'The door, Josephs,' replied Dick.
'And Miss Abinger?'
Dick gave the barber a look that hurried him out of the room and down the stairs. Abinger's mouth twitched every time he took the cigar out of it, until he started to his feet.
'I have forgotten that Angus and my father are together,' he murmured. 'I wonder,' he asked himself, as he returned to his own chambers, 'how the colonel will take this? Must he be told? I think so.'
Colonel Abinger was told, as soon as Rob had left, and it added so much fuel to his passion that it put the fire out.
'If the story gets abroad,' he said, with a shudder, 'I shall never hold up my head again.'
'It is a safe secret,' Dick answered; 'the fellow would not dare to speak of it anywhere. He knows what that would mean for himself.'
'Angus knows of it. Was it like the chivalrous soul you make him to flout this matter before us?'
'You are hard up for an argument against Angus, father. I made him promise to let me know if he ever came on the track of the impostor, and you saw how anxious he was to keep the discovery from you. He asked me at the door when he was going out not to mention it to either you or Mary.'
'Confound him,' cried the colonel testily; 'but he is right about Mary; we need not speak of it to her. She never liked the fellow.'