These words, which were quite audible, sent a thrill of amazement through the room. Colonel Fleetwood and Mr. Scrivener looked at each other. Notwithstanding the ruin and calamity which surrounded them, a gleam of amusement went over the lawyer’s face. Gus was moving about restlessly, hovering round the brother and sister who had not changed their position, like a big blue-bottle, moving in circles. He was not at all unlike a blue-bottle in his black coat. Mr. Scrivener went up to him, arresting him in one of his flights. “I should think--” said the lawyer, “don’t you agree with me?--that the family would prefer to be left alone after such an exciting and distressing day?” “Eh! the family? Yes, that is quite my opinion. You outsiders ought to go, and leave us to settle matters between us,” said Gus. He scarcely looked at the lawyer, so intent was he upon Paul and Alice, who were still standing together, supporting each other. The little man was undisguisedly anxious to listen to what Alice was saying in her brother’s ear. “I am their adviser,” said Mr. Scrivener. “I cannot leave till I have done all I can for them; but you Mr. ----” “Sir Augustus, if you please,” said the little gentleman, drawing himself up. “If you are their adviser, I, sir, am their brother. You seem to forget that. The family is not complete without me. Leave them to me, and there is no fear but everything will come straight.” Mr. Scrivener looked at this strange personage with a kind of consternation. He was half afraid of him, half amused by him. The genuineness of him filled the lawyer with dismay. He could not entertain a hope that a being so true was false in his pretensions. Besides, there were various things known perhaps only to Mr. Scrivener himself which gave these pretensions additional weight. He shook his head when Colonel Fleetwood, coming up to him on the other side, whispered to him an entreaty to “get the fellow to go.” How was he to get the fellow to go? He had not only right, but kindness and the best of intentions on his side. “My dear sir,” he said, perplexed, “you must see, if you think, that your claim, even if true, cannot be accepted in a moment as you seem to expect. We must have time to investigate; any one may call himself Sir William Markham’s son.” “But no one except myself can prove it,” said Gus, promptly; “and, my dear sir, to use your own words, you had better leave my family to me, as I tell you. I know better than any one else how to manage them. Are they not my own flesh and blood?” “That may or may not be,” said the lawyer, at the end of his reasoning.