“I will go to my room, uncle, while you explain the matter to Mr. Prescott.”
“My dear Mr. Prescott, I am most glad to see you. I find we have a good chance of stopping Frank. What a mistake it has all been to be sure. I always said I was an old fool, but I never really thought so until now.”
“I am indeed glad, Captain Bradshaw, that the mistake has been cleared up; but I shall be very glad if you will tell me what it has been about, for to myself, as well as to Frank, the whole affair has been a perfect and complete mystery.”
“It must have been so, indeed, Mr. Prescott. What did you think it was, for I suppose you must have had some opinion upon it?”
Prescott hesitated.
“Speak out, Mr. Prescott, I want to know what poor Frank really thought of it.”
“Well, Captain Bradshaw, the only thing in which Frank could conceive that he had displeased you, was in thwarting your wishes with regard to Miss Heathcote. He had hoped that you had ceased to feel any anger upon that point before he married; but when he received your letter, his only conclusion, and I own my own agreed with his, was that you had brooded over the matter until it had become a sort of hallucination with you. In fact, that upon that point you had, to speak frankly, gone a little out of your mind. I held that opinion until I saw you at the time your grandson was discovered. By the way in which you spoke, and also by the manner in which Miss Heathcote expressed herself with regard to the breach between you and Frank, I saw that my suspicions were altogether wrong; and that there was some, to me altogether unknown, and perfectly inexplicable, cause of complaint against Frank. I was convinced at the time that it must be an error. I have so perfect a faith in Frank. I have known him so closely and so intimately for so many years. He is so perfectly frank and open with me about I may almost say every thought, that I was certain he could wilfully have done nothing to forfeit your esteem and that of Miss Heathcote. You refused to explain, and I was forced to put it down to one of those extraordinary mistakes which sometimes occur, and which one can only leave to time to solve. And now I hope, Captain Bradshaw, that you will tell me what this supposed error of Frank could have been?”
“I will tell you, Mr. Prescott. You remember coming one night to me, and telling me that Frank had picked a man up from almost underneath the wheels of an omnibus, and had had a narrow escape of being run over himself?”
“Yes, I remember perfectly; his name was—let me see—ah—Walker.”
“Just so, Mr. Prescott. Some little time after, Frank came in one evening and told me that he had been to see Mr. Walker, that he was a superior person for his station of life, and that he had an extremely pretty daughter. I am a man of the world, Mr. Prescott, and I know how these sort of things end. I remember I told him that they were certain to end badly, that a man either made a fool of himself and married her, or a rascal of himself and seduced her. Frank was at first inclined to laugh at my advice, but at last he owned that I was right, that the girl was a pretty, loveable sort of girl, and that it would be just as well perhaps that he should not call again.”