“I have to make a clean breast of it to-night,” resumed John Massingbird, after puffing away for some minutes in silence.  “Do you remember my saying to you, the day we heard news of the codicil’s being found, that I was in your debt?”

“I remember your saying it,” replied Lionel.  “I did not understand what you meant.  You were not in my debt.”

“Yes, I was.  I had a score to pay off as big as the moon.  It’s as big still; for it’s one that never can be paid off; never will be.”

Lionel looked at him in surprise; his manner was so unusually serious.

“Fifty times, since I came back from Australia, have I been on the point of clearing myself of the secret.  But, you see, there was Verner’s Pride in the way.  You would naturally have said upon hearing it, ’Give the place up to me; you can have no moral right to it.’  And I was not prepared to give it up; it seemed too comfortable a nest, just at first, after the knocking about over yonder.  Don’t you perceive?”

“I don’t perceive, and I don’t understand,” replied Lionel.  “You are speaking in an unknown language.”

“I’ll speak in a known one, then.  It was through me that old Ste Verner left Verner’s Pride away from you.”

“What!” uttered Lionel.

“True,” nodded John, with composure.  “I told him a—­a bit of scandal of you.  And the strait-laced old simpleton took and altered his will on the strength of it.  I did not know of that until afterwards.”

“And the scandal?” asked Lionel quietly.  “What may it have been?”

“False scandal,” carelessly answered John Massingbird.  “But I thought it was true when I spoke it.  I told your uncle that it was you who had played false with Rachel Frost.”

“Massingbird!”

“Don’t fancy I went to him open-mouthed, and said, ’Lionel Verner’s the man.’  A fellow who could do such a sneaking trick would be only fit for hanging.  The avowal to him was surprised from me in an unguarded moment; it slipped out in self-defence.  I’d better tell you the tale.”

“I think you had,” said Lionel.

“You remember the bother there was, the commotion, the night Rachel was drowned.  I came home and found Mr. Verner sitting at the inquiry.  It never struck me, then, to suspect that it could be any one of us three who had been in the quarrel with Rachel.  I knew that I had had no finger in the pie; I had no cause to think that you had; and, as to Fred, I’d as soon have suspected staid old Verner himself; besides, I believed Fred to have eyes only for Sibylla West.  Not but that the affair appeared to me unaccountably strange; for, beyond Verner’s Pride, I did not think Rachel possessed an acquaintance.”

He stopped to take a few whiffs at his pipe, and then resumed, Lionel listening in silence.