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'You won't tell me that hath any guile in it. Prithee, what is it you have against the man Boyce? "'Eh, did ye see him run? says Captain McBean. 'A man's not in that hurry if he hath a good conscience. If ye'll please to have him up, maybe we'll hear a tale.
"As you please," she said. So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide, he explored every room of the house, which being identical with his own, he could do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But no piano did he find! "Explain," roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hag beside him. "Explain!
Five years of Parliament and marriage followed, and then a crash. It was a common and sordid story, made tragic by the quality of the wife, and the disappointment of the father, if not by the ruined possibilities of Dick Boyce himself.
"But good God! sir," cried the man, "You'd be having me shot for running away. I could tell a damned different story, Captain Boyce." "Who would believe you?" The Cockney intelligence immediately appreciated the situation. It also was ready for the alternative it guessed at the back of Boyce's mind. "I know it's a mess, sir," he replied, with a straight look at Boyce.
"But it will be a bench of landlords," cried Marcella; "of men with whom a poacher is already condemned." "You are unjust to us, I think," said Aldous, slowly, after a pause, during which Mrs. Boyce left the room "to some of us, at any rate. Besides, as of course you know, the case will be simply sent on for trial at the assizes.
Harry stared at him, and after a moment stood up. "I can do nothing," he said. "It is of all things most unlikely that I should do anything. For what I know, my father is dead. He has been nothing else to me all my life. But I believe I should thank you." "Well!" quoth McBean. "God help you. I ha' drawn a bow at a venture. I think I have hit something, Mr. Boyce."
Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge.
But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again. Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical. "Clarke does me no good not an atom," he said, rising. "There don't you come. I Can look after myself." He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room.
Boyce, who had never yet troubled himself about the matter from a distance, was not, upon personal inspection, very favourably struck with his daughter's surroundings. His wife remarked shortly, when he complained to her, that Marcella seemed to her as well off as the daughter of persons of their means could expect to be. But Mr. Boyce stuck to his point.
"And you know," said the lad, eagerly, "though she's so frightfully pretty well, frightfully fetching, rather and well dressed and all the rest of it, she isn't a bit silly, not one of your empty-headed girls not she. She's read a lot of things a lot! I'm sure, Miss Boyce" he looked at her confidently, "if you were to see her you'd think her awfully clever.
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