“No, no,” said Lucy; “it serves us right.  I wish I had never seen the fellow:  then you would have kept your word, and married me.”

“I will marry you now, if you can obey me.”

“Obey you, Leonard?  You have been my ruin; but only marry me, and I will be your slave in everything—­your willing, devoted, happy slave.”

“That is a bargain,” said Monckton, coolly.  “I’ll be even with him; I will marry you in his name and in his place.”

This puzzled Lucy.

“Why in his name?” said she.

He did not answer.

“Well, never mind the name,” said she, “so that it is the right man—­and that is you.”

Then Monckton’s fertile brain, teeming with villainies, fell to hatching a new plot more felonious than the last.  He would rob the safe, and get Clifford convicted for the theft; convicted as Bolton, Clifford would never tell his real name, and Lucy should enter the Cliffords’ house with a certificate of his death and a certificate of his marriage, both obtained by substitution, and so collar his share of the L20,000, and off with the real husband to fresh pastures.

Lucy looked puzzled.  Hers was not a brain to disentangle such a monstrous web.

Monckton reflected a moment.  “What is the first thing?  Let me see.  Humph!  I think the first thing is to get married.”

“Yes,” said Lucy, with an eagerness that contrasted strangely with his cynical composure, “that is the first thing, and the most understandable.”  And she went dancing off with him as gay as a lark, and leaning on him at an angle of forty-five; whilst he went erect and cold, like a stone figure marching.

Walter Clifford came out in time to see them pass the great window.  He watched them down the street, and cursed them—­not loud but deep.

“Mooning, as usual,” said a hostile voice behind him.  He turned round, and there was Mr. Bartley seated at his own table.  Young Clifford walked smartly to the other side of the table, determined this should be his last day in that shop.

“There are the payments,” said he.

Bartley inspected them.

“About one in five,” said he, dryly.

“Thereabouts,” was the reply. (Consummate indifference.)

“You can’t have pressed them much.”

“Well, I am not good at dunning.”

“What are you good at?”

“Should be puzzled to say.”

“You are not fit for trade.”

“That is the highest compliment was ever paid me.”

“Oh, you are impertinent as well as incompetent, are you?  Then take a week’s warning, Mr. Bolton.”

“Five minutes would suit me better, Mr. Bartley.”

“Oh! indeed!  Say one hour.”

“All right, sir; just time for a city clerk’s luncheon—­glass of bitter, sandwich, peep at Punch, cigarette, and a chat with the bar-maid.”

Mr. Walter Clifford was a gentleman, but we must do him the justice to say that in this interview with his employer he was a very impertinent one, not only in words, but in the delivery thereof.  Bartley, however, thought this impertinence was put on, and that he had grave reasons for being in a hurry.  He took down the numbers of the notes Clifford had given him, and looked very grave and suspicious all the time.