“What do you know about it?” said he, roughly.

“I’ll tell you,” said Monckton, coolly.

He then walked in a most leisurely way to the gate that led into the meadow whose eastern boundary was Hope’s quick-set hedge, and he came in the same leisurely way up to Mr. Bartley, and leaned his back, with his hands behind him, with perfect effrontery, against the palings.

“I know all,” said he.  “I overheard you in your office fourteen years ago, when you changed children with Hope.”

Bartley uttered an exclamation of dismay.

“And I’ve been hovering about here all day, and watched the little game, and now I am fly, and no mistake.”

Bartley threw up his hands in dismay.  “Then it’s all over; I am doubly ruined.  I can not hope to silence you both.”

“Don’t speak so loud, governor.”

“Why not?” said Bartley, “others will, if I don’t.”  He lowered his voice for all that, and wondered what was coming.

“Listen to me,” said Monckton, exchanging his cynical manner for a quiet and weighty one.

Bartley began to wonder, and look at him with a sort of awe.  The words now dropped out of Monckton’s thin lips as if they were chips of granite, so full of meaning was every syllable, and Bartley felt it.

“It’s not so bad as it looks.  There are only two men that know you are a felon.”

Bartley winced visibly.

“Now one of those men is to be bought”—­Bartley lifted his head with a faint gleam of hope at that—­“and the other—­has gone—­down a coal-mine.”

“What good will that do me?”

The villain paused, and looked Bartley in the face.

“That depends.  Suppose you were to offer me what you offered Hope, and suppose Hope—­was never—­to come up—­again?”

“No such luck,” said Bartley, shaking his head sorrowfully.

“Luck,” said Monckton, contemptuously; “we make our own luck.  Do you see that vagabond lying under the tree, that’s Ben Burnley.”

“Ah!” said Bartley, “the ruffian Hope discharged.”

“The same, and a man that is burning to be revenged on him:  he’s your luck, Mr. Bartley; I know the man, and what he has done in a mine before to-day.”

Then he drew near to Bartley’s ear, and hissed into it these fearful words: 

“Send him down the mine, promise him five hundred pounds—­if William Hope—­never comes up again—­and William Hope never will.”

Bartley drew back aghast.  “Assassination!” he cried, and by a generous impulse of horror he half fled from the tempter; but Monckton followed him up and laid his hand upon his shoulder.

“Hush,” said he, “you are getting too near that window; and it is open.  Let me see there’s nobody inside.”

He looked in.  There was nobody.  Grace was upstairs, but it did so happen that she came into the room soon after.

“Nothing of the kind.  Accident.  Accidents will happen in mines, and talking of luck, this mine was declared dangerous this very day.”