"The General resides somewhere near Porthellick, does he not?" asked Downie, who saw that his brother was changing colour, or rather losing it fast.
"Some one told me, Dick, that it was rumoured you got into a scrape in Edinburgh, 'that village somewhere in the North,' as one of our humourists calls it; it was to the effect that your landlady had fallen over head and ears in love with her handsome lodger, who was ditto ditto in her debt, and had to soothe her ruffled feelings and settle her bill, by matrimony at sight."
"An utter scandal!" said Richard, now laughing. "Your allowance to me, ever since I left the Cornish Light Infantry, has been too generous for such a catastrophe ever to occur."
"And next came a story, that when you were at Montreal with the regiment, you made a precious mess of it with some pretty girl, and—to use Downie's phraseology—parted as heart-broken lovers, to figure as plaintiff and defendant at the bar."
"Worse still and as false, my lord!" exclaimed Richard, now pale with suppressed passion.
"Don't look so darkly, Richard," said Lord Lamorna, who saw the flash in his nephew's dark blue eyes; "I have had a pretty little box at Chertsey, and a villa at St. John's Wood in my day, when my friends, raven-tressed, or golden-haired as the case might be, were amiable and tenderly attached—but deuced expensive; so I must not be severe upon you," added the old man, with his dry cackling laugh. "It is not these kind of little arrangements I fear, but a mésalliance; and there are scandals even in London—yes, even in the mighty world of London, though there they soon die; they don't live and take root, as in the so-called purer air of the country."
"I cannot understand all those vague hints, tales and rumours, or who sets them afloat," replied Richard, making an effort to preserve his calmness.
Downie saw the veins rise in his brother's forehead while their uncle had been speaking; and he smiled a quiet smile, as he bent curiously over his glass.
"Full many a shaft at random sent,
Finds mark the archer never meant;"
and he could see that some of the random remarks in the present conversation, rankled deeply in Richard's breast; and that this conversation had verged, more than once, on somewhat dangerous ground.