“Morose? No, your Grace,” said the old man, who adored his owner. “But it is certain his lordship leads a lonesome life. When we’re in any port, he don’t go ashore o’ nights to sup and play and lark as other gentlemen do. But there aren’t his equal for goodness and kindness, madam, anywhere; no, not in the ’varsal world.” “It is very nice of you to say so,” she replied, buttoning the big gold buttons of her coat; her spirits had risen; she was not afraid of her brother any longer; he had said his worst and she had made him feel his impotence. After all it did not really matter what he knew or guessed, he would not talk. “My poor darling, has he worried you?” said Lady Bassenthwaite, full of sympathy, when she returned. “Worried me? I should think so!” she answered. “He insists on my shutting myself up at Whiteleaf, and says Boo is to have no more Paris frocks. Pray give me some tea, I am worn out with being lectured!” Lady Bassenthwaite’s sympathy did not include credulity. “He can’t have come out all the way from Cowes to Bergen only to talk about Boo’s frocks,” she said later in the evening to her husband. CHAPTER XXXVI. Katherine Massarene was as unhappy as it is possible for a person to be who has no personal crime on their conscience, and has all their personal wants supplied. She was incessantly haunted by the sense of her father’s wickedness. True he had never gone to windward of the law; he had never done anything which would have enabled the law to call him to account. But his actions seemed to her all the worse because of that cold-blooded caution which had kept him carefully justified legally in all which he did. His own advancement had always been his governing purpose; and he had been too shrewd to imperil this by any excess in overreaching others, such as might have made him liable to law. He had dealt with men so that they were always legally in the wrong: for moral right he cared nothing. To his heiress all his wealth seemed blood-stained and accursed. She seemed to herself blood-stained in keeping or using it. Some part might possibly have been gained by industry, frugality, and self-denial; but the main portion of it had been built up on the ruin of others. In any case she would have felt thus, but the words of Hurstmanceaux had been like electric light shed on a dark place where murdered bodies lie. His scorn cut her to the heart. She did not resent it; she admired it; but it cut her to the quick.