'I have very little doubt it was so--though I wasn't old enough when he died to hear as much from his own lips. My father went straight from the University to Vienna, where he began his career in the diplomatic service, and where he soon afterwards married a dowerless English girl of good family. He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies, the youngest in long clothes. Mother and babies all came over to England, and were at once established at Fellside. I can remember the voyage--and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow of my father's death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of broken health and broken spirits. We had no one but the dowager to look to as children--hardly another friend in the world. She did what she liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so _they_ have never heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached _their_ ears. But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever, though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school. The time came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had been said about Lord Maulevrier. The men who told me about the old scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night, when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor's son, he told me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he thought himself the better bred of the two. I smashed his nose for him, but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared the matter.' 'Did you ever hear the exact story?'