“No, but it will secure _me_; secure me from arrest, and the other unpleasant consequences that might follow arrest. To do this, however, I need money, and I have not five pounds--no, nor, I verily believe, five shillings--in the world.” “There are a few trinkets of mine upstairs. I never wear them--” “Not worth fifty pounds, the whole lot; nor would one get half fifty for them in a moment of pressure.” “We have some plate--” “We had, but I sold it three weeks ago; and that reminds me there was a rum old tea-urn got somehow mixed up with our things, and I sold it too, though it has Lendrick's crest upon it. You 'll have to get it back some of these days,--I told the fellow not to break it up till he heard from you.” “Then what is to be done?” said she, eagerly. “That's the question; travelling is the one thing that can't be done on tick.” “If you were to go down to the Nest--” “But our tenure expires on the seventeenth, just one fortnight hence,--not to say that I couldn't call myself safe there one hour. No, no; I must manage to get abroad, and instantly, that I may escape from my present troubles; but I must strike out some way of life,--something that will keep me.” She sat still and almost stupefied, trying to see an escape from these difficulties, but actually overwhelmed by the number and the nature of them. “I told you awhile ago that I did not believe one word of this story of the mine, and the untold wealth that has fallen to old Fossbrooke: _you_, however, do believe it; you affirm the tale as if you had seen and touched the ingots; so that you need have no reluctance to ask him to help you.” “You do not object to this course, then?” asked she, eagerly. “How can I object? If I clutch at a plank when I'm drowning, I don't let go because it may have nails in it. Tell him that you want to buy me off, to get rid of me; that by a couple of hundred pounds,--I wish he 'd make it five,--you can insure my leaving the country, and that my debts here will prevent my coming back again. It's the sort of compact he 'll fully concur in; and you can throw in, as if accidentally, how useless it is for him to go on persecuting me, that his confounded memory for old scores has kept my head under water all my life; and hint that those letters of Trafford's he insists on having--” “_He_ insists on having!” “To be sure he does; I thought I had told you what brought him over here! The old meddling humbug, in his grand benevolence vein, wants to smooth down the difficulties between Lucy Lendrick and Trafford, one of which was thought to be the fellow's attachment to _you_. Don't blush; take it as coolly as I do. I 'm not sure whether reading the correspondence aloud isn't the best way to dispel this illusion. You can say that better than I can.” “Trafford never wrote one line to me of which I should be afraid or ashamed to see in print.”