"You use strong words," he said, and his voice was low and hoarse. "You are an old man and--you are her father. You call me a scoundrel; I call you a fool, for if I were half the scoundrel you think me, you'd be to blame for any harm I might have done. I've done none. But that's no thanks to you, who keep such a girl as she is shut up as you do, and leave her to wander about unprotected. You know me, you say, and you know no good of me; that's as it may be, but I say when you call me a scoundrel, you lie!" "Yes, I know you. I know the stock from whence you sprung, villains all! I thought that here, at least, I was safe from your kind; but Fate led you here--thank Fate that I let you go unhurt. Take an old man's advice, and, unlike your race, for once leave the prey which you thought so easy to destroy. Go!" "I am going," he said, grimly. "I shall go, because if I stayed all night I should not convince you that I am not the scoundrel you suppose me. But, if you think that I am to be frightened by these sort of threats, you are mistaken. I have said that I will come back, and I _will_!" and with a curt nod he strode off. CHAPTER V. It was the evening of the day on which Jack Newcombe had parted from Gideon and Una, and the young moon fell peacefully on the irregular pile of the ancient mansion known familiarly for twenty miles of its neighborhood as The Hurst. The present owner was one Ralph Davenant, or Squire Davenant, as Jack Newcombe had called him, and as he was called by the county generally. He was an old man of eighty, who had lived one-half his life in the wildest and most dissipated fashion, and the other half in that most unprofitable occupation known as repenting thereof. I say "known as," for if old Squire Davenant had really repented, this story would never have been written. If half the stories which were told of him were true, Ralph Davenant, the present owner of Hurst, deserves a niche in the temple of fame--or infamy--which holds the figures of the worst men of his day. He had been a gambler, a spendthrift, a rogue of the worst kind for one half his life; a miser, a cynic, a misanthrope for the other. And he now lay dying in his huge, draughty bed-chamber, hung with the portraits of his ancestors--all bad and filled with the ghosts of his youth and wasted old age. As it was, he lay quite still--so still that the physician, brought down from London at a cost of--say, ten guineas an hour, was often uncertain whether he was alive or dead.