It was no good for the poor young lady to argue that young Mr. Owen was a private gentleman, and hadn’t anything to do with the business—the old Squire wouldn’t listen to her. “If ever you marry that man, Di,” he said, “you’re no daughter of mine, and I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”
Miss Di never said any more, but moped a good deal; and Mr. Owen never came to the Squire to ask for her hand, because, of course, she’d told him that it was no use.
But the Squire went on just as reckless as before, gambling and enjoying himself, and being up in London more than ever.
One morning he came down by the first train from London, looking very pale, and he went straight up to the Hall, and got there just as Miss Di had come down to breakfast. “Di,” he said, “I’m going away, and you’ll have to go away too. I’ve lost the Hall.”
It was true; he’d actually played for the Hall, the old place where he was born, and lost it at cards, having parted with everything else long before. They say that altogether he must have gambled away a hundred thousand pounds—at any rate he was ruined, for all his estate and all his property had been lost, and he was in debt.
Miss Di looked at her pa, and said, “What am I to do?”
“Come abroad with me,” he said; “we must live cheaply for a little while somewhere.”
“No, I sha’n’t,” said the girl; “as long as you kept a home for me, I obeyed you as your daughter. As you have gambled my home away, I shall go where there is one for me. I shall marry George Owen.”
And marry him she did very soon after. The Squire wasn’t at the wedding, you may be sure. He went away abroad, and lived there for years—how nobody knew; and strangers took the Hall and the lands; and the name of Stretford, that had been in the place for hundreds of years, died out of it; the village inn, the ‘Stretford Arms,’ being the only thing that kept it alive.
And it was in the best bedroom of that inn—a dear old-fashioned room it is, with a great four-post bedstead, and an old oak chest, and a big fireplace with old brass dogs for the logs of wood—that the old Squire lay, years afterwards, dying.