"Everything. He is your grandson, your sole descendant, your natural heir. He is flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone, and ought to be dearer to you than all the world beside. Poor Dick died years ago. Why avenge his fault, if fault it was, on his innocent child? Think, uncle, think and----" He brought down his fist heavily on the table. "Think, girl, say'st thou? Zounds! there's no need for me to think. My mind was made up long ago, and nothing thou can'st urge will move me from it. I tell thee, my grandson is no more to me than the veriest beggar's brat that crawls in a London gutter. Never will I acknowledge him, or have aught to do with him in any way. And if thou hast any regard left for me, or any care for my displeasure, thou wilt never speak of him in my presence again. As thou ought to have found out by now, I am a man who never forgives." CHAPTER VII. WHO SHALL BE HEIR? From that day forward Ambrose Cortelyon seemed to regard his niece with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust, but it was a distrust that found no expression in words, and although Nell was conscious of an undefinable change in her uncle's manner towards her, she was wholly at a loss to what cause to attribute it. The Squire was a man who expected those of his household, and all who were in any way dependent on him, not merely to believe as he believed, but to share his conviction that whatever decision he might come to in any given set of circumstances was the right one, and that all who differed from him were, theoretically, either fools or worse. In short, he was one of that numerous class who have a firm belief in their own infallibility in all the concerns of life; and as he was an autocrat in his own domain, with nobody to contradict him, it was not to be expected that his opinion of himself would become less confirmed with advancing years. When, therefore, his niece chose to impugn his action in a certain affair--and he now called to mind that it was not the first time she had done so--and even to imply, not by her words but by her manner, that his treatment of his grandson, or, to speak correctly, his absolute neglect of him, was both cruel and unjust, he was not, at any rate at first, so much angered as amazed at her audacity in daring to set up her feeble girl's will in opposition to his own, and, indeed, at her presumption in venturing to question his decision in any way. Nor, when he came to think the matter over at his leisure, did his surprise, not unleavened with resentment, diminish. He told himself that he could not have believed it of her; she had hurt him in a tender place, and he felt as if she could never be quite the same to him again as she had been in the past: and she never was.