“_C’est selon!_ I _think_ I should have spoken at the last moment--and yet it might have been very convenient to hold an awkward little secret about one’s wealthy brother. A man must be very hard up before he descends to that undignified mode of livelihood which the French galley-slaves call _chantage_; but when a fellow _is_ hard up there’s no knowing how low he may descend.” “You are a scoundrel!” “And you are--I can’t finish the sentence without sinking to slang. We resemble each other in character as we do in person.” In this fashion the brothers bandied civilities for some time; but they ended matters by dining together at the Metropolitan. Arabian traditions as to the sanctity of bread and salt cannot hold good against the exigencies of civilized life; and men may dine together in a friendly way, and reserve the right of hating each other nevertheless. Warmed by a good dinner and a bottle of Moselle, Roderick grew hopeful as to the future. Susan would relent from her calm determination never to hold any communication with the husband she had loved so tenderly, by whom she had been so cruelly abandoned. Francis might act in a handsome manner about the fortune which ought to have been his cousin’s; and, after all, the turn which affairs had taken might not be altogether an unlucky one. “Looking at it in any way, Rosa was a nuisance,” said Mr. Lowther, as he bedewed his moustache with the rose-water which the luxurious Metropolitan provides for its guests; “and perhaps it’s better as it is. We hadn’t come to close quarters about the settlements; and I dare say if the _père_ Grunderson had been brought to the scratch, we should have had a scuffle.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XLII. A PERFECT UNION. Maude left Paddington by an afternoon express, and reached Exeter after a journey that was long and wearisome even to a modern traveller, for whom the way has been smoothed so delightfully. It was late the next evening when she reached Falmouth, after a day in a stage-coach, and put up at the principal hotel with her maid, who was a good deal more tired than her mistress, as it is in the nature of maids to be. The coach that passed through Landresdale on its way to some still more remote and savage district left Falmouth early in the morning; and Maude left with it, this time unattended by her maid, whose curiosity had been considerably stimulated by the erratic nature of her mistress’s movements, and who thought it a hard thing to be left alone to look out of the window of the hotel sitting-room, while Mrs. Tredethlyn pursued her mysterious journey to its mysterious close.