The banker coloured scarlet--he bit his lips and measured his companion from head to foot (while the latter lolled on the sofa), as if he were meditating the possibility of kicking him down-stairs. But Luke Darvil would have thrashed the banker and all his clerks into the bargain. His frame was like a trunk of thews and muscles, packed up by that careful dame, Nature, as tightly as possible; and a prizefighter would have thought twice before he had entered the ring against so awkward a customer. The banker was a man prudent to a fault, and he pushed his chair six inches back, as he concluded his survey. "Sir," then said he, very quietly, "do not let us misunderstand each other. Your daughter is safe from your control--if you molest her, the law will protect--" "She is not of age," said Darvil. "Your health, old boy." "Whether she is of age or not," returned the banker, unheeding the courtesy conveyed in the last sentence, "I do not care three straws--I know enough of the law to know that if she have rich friends in this town, and you have none, she will be protected and you will go to the treadmill." "That is spoken like a sensible man," said Darvil, for the first time with a show of respect in his manner; "you now take a practical view of matters, as we used to say at the spouting-club." "If I were in your situation, Mr. Darvil, I tell you what I would do. I would leave my daughter and this town to-morrow morning, and I would promise never to return, and never to molest her, on condition she allowed me a certain sum from her earnings, paid quarterly." "And if I preferred living with her?" "In that case, I, as a magistrate of this town, would have you sent away as a vagrant, or apprehended--" "Ha!" "Apprehended on suspicion of stealing that gold chain and seals which you wear so ostentatiously." "By goles, but you're a clever fellow," said Darvil, involuntarily; "you know human natur." The banker smiled: strange to say, he was pleased with the compliment. "But," resumed Darvil, helping himself to another slice of beef, "you are in the wrong box--planted in Queer Street, as /we/ say in London; for if you care a d--n about my daughter's respectability, you will never muzzle her father on suspicion of theft--and so there's tit for tat, my old gentleman!" "I shall deny that you are her father, Mr. Darvil; and I think you will find it hard to prove the fact in any town where I am a magistrate." "By goles, what a good prig you would have made! You are as sharp as a gimlet. Surely you were brought up at the Old Bailey!"