“--But you've got something to tell me--eh?” suggested sir Wilton. He was on the point of adding, “If it be where you got those eyes, I may have to ask you to sit down!” but he checked himself, and said only, “You'd better make haste, then; for the devil is at the door in the shape of my damned gout!” “I came to tell you, sir Wilton,” replied Richard, plunging at once into the middle of things, which was indeed the best way with sir Wilton, “about a son of yours--” “What!” cried sir Wilton, putting his hands on the arms of his chair and leaning forward as if on the point of rising to his feet. “Where the devil is he? What do you know about him?” “He is lying at the point of death--dying of hunger, I may say.” “Rubbish!” cried the baronet contemptuously. “You want to get money out of me! But you shan't!--not a damned penny!” “I do want to get money from you, sir,” said Richard. “I kept the poor fellow alive--kept him in dinners at least, him and his sister, till I fell ill and couldn't work.” At the word _sister_ the baronet grew calmer. It was nothing about the lost heir! The other sort did not matter: they were no use against the enemy! Richard paused. The baronet stared. “I haven't a penny to call my own, or I should not have come to you,” resumed Richard. “I thought so! That's your orthodox style! But you've come to the wrong man!” returned sir Wilton. “I never give anything to beggars.” He did not in the least doubt what he heard, but he scarcely knew what he answered--wondering where he had seen the fellow, and how he came to be so like his wife. The remembered ugliness of her infant prevented all suggestion that this handsome fellow might be the same. “You are the last man, sir Wilton, from whom I would ask anything for myself,” said Richard. “Why so?” Richard hesitated. To let him suspect the same claim in himself, would be fatal. “I swear to you, sir Wilton,” he said, “by all that men count sacred, I come only to tell you that Arthur and Alice Manson, your son and daughter, are in dire want. Your son may be dead; he looked like it three days ago, and had no one to attend to him; his sister had to leave him to earn their next day's food. Their mother lay a corpse in the other of their two rooms.” “Oh! she's gone, is she! That alters the case. But what became of all the money I gave her? It was more than her body was worth; soul she never had any!” “She lost it somehow, and her son and daughter starved themselves to keep her in plenty, so that by the time she died, they were all but dead themselves.” “A pair of fools.” “A good son and daughter, sir!” “Attached to the young woman, eh?” asked the baronet, looking hard at him.