The moment he entered the little parlour where they waited to receive him, he made Mrs. Tuke a polite bow and held out his hand.

“You are the sister of my late wife, I am told,” he said.

Jane made a dignified curtsey, her resentment, even after a lapse of twenty years, rising once again at the sight of the man who had behaved so badly to her sister.

“You carried off the child?” asked the baronet.

“Yes, sir.”

“I am glad I did not know where to look for him. You did me the greatest possible favour. What these twenty years would have been like, with him in the house, I dare not think.”

“I did it for the child’s sake,” said Jane.

“I am perfectly aware it was not for mine,” returned sir Wilton. “Ha, ha! you looked as if you had come to stab me that day you brought the little object to the library and presented his fingers and toes to me as if, by Jove, I was the devil and had made them so on purpose! I tell you, Richard, if that’s your name, you rascal, you have as little idea what a preposterously ugly creature you were, as I had that you would ever grow to be—well, half fit to look at! But it doesn’t follow you’re the least fit to be owned to. You’re a tradesman, every inch of you! You don’t look like a gentleman in the least, though your aunt looks as if she would eat me for saying it.

“Now listen to me, all of you. It’s no use your saying I’ve acknowledged him. If I choose to say I know nothing about him, then as I told the rascal himself the other day, you’ll have to prove your case, and that will take money, and when you prove it, you will get nothing but the title, and much good that will do you! So you had better make up all your minds to do as I tell you—that is, not to say one word about the affair, but just hold your tongues. I’m not going to have people say my son shows the tradesman in him. I’m going to have the rascal the gentleman I can make him!

“So you’re off to the university directly, young man,” sir Wilton said, “and I don’t want to hear of or from you until you’ve taken your degree! You shall have two hundred pounds a year and pay your own fees—not a penny more! You’re not to attempt to communicate with me. If there’s anything I ought to know, let your grandfather come to me. Only, mind, I make no promises! If I should leave everything to the other lot, you will have no right to complain. With the education I give you, the independence your uncle has given you, and the good sense you have, you’re well provided for. You can be a doctor or a parson, you know. The Reverend Sir Richard Lestrange! It doesn’t sound too bad.