with reference to the unentailed and personal property, it will be erased, and that of your cousin George substituted.  Please yourself, Philip, please yourself; it is a matter of entire indifference to me.  I am very fond of George, and shall be glad to do him a good turn if you force me to it, though it is a pity to split up the property.  But probably you will like to take a week to consider whether you prefer to stick to the girl you have got hold of up in town there—­oh, yes!  I know there is some one—­and abandon the property, or marry Miss Lee and retain the property—­a very pretty problem for an amorous young man to consider.  There, I won’t keep you up any longer.  Good night, Philip, good night.  Just see to the plate, will you?  Remember, you have a personal interest in that; I can’t leave it away.”

Philip rose without a word and left the room, but when he was gone it was his father’s turn to hide his face in his hands.

“Oh, God!” he groaned aloud, “to think that all my plans should come to such an end as this; to think that I am as powerless to prevent their collapse as a child is to support a falling tree; that the only power left me is the power of vengeance—­vengeance on my own son.  I have lived too long, and the dregs of life are bitter.”

CHAPTER IX

Poor Hilda found life in her London lodging anything but cheerful, and frequently begged Philip to allow her to settle somewhere in the country.  This, however, he refused to do on two grounds:  in the first place, because few country villages would be so convenient for him to get at as London; and in the second, because he declared that the great city was the safest hiding-place in the world.

And so Hilda continued perforce to live her lonesome existence, that was only cheered by her husband’s short and uncertain visits.  Friends she had none, nor did she dare to make any.  The only person whose conversation she could rely on to relieve the tedium of the long weeks was her landlady, Mrs. Jacobs, the widow of a cheesemonger, who had ruined a fine business by his drinking and other vicious propensities, and out of a good property had only left his wife the leasehold of a house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, fortunately for her, had been settled upon her at her marriage.  Like most people who have seen better days—­not but what she was now very comfortably off—­she delighted in talking of her misfortunes, and of the perfidiousness of man; and in Hilda, who had, poor girl, nothing else to listen to, she found a most attentive audience.  As was only natural where such a charming person and such a good listener were concerned, honest Mrs. Jacobs soon grew fond of her interesting lodger, about whose husband’s circumstances and history she soon wove many an imaginary tale; for, needless to say, her most pertinent inquiries failed to extract much information from Hilda.  One of her favourite fictions was that her lodger was the victim of her handsome husband, who had in some way beguiled her from her home beyond the seas, in order to keep her in solitary confinement and out of the reach of a hated rival.  Another, that he kept her thus that he might have greater liberty for his own actions.