"Not a bit. I am accustomed to strong language on the subject of my character, from my relations and from police-court officials alike."
"You have no moral principles whatever," continued the little lady, turning over his large, well-shaped, but, truth to tell, not over-clean hand with her delicate be-ringed fingers. "You are wholly unreliable and most ungrateful; your passions are violent, and you make no attempt to control them. You are selfish to the core——"
"Pray stop the catalogue of my deficiencies, Mrs. Vandeleur, or your niece here will fall madly in love with me!"
"Your past has been troubled and stormy, and your future looks very black," continued the little lady, quite unmoved by his sarcasm. "Only one thing can save you—the love of a good, pure woman."
She uttered the words with her usual slow impressiveness, letting his hand fall as she finished speaking; and, although he affected to treat the matter lightly, her words rang through Wallace's brain when he left her house a little later in the evening.
It was a miserably dull and gloomy evening, bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. There was some excuse for spirit-drinking under the circumstances; but Wallace did not require an excuse for the constant whiskies-and-sodas and "nips" of raw brandy in which he indulged at all hours of the day and night when free from his cousin's watchful care. Since his imprisonment he had been lodging in a street off the Strand; and, although he was forbidden to enter Alexander Wallace's house, his cousin encouraged his visits there in the hope of keeping him out of mischief. It was easy enough for him to summon Adams by knocking in a peculiar manner agreed upon between them, and then to slip up-stairs to Lorin's rooms, where he was sure of warmth and comfort and a hearty welcome. Old Alexander was aware that his orders regarding his elder nephew were set at naught, and he was well pleased that it should be so. Wallace had angered and shamed him so deeply that his name was a forbidden subject in the household, and the old gentleman affected to believe that he had only one nephew. That his sister's child, whom he had brought up from a boy and loved as his own son, should be convicted of drunkenness and brutal violence and sent to prison with hard labour, had been a terrible blow to the old man, from whom Lorin had often contrived to keep his cousin's delinquencies a secret. The disgrace of the whole affair went nigh to break Alexander's heart, and none the less so because he had always most unreasonably loved his elder nephew the better of the two.
Lorin was now seven-and-twenty; and since his parents' death, eighteen years before, he had been adopted by his uncle, to whom he had been in every way a credit. Beyond a few school scrapes, the result of boyish high spirits, and a little unnecessary expenditure at college, there had been no fault to find with him. He had been a good, even a brilliant scholar, and had won the liking and esteem of all who had to do with him as a growing lad; and when arrived at man's estate the same tale was true. Although disinclined for office work, he had set himself to master the entire business at the bank, with the result that his opinion was already of value in the house, while outside among general society he was extremely popular and everywhere in great request.
With his cousin it was far otherwise. As a mere baby he had been placed in Alexander Wallace's care by the latter's elder sister, a woman of passionate and ungovernable temper, very unhappily married to a man from whom she was speedily separated. The heart of the old bachelor-uncle went out to the handsome black-haired baby boy at first sight, and no subsequent delinquencies on Wallace's part could wholly alienate from him his uncle's love. By turns he was expelled from school, "plucked" for examinations, rusticated from college, and gradually shunned by the more respectable and law-abiding of his acquaintances. A fierce, sardonic temper and instinctive rebellion against all constituted authority characterised him from early boyhood, and his uncle's indulgence, while it bred in him no reciprocal affection, developed to the full the boy's intensely selfish nature and extravagant disposition. As a lad he possessed considerable charm of manner, despite his intractable disposition; and from the time when, at the respective ages of nine and twelve, the two cousins first met, Lorin had loved and shielded him, often taking upon himself the blame for Wallace's misdemeanours, and showing towards his elder an affectionate forbearance which the latter was wholly incapable of appreciating.
At twenty-one, Wallace Armstrong forged his uncle's name on several separate occasions, chiefly in order to settle his heavy gambling debts, some of which he had contracted at the club kept at one time by Captain Garth, Laline's father.
Then followed years of banishment, spent for the most part in gambling-dens, hotel-bars, and billiard-rooms, among the male and female "riff-raff" of the Colonies, leading up to the moment of Wallace's return to Europe, and his memorable meeting with Captain Garth in the market-place of Boulogne.