It is true, the amount was much greater than his inexperience had led him to expect; but he only smiled grimly when he had all his bills before him, and had estimated the sum total, and he said to himself:
"If my allowance will not support me here like a gentleman, my father must make up the deficiency, that is all!"
The Duke of Hereward was indeed confounded when his ward wrote to him and told him boldly that he wanted fifteen hundred pounds for immediate necessities—namely, twelve hundred for the liquidation of debts, and three hundred for traveling expenses.
But could he scold the poor, disinherited boy, who, kept to himself at Oxford, had doubtless fallen among thieves and been mercilessly fleeced.
No; he would pay these debts out of his own pocket, and write the young man a kind letter of warning against the university sharks.
The duke carried out this resolution, and John Scott, freed from debt, and with three hundred pounds in his possession, went on a holiday tour through the country.
He had heard at Oxford of the rising glories of Lone, and determined to take his holiday in that neighborhood.
It happened that the Duke and Duchess of Hereward, with the Marquis of Arondelle, and their attendants, went that summer to Baden-Baden; so when the Oxonion arrived at the "Hereward Arms," in the hamlet of Lone, and, from his age and his exact likeness to the family, was mistaken for the heir, there was no one to set the people right on the subject.
The obsequious host of the Hereward Arms called him "my lord," and inquired after his gracious parents, the duke and the duchess.
John Scott did not actually deceive the people as to his identity, but he tacitly allowed them to deceive themselves. He did not tell them that he was the Marquis of Arondelle; neither did he contradict them when they called him so. Nor did his conscience reproach him for his silent duplicity. He said to himself: