“Of obtaining goods under false pretences? Most undoubtedly, yes. I can't help it, sir. Don't look as if you would knock me down. (Curse him, I am making him wince, though.) A young gentleman, who has only two hundred a year from his ma', orders diamonds and watches, and takes 'em to a pawnbroker. You ask me what people will think of such behaviour, and I tell you honestly. Don't be angry with me, Mr. Warrington.”
“Go on, sir!” says Harry, with a groan.
The lawyer thought the day was his own. “But you ask if I can't help to pay this debt off? And I say Yes—and that here is the money in my pocket to do it now, if you like—not mine, sir, my honoured client's, your aunt, Lady Bernstein. But she has a right to impose her conditions, and I've brought 'em with me.”
“Tell them, sir,” says Mr. Harry.
“They are not hard. They are only for your own good: and if you say Yes, we can call a hackney-coach, and go to Clarges Street together, which I have promised to go there, whether you will or no. Mr. Warrington, I name no names, but there was a question of marriage between you and a certain party.”
“Ah!” said Harry; and his countenance looked more cheerful than it had yet done.
“To that marriage my noble client, the Baroness, is most averse—having other views for you, and thinking it will be your ruin to marry a party,—of noble birth and title it is true; but, excuse me, not of first-rate character, and so much older than yourself. You had given an imprudent promise to that party.”
“Yes; and she has it still,” says Mr. Warrington.
“It has been recovered. She dropped it by an accident at Tunbridge,” says Mr. Draper, “so my client informed me; indeed her ladyship showed it me, for the matter of that. It was wrote in bl——”
“Never mind, sir!” cries Harry, turning almost as red as the ink which he had used to write his absurd promise, of which the madness and folly had smote him with shame a thousand times over.