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a loud laugh: “I don't want to know your secrets, any of them, mind that."

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However," continued Roger Gilbert, "I may just hint that in another week or two

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"Hint nothing of the sort, sir; I may have heard something of that too; but that's neither here nor there. And now, I think, I have given you my best advice about that trifling difficulty (an emphasis on "trifling "), " and, as you may be in a hurry to return to Fairbourne- "Mr. Brooke rose as he spoke.

"But stay, my dear Jason," the visitor said, hastily, with some agitation of voice and manner: "you promise to give me the assistance I want?"

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I promise, my good sir! not I.”

"But, Mr. Brooke, I have shown you how needful it is.”

"Needful for you: yes, but not for me; and I do not see yet why I should mix myself up with your affairs. We are connected closely enough already," said the master of Hurlock Chase, savagely.

"It is that very connection, Jason, that gives us jointly and separately a―a kind of claim, a family claim, you know, on each other."

"You think so? Now, do you really think so, Mr. Gilbert?" asked Mr. Brooke, curiously.

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"I do indeed; and perhaps there may be other claims. I won't speak of them, however, if you will only unloose your pursestrings. I am not in the habit of asking such favours; but I do ask it now," said the humiliated owner of Fairbourne Court.

"And I refuse it."

"Think of the consequences," pleaded Roger Gilbert, rising in agitation.

"The consequences! Why, yes, they are pretty clear. We know what generally follows a writ. First, an execution; then -tell me what then, Mr. Gilbert."

"My dear friend, you are only playing with my feelings. If this affair should get wind

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"There's no doubt but it will get wind," observed Mr. Brooke, coolly.

"Then I shall be ruined."

"True: the bank would go, with all the rest of your peddling, shopkeeping firms-firms, too!" And Jason Brooke laughed silently.

Roger Gilbert was stung. To be called a shopkeeper!

"If you come to calling names, Jason," he said, flushed and excited, "what do you call yourself-with your furnaces and forges? There are those, Mr. Brooke, who would not hesitate to say that you are a blacksmith."

"Well, what then?”

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'Yes, that is what I say, 'What then?' But then, why taunt me with my connection with trade, Jason? It is not kind, you know."

"That's as you like to take it. But you were talking about being ruined. Now I wish to know, supposing you are ruined, what is that to me?"

"It should be something to you, Mr. Brooke," returned the agitated man: "you would scarcely like to have it cast in your teeth that your wife's father had become a bankrupt.”

"See what it is to build arguments and expectations on false premises," said the iron-master, gravely. "Do you know, now, that you are entirely mistaken in your judgment of my likes and dislikes, and that I would give-let me see—ah, a hundred pounds—the hundred pounds you were about to be so free with just now-to have it in my power to say to Mrs. Brooke, 'Your father is a bankrupt, my love'?"

For a moment or two the unhappy father stood speechless, but not signless; for the dark shadow of hate, which he could no longer conceal or restrain, gathered on his countenance, while his

hands were clenched in impotent fury. At length he spoke, if that can be called human speech which more resembled the hissing of a serpent articulating human words.

“Take care, Mr. Brooke, that you are not forestalled; that other intelligence does not first reach Clara's ear. I spoke of other claims upon you besides family claims. How would it be, Mr. Brooke, if I were to refer you back thirty years, to remind you of one who ought to have stood in a criminal dock if he did not (he did not go by the name of Jason Brooke then, you know), and who might narrowly have escaped hanging, only because there was a flaw in the indictment, and not that he was not guilty. You understand me, I see. Now, how much for my secrecy, Brooke, or Bagstaff, or whatever other alias you may choose to adopt?"

Jason Brooke broke into a scornful laugh. "So you have been closeted with my old friend, the lawyer Wainfleet, I see; and he has put you up to this move, has he?"

"It matters little or nothing where my intelligence comes from," retorted Roger Gilbert: "the question is, first, is it true? and next, how much is it worth to have it suppressed?"

"And the answer is," said the owner of Hurlock Chase, with mock courtesy, "first; I have little doubt that the intelligence is correct enough; and next, it is not worth a farthing to you. Shall I ring the bell, Sir Smuggler?" He rang as he spoke, without waiting for a reply.

"Mr. Gilbert's horse; let it be brought round to the door," he said to the servant who came at the call.

Five minutes afterwards Roger Gilbert was galloping violently across the Chase, in the direction of Fairbourne Court.

CHAPTER LIV.

MR. CRICKETT STILL AT WORK.

TOPOGRAPHERS do not require to be informed that at the date of our story the town of B- consisted of one main street, of very ancient houses, mostly. These houses exhibited many varieties of architectural style, and irregularly abutted upon loose, rough, and treacherous footways, scarcely worthy to be called pavements, and were jumbled together in charming democratic contempt of the rank and station of their occupants. Thus, for instance, the comparatively grand mansion of the chief magistrate of the borough, and a justice of the peace for the county to boot, was flanked on one side by the wretched and dilapidated cottage of a drunken shoemaker, and on the other by "The Bell and Crown." a fourth-class pot-house of somewhat equivocal reputation.

people of B

In one particular, however, almost all the dwellings in the street enjoyed an equal privilege; namely, in the possession of long strips of garden at their rear, bounded at their extremities by high brick walls, and having lawful or permissional egress into meadows which communicated with the country beyond, on either side of the town. By means of these back entrances the good were enabled to "take their walks abroad," by day or by night, without appearing in the street, or to receive visitors who courted privacy. There is little or no doubt that, in the high and prosperous times of smuggling of which our story treats, when probably every other inhabitant of the town was connected with the trade, these private and secluded approaches to certain haunts and hides were extremely convenient, as affording much security and great facility to those engaged in evading the law. But this is now pretty nearly traditional.

On the September evening of the busy day already referred to

in the previous chapters a man, so muffled in a woollen comforter as to leave scarcely more than his eyes exposed, so stooping in his gait as to exhibit the appearance of old age and feebleness, and so apparently lame as, even with the assistance of a stout stick, to drag one foot after the other with difficulty and pain, slowly wended his way from the outskirts of B- first into a narrow and rugged lane bounded on either side by high garden hedges, also by a broad, deep, open sewer or ditch, down which ran the accumulated filth of one quarter of the town, and then, having escaped the perils of this pestiferous passage, into the more fragrant meadow in which it terminated. Here the old cripple seated himself on the ground to rest.

It was nearly dark, for the moon was past its full for that month, and had not yet risen, and a few stars which broke through the clouded sky cast only a dubious, glimmering light on surrounding objects. A strange fancy, one would have thought, of the old man, to be wandering alone at an hour when almost all the sober people of B were, or were supposed to be, preparing for rest. But then there is no accounting for tastes. Infirm as was the halting wanderer, his sense of hearing was sufficiently keen and on the alert. The slightest noise discomposed him as he sat at rest. The chirping of a grasshopper made him start, and a rustling in the grass, caused probably by the transit of a shrew-mouse, raised him on to his legs more quickly than might have seemed possible for one so feeble. Then, when the temporary fear had subsided, he once more pursued his way, keeping very close to the wall of which we have spoken.

He must have had the organ of investigation strongly developed on his cranium (only that he lived before the days of phrenological bumps), for, by the dim starlight and half-gropingly, he examined with minute care, one after another, the old gates and doors which gave admittance into the gardens of the townsfolk. At more than one of them he halted, as in perplexity, and

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