'Julia leaves this place tomorrow,' replied Morris. 'She must go

up to town and get the house ready, and find servants. We shall
all follow in three days.'

'Oh, brayvo!' cried John. 'But why?'
'I've found it out, John,' returned his brother gently.

'It? What?' enquired John.
'Why Michael won't compromise,' said Morris. 'It's because he

can't. It's because Masterman's dead, and he's keeping it dark.'
'Golly!' cried the impressionable John. 'But what's the use? Why

does he do it, anyway?'
'To defraud us of the tontine,' said his brother.

'He couldn't; you have to have a doctor's certificate,' objected
John.

'Did you never hear of venal doctors?' enquired Morris. 'They're
as common as blackberries: you can pick 'em up for

three-pound-ten a head.'
'I wouldn't do it under fifty if I were a sawbones,' ejaculated

John.
'And then Michael,' continued Morris, 'is in the very thick of

it. All his clients have come to grief; his whole business is
rotten eggs. If any man could arrange it, he could; and depend

upon it, he has his plan all straight; and depend upon it, it's a
good one, for he's clever, and be damned to him! But I'm clever

too; and I'm desperate. I lost seven thousand eight hundred
pounds when I was an orphan at school.'

'O, don't be tedious,' interrupted John. 'You've lost far more
already trying to get it back.'

CHAPTER II. In Which Morris takes Action
Some days later, accordingly, the three males of this depressing

family might have been observed (by a reader of G. P. R. James)
taking their departure from the East Station of Bournemouth. The

weather was raw and changeable, and Joseph was arrayed in
consequence according to the principles of Sir Faraday Bond, a

man no less strict (as is well known) on costume than on diet.
There are few polite invalids who have not lived, or tried to

live, by that punctilious physician's orders. 'Avoid tea, madam,'
the reader has doubtless heard him say, 'avoid tea, fried liver,

antimonial wine, and bakers' bread. Retire nightly at 10.45; and
clothe yourself (if you please) throughout in hygienic flannel.

Externally, the fur of the marten is indicated. Do not forget to
procure a pair of health boots at Messrs Dail and Crumbie's.' And

he has probably called you back, even after you have paid your
fee, to add with stentorian emphasis: 'I had forgotten one

caution: avoid kippered sturgeon as you would the very devil.'
The unfortunate Joseph was cut to the pattern of Sir Faraday in

every button; he was shod with the health boot; his suit was of
genuine ventilating cloth; his shirt of hygienic flannel, a

somewhat dingy fabric; and he was draped to the knees in the
inevitable greatcoat of marten's fur. The very railway porters at

Bournemouth (which was a favourite station of the doctor's)
marked the old gentleman for a creature of Sir Faraday. There was

but one evidence of personal taste, a vizarded forage cap; from
this form of headpiece, since he had fled from a dying jackal on

the plains of Ephesus, and weathered a bora in the Adriatic,
nothing could divorce our traveller.

The three Finsburys mounted into their compartment, and fell
immediately to quarrelling, a step unseemly in itself and (in

this case) highly unfortunate for Morris. Had he lingered a
moment longer by the window, this tale need never have been

written. For he might then have observed (as the porters did not
fail to do) the arrival of a second passenger in the uniform of

Sir Faraday Bond. But he had other matters on hand, which he
judged (God knows how erroneously) to be more important.

'I never heard of such a thing,' he cried, resuming a discussion
which had scarcely ceased all morning. 'The bill is not yours; it

is mine.'
'It is payable to me,' returned the old gentleman, with an air of

bitter obstinacy. 'I will do what I please with my own property.'
The bill was one for eight hundred pounds, which had been given

him at breakfast to endorse, and which he had simply pocketed.
'Hear him, Johnny!' cried Morris. 'His property! the very clothes

upon his back belong to me.'
'Let him alone,' said John. 'I am sick of both of you.'

'That is no way to speak of your uncle, sir,' cried Joseph. 'I
will not endure this disrespect. You are a pair of exceedingly

forward, impudent, and ignorant young men, and I have quite made
up my mind to put an end to the whole business.'.

'O skittles!' said the graceful John.
But Morris was not so easy in his mind. This unusual act of

insubordination had already troubled him; and these mutinous
words now sounded ominously in his ears. He looked at the old

gentleman uneasily. Upon one occasion, many years before, when
Joseph was delivering a lecture, the audience had revolted in a

body; finding their entertainer somewhat dry, they had taken the
question of amusement into their own hands; and the lecturer

(along with the board schoolmaster, the Baptist clergyman, and a
working-man's candidate, who made up his bodyguard) was

ultimately driven from the scene. Morris had not been present on
that fatal day; if he had, he would have recognized a certain

fighting glitter in his uncle's eye, and a certain chewing
movement of his lips, as old acquaintances. But even to the

inexpert these symptoms breathed of something dangerous.
'Well, well,' said Morris. 'I have no wish to bother you further

till we get to London.'
Joseph did not so much as look at him in answer; with tremulous

hands he produced a copy of the British Mechanic, and
ostentatiously buried himself in its perusal.

'I wonder what can make him so cantankerous?' reflected the
nephew. 'I don't like the look of it at all.' And he dubiously

scratched his nose.
The train travelled forth into the world, bearing along with it

the customaryfreight of obliterated voyagers, and along with
these old Joseph, affecting immersion in his paper, and John

slumbering over the columns of the Pink Un, and Morris revolving
in his mind a dozen grudges, and suspicions, and alarms. It

passed Christchurch by the sea, Herne with its pinewoods,
Ringwood on its mazy river. A little behind time, but not much

for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of a station,
in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in case

the railway company 'might have the law of me') I shall veil
under the alias of Browndean.

Many passengers put their heads to the window, and among the rest
an old gentleman on whom I willingly dwell, for I am nearly done

with him now, and (in the whole course of the present narrative)
I am not in the least likely to meet another character so decent.

His name is immaterial, not so his habits. He had passed his life
wandering in a tweed suit on the continent of Europe; and years

of Galignani's Messenger having at length undermined his
eyesight, he suddenly remembered the rivers of Assyria and came

to London to consult an oculist. From the oculist to the dentist,
and from both to the physician, the step appears inevitable;

presently he was in the hands of Sir Faraday, robed in
ventilating cloth and sent to Bournemouth; and to that

domineering baronet (who was his only friend upon his native
soil) he was now returning to report. The case of these

tweedsuited wanderers is unique. We have all seen them entering
the table d'hote (at Spezzia, or Grdtz, or Venice) with a genteel

melancholy and a faint appearance of having been to India and not
succeeded. In the offices of many hundred hotels they are known