“At a school in Southampton,” where Roger never was at school.  But it happened that Lady Tichborne in a letter to Mr. Gibbes had said that her son was for three years at the Jesuit College of Stonyhurst, in Lancashire; Mr. Gibbes accordingly suggested to the client “in a humble station of life,” that his memory was at fault on that point, but the client maintained his ground.  “Did she say he had been at Stonyhurst College?  If so, it was false;” and, he added, with an oath, “I have a good mind never to go near her again for telling such a story.”  Yet this strange person was able to confirm the entire story of the tramping sailors.  He had embarked in the “Bella,” he had been picked up at sea with other survivors in a boat off the coast of Brazil, and it was quite true that he was landed with them in Melbourne.  In short, he corroborated the Dowager’s long advertisement in every particular; but beyond that he had nothing of the slightest importance to tell which was not absurdly incorrect.  His replies, however, were forwarded to the Lady Tichborne, with pressing requests to send L200, then L250, and finally L400, to enable the lost heir to pay his debts—­an indispensable condition of his leaving the colony.  It is evident that the statements thus reported puzzled the poor lady a little, and she seems to have been unable to account for the lost heir sending his kind remembrance to his “grandpa,” because Roger’s’ paternal grandfather died before he was born; and his grandfather by the mother’s side had also died several years before Roger left England, as the young man knew well enough.  She was clearly a little surprised to hear that the resuscitated Roger did not understand a word of French, for “my son,” she says, “was born in Paris, and spoke French better than English.”  But yet, with the strange pertinacity which causes people to cling to that which they know to be wrong, and try to force themselves into belief of its truth, she believed in the bona-fides of the claimant for maternal solicitude and the paternal acres.  “I fancied,” she said in one letter to Gibbes, “that the photographies you sent me are like him, but of course after thirteen years’ absence there must have been some difference in the shape, as Roger was very slim; but,” she added, “I suppose all those large clothes would make him appear bigger than he is.”  Again, alluding to the “photographies,” she remarks that at least the hand in the portrait is small, and adds, “that peculiar thing has done a good deal with me to make me recognise him.  A year and a half was consumed in these tedious hagglings with brokers and agents for the restoration of a lost heir, and during great part of that time the lost heir himself made no sign, but contented himself with begging trifling loans of Gibbes on the strength of his pretensions.  Sometimes a pound was the modest request; sometimes more.  He had married, and a child was born, and on that occasion he implored for “three pound,”