"Mind!" he interrupted. "Forgive me, Miss Brabazon, but how _could_ they be sensitive about the last head but five of a branch of the family which doesn't even recognise our existence?" "Very well, then! I'll take you at your word, and the--the blood and thunder," whispered Miss Julia, as though they were bad words, "be on your own head, Mr. Delavoye!" Thereafter, in a quivering silence, Uvo took me home with him, and straight up into his own room, where he first shut door and window without a word. Never since have I heard man laugh quite so loud and long as he did then. "But you don't see the point!" he arrogated through his tears, because I made rather less noise. "What is it, then?" "I told you I'd opened up a new sink to-day?" "You said something of the sort." "It was a sink of fresh iniquity. I came across it in an old collection of trials; it isn't as much as mentioned in any memoir of the old reprobate, nor yet in the many annals of Witching Hill. Yet he once figured in one of the most disgraceful cases on record." The case was all that, as Delavoye summed it up for my benefit. The arch-villain of the piece was of course his scandalous progenitor, aided and abetted by a quite unspeakable crew. There was a sorely distressed heroine in humble life--a poor little milliner from Shoreditch--but because it was all too true, there had been no humble hero to wreak poetic vengeance on the miscreant. "Not a nursery story, I grant you! But there were some good touches in the version I struck," said Delavoye, producing his museum note-book. "One or two I couldn't help taking down. 'In obedience to the custom of the times,' for instance, 'the young lord proceeded to perform the grand tour; and it is reported that having sailed from Naples to Constantinople, he there imbibed so great an admiration for the manners of the Turks, that on his return to England in 1766, he caused an outlying portion of his family mansion to be taken down, and to be rebuilt in the form of a harem.'" "Rot!" "I took it down word for word. I've often wondered how the Turkish Pavilion got its name; now we know all about it, and why it had a tunnel connecting it with the house." "Poor little milliner!" "I believe you, Gilly. Listen to this, when she was a prisoner in his town house, before they spirited her out here--'Looking out of the window at about eight o'clock, she observed a young woman passing, to whom she threw out her handkerchief, which was then heavy with tears, intending to attract her attention and send to her father for assistance.'""Because the handkerchief was marked?"
"And so heavy with her tears that she could throw it like a tennis-ball!"
The note-book was put away. There was an end also of our hilarity.
"And this dear old girl," said Uvo, with affectionate 

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