"Your brother."
"And—and—" stammered Derval, as the newspaper paragraph flashed upon his memory.
"Miss Clara Hampton—a good marriage indeed; a strange, but very good way of compromising the claim to the coronet—a consolidation of mutual interests, I take it to be; a family compact, quite."
With his eyes fixed alternately on the speaker's face, and then, as one in a dream, surveying the great square of the Inn, with its monotonous brick walls and uniform rows of windows, Derval heard all this with equal astonishment and dismay.
"I am just about to take these papers to Lord Oakhampton's; you will go with me, of course, and sign them as witness."
"Clara false—so fair, yet so false!" was Derval's bitter thought, as he threw himself into a chair.
A very few words served to enlighten him as to the conspiracy of which they had both been the victims—as to the pressure which must have been put upon the unhappy Clara to save her father's title, during his life at least, by the sacrifice of herself; and more exasperating to him was the knowledge that this pressure had been put upon her by Rookleigh, while acting nominally in the interests of an absent brother; and he knew in a moment that Rookleigh—the medium of their correspondence—must, for his own nefarious ends, have effectually suppressed it!
"And now, as we are on this unpleasant subject," said the lawyer, opening a drawer and taking therefrom a paper, "what was the meaning of this mysterious document that Rookleigh framed and you signed?"
"It referred, I understood, to a sum of money I lent him."
"Of what folly you were guilty! he should have signed an acknowledgment to you. Good heavens! you sailors are strange fellows."