“If I mistake not, I saw him betting at the races when I went there to find an important witness yesterday,” he ruminated, “and if that is the kind of life he leads, poor George Dinsmore’s wealth will flow like water through those white, slim, idle hands of his.
“There is but one formula necessary now to be gone through with ere the fortune can be made over to you, Mr. Dinsmore,” remarked the old lawyer, with a grim smile, “and that is to wed the—Miss Jess,” he said, hurriedly, changing the words that had been almost on his lips.
“If I do not like the young girl, I shall not marry her—not for all the fortunes that were ever made!” cried the false Dinsmore, dramatically, and the lawyer liked him the better for that dash of spirit.
“The estate is a fine one, young man, and it would be a pity for you not to inherit it, as you are next of kin to the deceased Mr. Dinsmore. It was a great mistake, in my opinion, to tie it up as he did.”
Armed with the lawyer’s letters of introduction, it was an easy matter for the daring, fraudulent heir to gain an entrance to Blackheath Hall.
Mrs. Bryson, the old housekeeper, looked with unfeigned astonishment at the handsome young man who soon afterward presented himself at the hall as Mr. John Dinsmore.
“I—I beg your pardon for staring at you so hard,” she said, apologetically, as she bade him enter; “you are changed so much from the boy that it is hard to look at you and believe you to be one and the same. Your eyes were quite blue as a boy, I remember; now they are positively black—and you look so very young. The years have rested lightly on you, sir; I should scarcely take you for two-and-twenty, let alone thirty, which you must surely be.”
“You are inclined to be complimentary, my dear madam,” remarked the young man, with a covert sneer in his tone and a curl of his lips which the black mustache, luckily for him, covered. “I try to take good care of myself, and do not dissipate, which may, in a measure, account for my youthful appearance, as you are pleased to term it; but, as to changing the color of my eyes, that, my dear madam, would be quite beyond my humble power. I would say that your memory has been playing you a trick if you ever imagined them blue.”
Mrs. Bryson was certainly bewildered. She must certainly have been laboring under a most decided blunder in believing them blue all these years, she told herself.
“Come right in, sir,” she said, holding the great oaken door wide open for him. “Welcome to Blackheath Hall.”