"Why do you ask that?" demanded Hilliston sharply, and, as it seemed to Claude, a trifle uneasily.
"Well, as I am a stranger to her, she cannot wish to see me on any personal matter, sir. And as you mention that you have not seen her for five-and-twenty years, about which time my parents died, I naturally thought——"
"That I had some object in asking you not to see her?"
"Well, yes."
"You are a man of experience now, Claude," said Hilliston, with apparent irrelevance, "and have been all over the world. Consequently you know that life is full of—trouble."
"I believe so; but hitherto no trouble has come my way."
"You might expect that it would come sooner or later, Claude. It has come now."
"Indeed!" said Larcher, in a joking tone. "Am I about to lose my small income of five hundred a year?"
"No, that is safe enough!" answered Hilliston abruptly, rising to his feet. "The trouble of which I speak will not affect your material welfare. Indeed, if you are a hardened man of the world, as you might be, it need affect you very little in any case. You are not responsible for the sins of a former generation, and as you hardly remember your parents, cannot have any sympathy with their worries."
"I certainly remember very little of my parents, sir," said Larcher, moved by the significance of this speech. "Yet I have a faint memory of two faces. One a dark, handsome face, with kind eyes, the other a beautiful, fair countenance."