"Oh, it's all very well for you from your eminence of five thousand a year; but I tell you what it is, John, I was treated beastly badly by the old man. He always gave me to understand I was to be his heir." "Well; and he acted up to his promise. It was not his fault that his will was stolen. In that will he did make you his heir." "If you believe that, you ought to allow me anyhow a thousand a year." "I don't agree that I ought to allow you anything, strictly speaking. But I certainly would do so if you were a different sort of man. Unfortunately you are not; and to allow you an independent income would simply be to encourage you to drink, and degrade yourself and your unhappy wife." "It would be nothing of the kind. I won't allow you to speak to me like that, John--even to salve your own conscience. And let me tell you straight, if the day ever comes when that will turns up, I'll have my rights--every penny of them. So you know." "In such circumstances I would not attempt to deprive you of them. You would be dead within the year--or locked up. Look here, Gerald, you know I'm not a man to mince my words. When you married Miriam Crane, you married a woman in a thousand. What have you been to her? Have you made her a decent husband? For a time, I grant, you kept pretty straight, and did your work well, but now you are drifting back to your old tricks as fast as you jolly well can. Only the other day, when I was in the city and dropped in to see Crichton at the office, he was complaining to me about you----" "It's like his damned impudence," retorted Gerald at white heat. "For two pins I'd chuck him and his beastly office, and clear out." "And live on your wits, I suppose, or on your wife. You're quite capable of it." Things were not going to Gerald's liking at all. The cheque he had promised himself was vanishing rapidly. So he made no retort to the Major's last remark, and submitted with the best grace he could muster, to the lecture that warrior did not hesitate to administer to him. Then, having promised and vowed everything that was demanded of him in the future, he made so bold as to ask for a trifle of fifty pounds, and was straightway refused. The Major had been subject to discipline all his life, and was not one to relax it, more especially in the case of such a man as his cousin. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was a precept upon which he had always laid the greatest stress. Gerald had been spared--and spoiled. From the bottom of his heart he pitied Miriam. "How awfully things have gone askew," he said to himself, as he spun east in a quick-going hansom. What would he not give to be in that young rascal's shoes--yes, even without the Manor House and its five thousand a year. By the time he reached the Soudan Hotel he was getting horribly sentimental. But he looked with confidence to his wife to dispel all weakness of that sort. Where Hilda was, he knew, sentiment could not be.