'Well, your nephew, pretending to aid us in forming this company, did everything to retard our progress. He engaged offices that took a long time to fit up, and which we had at last to take in hand ourselves. Then he left for a week, leaving us no address, and refusing to answer the letters I sent to his office for him. On one pretext or another, the forming of the company was delayed; until at length, when the option by which Mr. Kenyon held the mine had less than a month to run, your nephew went to America in company with Mr. Melville, ostensibly to see and report upon the property. After waiting a certain length of time and hearing nothing from him (he had promised to cable us), Kenyon went to America to get a renewal of the option. This cablegram explains his success. He finds, on going there, that your nephew has secured the option of the mine in his own name, and, as Kenyon says, we are cheated. Now have you any doubt whether your nephew is a scoundrel or not?' Mr. Longworth mused for a few moments on what the young man had told him. 'If what you say is exactly true, there is no doubt William has been guilty of a piece of very sharp practice.' 'Sharp practice!' cried the other. 'You might as well call robbery sharp practice!' 'My dear sir, I have listened to you; now I ask you to listen to me. If, as I say, what you have stated is true, my nephew has done something which I think an honourable man would not do; but as to that I cannot judge until I hear his side of the story. It may put a different complexion on the matter, and I have no doubt it will; but even granting your version is true in every particular, what have I to do with it? I am not responsible for my nephew's actions. He has entered into a business connection, it seems, with two young men, and has outwitted them. That is probably what the world would say about it. Perhaps, as you say, he has been guilty of something worse, and has cheated his partners. But even admitting everything to be true, I do not see how I am responsible in any way.' 'Legally, you are not; morally, I think you are.' 'Why?' 'If he were your son----' 'But he is not my son; he is my nephew.' 'If your son had committed a theft, would you not do everything in your power to counteract the evil he had done?' 'I might, and I might not. Some fathers pay their sons' debts, others do not. I cannot say what action I should take in a purely imaginary case.' 'Very well; all I have to say is, our option runs out in two or three days. Twenty thousand pounds will secure the mine for us. I want that twenty thousand pounds before the option ceases.' 'And do you expect me to pay you twenty thousand pounds for this?' 'Yes, I do.' Old Mr. Longworth leaned back in his office chair, and looked at the young man in amazement. 'To think that you, a man of the City, should come to me, another man of the City, with such an absurd idea in your head, is simply grotesque.'