"You may enter; it was my son's bedroom."
"She obeyed him, a rush of tears almost blinding her; Mr. Manners remained outside. She saw, not a bedroom, but a suite of rooms luxuriously furnished; a library of costly books; rare old engravings on the walls; a bath-room fitted up with all the newest appliances; everything that money could purchase to make a man's life pleasant and devoid of care. She remained there but a short time; the contrast between these rooms and the miserable attics which she and her uncle occupied, and to which she hoped to welcome Kingsley, appalled her. When she rejoined Mr. Manners in the passage he led her down-stairs and ushered her into his study.
"You may sit down," he said.
She was tired, wretched, and dispirited, and she accepted the ungracious invitation.
"I am not in the habit of boasting of my wealth," he said; "what you have seen affords proof of it. And all that you have seen, with means sufficient to keep it up ten times over, would have been my son's had you not marred his career. I will not do you an injustice; you have surprised me; I thought that my son had taken up with a common, vulgar woman; I find myself mistaken."
Again animated by hope, she looked up; again her hope was destroyed by the stern face she gazed upon.
"It is because I see that you are superior to what I anticipated that I am speaking to you now. Doubtless my son has informed you that, by my own unaided exertions, I have raised myself to what I am." She bowed her head. "The pleasure of success was great, and was precious to me, not so much for wealth itself, but for a future I had mapped out, in which my son was to play the principal part. With him absent, with him parted from me, this future vanishes, and I am left with the dead fruits of a life of successful labor. Who is to blame for this?"
She held up her hands appealingly, but he took no notice of the action.
"You are therefore my enemy, and not only my enemy, but my son's. With my assistance, with my wealth and position to help him, he would have risen to be a power in the land. You have destroyed a great future; you have deprived him of fame and distinction; but there is a remedy, and it is to propose this remedy to you that I invited you into my house. Your speech is that of an educated person, and you must be well able to judge between right and wrong. What your real character is I may learn before we part to-day. I will assume, for instance, that you are nothing but an adventuress, a schemer--do not interrupt me; the illustration is necessary to what I have to say. You may be nothing of the kind, but I assume the possibility to give force to a statement I shall make without any chance of a misunderstanding. It is this. Assuming that you played upon my son's feelings because of my being a rich man, in the expectation that, if not at once, in a little while I should open my purse to you, it will be well for you to know that there is not the remotest possibility of such an expectation being realized. Do you understand?"
She did not reply in words; the fear that she might further anger him kept her silent; she made a motion which he interpreted into assent, and accepting it so, continued: