“Not this time, father!” said the son, with some effrontery in spite of his perturbation. “There’s damned little left between us: we’re at the dregs of the old Bordeaux. I dropped—I dropped something last time I was here, I fancy, and I’m come to seek for it.” His father’s cheek in the daytime would have ashened: in the taper light it merely shook and crinkled colourlessly like a scum. He held the brooch out in his hand, and asked, “Is that it, Stephen?” in the simple phrase of a man with his last illusion shattered, and the son confessed. He had been shown to the strong-room when he carried the brooch to Mellish: the sight of its contents and all their possibilities of life and pleasure had fevered him with desire: he had returned in cover of night and plundered the treasure of The Peel. “Oh Lord!” cried Wanlock, “must I now pay teind to hell? ‘He that begetteth a fool doeth it to his own sorrow, and the father of a fool hath no joy.’ And where, my rogue, have ye put your plunder?” “That is the worst of it,” said Stephen: “you have it all there in your hand! It lay apart from the rest, and I put it in my pocket.” “A liar, too!” wailed Wanlock. “It is nothing but the truth,” protested Stephen sullenly. “I was observed, whether by man or woman, beast or bugle, I cannot tell, but I heard the laugh at my elbow, and I ran. It pattered at my heels, and would have caught me if I had not dropped my burden in the old Peel well.” “And there let it lie and rot!” exclaimed his father: “But you—oh, Stephen!—you to be the robber! and bring on me the second blow!” and the wine-vault rang with the blame and lamentation of a shattered man. The son was packed off on the morrow lest a worse thing should befall in a suspicion of his part in the fall of Mellish: his father paid the last penny of his available money for the journey to the south; the search for the spoiler passed into other parts of the country, and was speedily abandoned. When the hue and cry had ceased, old Wanlock, professing to have found the brooch on the roadside, sent it back to Mellish, and waited with a savage expectation for another demonstration of its power. He had not long to wait. The very day on which the talisman was sent, the match of Mellish with the Glasfurd girl—as rich as she was proud, haughty, and ambitious—was broken off by one who could not bring herself to marry a beggared man, and the tale, by gossip amplified and rendered almost laughable, went round the parish like a song. ’Twas Dreghorn brought the news to Manor—the ancient wooer. Wanlock broke a bottle of wine and made the occasion festival, but Mirren could not be discovered.