"Morry?"
"Morice Conyers—poor old Ralph's son. A buck worth having for a son, too. Why! we're the best of friends."
"Morice Conyers your friend?"
"You look unbelieving, my Bayard, but it is true that I drove down here on friend Morry's coach, and, had it not been for my ardent longing to embrace you and see again these ancestral halls, I should now be toasting the prettiest eyes in the kingdom, and drinking to the august health of our liege lord Prince Florizel, who is at present between the sheets in his royal residence at Carlton House, suffering from an attack of indigestion."
Then, suddenly dropping his lighter tone of badinage, the speaker leant forward.
"Look here, Michael," he said,—and there lacked not a certain wistful pleading in his tones,—"others have agreed to let the past be forgotten; can't my own son join them there? It's true my crop of wild oats was plentiful enough. As for that Jacobite affair, I—well—I've often wished that I'd been in Pryor's place, and written finis on a jumble of mistakes and a life which was not then quite such a wretched failure."
"If it had been only——"
"Roast me, sir! Are you my Lord High Inquisitor to ask what else I've been doing through these years, and call me blackguard for everything not explained?"
"You forget my mother."
Stephen Berrington's hand dropped, whilst his blue eyes wavered and fell before the stern gaze of the younger man.