"You set me at ease," said the lawyer, "and it will gratify Lord Storndale to hear that you and he are in agreement upon the question. As our interview is private I may speak freely. Unhappily Lord Storndale is a poor peer. Since he came into the title he has had great difficulties to contend with, and as his estates lay chiefly in Ireland, these difficulties have been of late years increased. Happily or unhappily, also, he has a large family, two daughters and six sons. Of these sons the Honorable Percy Storndale is the youngest. I do not know who is the more to be pitied, a poor peer struggling with mortgages, decreased rents, and the expenses of a large family, or a younger son who comes into the world with the expectation that he is to be provided for, and whose father can allow him at the utmost two hundred and fifty or three hundred a year. Father and son have both to keep up appearances, and the son's allowance will scarcely pay his tailor's and his glover's bill. There are a thousand things he wants, and to which he believes himself entitled--flowers, horses, clubs, a stall at the theater, and so on and so on, _ad infinitum_. The consequence is that the young gentleman gets into debt, which grows and grows. Perhaps he thinks of a means of paying his creditors--he plunges on a horse, he plays for high stakes at his club. You know the result. Into the mire deeper and deeper. A sad picture, Mr. Cohen." "Very sad," said Aaron, who had listened patiently and knew that the crucial part of the lawyer's mission--that which affected himself and Ruth--had not yet been reached.