“What nonsense! you know as well as I do that he could n't purchase a dog-kennel. That property was valued at sixteen thousand pounds four years ago,--it is worth twenty now; and you talk to me of this beggar buying it!” “I tell you what he told me, and it was this: Some mine that Sir Brook owned in Sardinia has turned out to be all silver, and in consequence he has suddenly become immensely rich,--so rich, indeed, that he has already determined to settle this estate on Lucy Lendrick; and intends, if he can induce Lord Drumcarran to part with 'The Forest,' to add it to the grounds.” Sewell grasped his hair with both hands, and ground his teeth together with passion as he listened. “You believe this story, I suppose?” said he at last. “Yes; why should I not believe it?” “I don't believe a word of it. I see the drift--I saw the drift of it before you had told me ten words. This tale is got up to lull us into security, and to quiet our suspicions. Lendrick knows well the alarm his unexpected return is likely to give us, and to allay our anxieties they have coined this narrative, as though to imply they will be rich enough not to care to molest us, nor stand between us and this old man's money. Don't you see that?” “I do not. It did not occur to me before, and I do not admit it now.” “I ought not to have asked you. I ought to have remembered what old Fossbrooke once called 'the beautiful trustfulness of your nature.'” “If had it once, it has left me many a long day ago!” “But I deny that you ever had it. You had the woman's trick of affecting to believe, and thus making out what you assumed to think, to be a pledge given by another,--a bit of female craft that you all trade on so long as you are young and good-looking?” “And what supplies the place of this ingenious device when we are neither young nor good-looking?” “I don't know, for the simple reason that I never much interested myself in the sex after that period.” “That's a very sad thing for us. I declare I never had an idea how much we 're to be pitied before.” “You would be to be pitied if you knew how we all think of you;” and he spoke with a spiteful malignity almost demoniac. “It's better, then, for each of us that we should not know this. The trustfulness that you sneer at does us good service, after all.” “And it was this story of the mine that induced Lendrick to come home from the Cape, wasn't it?” “No; he only heard of the mine since he arrived here.” “I thought,” rejoined he, with a sneer, “that he ought to have resigned his appointment on account of this sudden wealth, all the more because I have known that he intended to come back this many a day. And what is Fossbrooke going to do for you? Is there a diamond necklace ordered? or is it one of the brats he is going to adopt?” “By the way, I have been robbed; some one has carried off my gold comb and some pins; they were on my dressing-table last night. Jane saw them when I went into my room.”