"What young man?" "Randal Leslie. How! You know him?" Here a brief explanation followed. Harley heard with attentive ear, and marked vexation, the particulars of Riccabocca's connection and implied engagement with Leslie. "There is something very suspicious to me in all this," said he. "Why should this young man have so sounded me as to Violante's chance of losing fortune if she married an Englishman?" "Did he? O, pooh! excuse him. It was but his natural wish to seem ignorant of all about me. He did not know enough of my intimacy with you to betray my secret." "But he knew enough of it--must have known enough to have made it right that he should tell you I was in England. He does not seem to have done so." "No--_that_ is strange; yet scarcely strange--for, when we last met, his head was full of other things--love and marriage. _Basta!_ youth will be youth." "He has no youth left in him!" exclaimed Harley, passionately. "I doubt if he ever had any. He is one of those men who come into the world with the pulse of a centenarian. You and I never shall be as old--as he was in long-clothes. Ah, you may laugh; but I am never wrong in my instincts. I disliked him at the first--his eye, his smile, his voice, his very footstep. It is madness in you to countenance such a marriage; it may destroy all chance of your restoration." "Better that than infringe my word once passed." "No, no," exclaimed Harley; "your word is not passed--it shall not be passed. Nay, never look so piteously at me. At all events, pause till we know more of this young man. If he be worthy of her without a dower, why, then, let him lose you your heritage. I should have no more to say." "But why lose me my heritage?" "Do you think the Austrian government would suffer your estates to pass to this English jackanapes, a clerk in a public office? O, sage in theory, why are you such a simpleton in action?" Nothing moved by this taunt, Riccabocca rubbed his hands, and then stretched them comfortably over the fire. "My friend," said he, "the heritage would pass to my son--a dowry only goes to the daughter." "But you have no son." "Hush! I am going to have one; my Jemima informed me of it yesterday morning; and it was upon that information that I resolved to speak to Leslie. Am I a simpleton now?" "Going to have a son," repeated Harley, looking very bewildered; "how do you know it is to be a son?" "Physiologists are agreed," said the sage positively, "that where the husband is much older than the wife, and there has been a long interval without children before she condescends to increase the population of the world--she (that is, it is at least as nine to four)--she brings into the world a male. I consider that point, therefore, as settled, according to the calculations of statistics and the researches of naturalists." Harley could not help laughing, though he was still angry and disturbed. "The same man as ever; always the fool of philosophy."