After waiting to hold a preliminary consultation with his son, Mr. Pedgift the elder set forth alone for his interview with Allan at the great house.

Allowing for the difference in their ages, the son was, in this instance, so accurately the reflection of the father, that an acquaintance with either of the two Pedgifts was almost equivalent to an acquaintance with both. Add some little height and size to the figure of Pedgift Junior, give more breadth and boldness to his humor, and some additional solidity and composure to his confidence in himself, and the presence and character of Pedgift Senior stood, for all general purposes, revealed before you.

The lawyer’s conveyance to Thorpe Ambrose was his own smart gig, drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of light spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. He used tobacco like his son, but in a different form. While the younger man smoked, the elder took snuff copiously; and it was noticed among his intimates that he always held his “pinch” in a state of suspense between his box and his nose when he was going to clinch a good bargain or to say a good thing. The art of diplomacy enters largely into the practice of all successful men in the lower branch of the law. Mr. Pedgift’s form of diplomatic practice had been the same throughout his life, on every occasion when he found his arts of persuasion required at an interview with another man. He invariably kept his strongest argument, or his boldest proposal, to the last, and invariably remembered it at the door (after previously taking his leave), as if it was a purely accidental consideration which had that instant occurred to him. Jocular friends, acquainted by previous experience with this form of proceeding, had given it the name of “Pedgift’s postscript.” There were few people in Thorpe Ambrose who did not know what it meant when the lawyer suddenly checked his exit at the opened door; came back softly to his chair, with his pinch of snuff suspended between his box and his nose; said, “By-the-by, there’s a point occurs to me;” and settled the question off-hand, after having given it up in despair not a minute before.

This was the man whom the march of events at Thorpe Ambrose had now thrust capriciously into a foremost place. This was the one friend at hand to whom Allan in his social isolation could turn for counsel in the hour of need.

“Good-evening, Mr. Armadale. Many thanks for your prompt attention to my very disagreeable letter,” said Pedgift Senior, opening the conversation cheerfully the moment he entered his client’s house. “I hope you understand, sir, that I had really no choice under the circumstances but to write as I did?”

“I have very few friends, Mr. Pedgift,” returned Allan, simply. “And I am sure you are one of the few.”

“Much obliged, Mr. Armadale. I have always tried to deserve your good opinion, and I mean, if I can, to deserve it now. You found yourself comfortable, I hope, sir, at the hotel in London? We call it Our hotel. Some rare old wine in the cellar, which I should have introduced to your notice if I had had the honor of being with you. My son unfortunately knows nothing about wine.”

Allan felt his false position in the neighborhood far too acutely to be capable of talking of anything but the main business of the evening. His lawyer’s politely roundabout method of approaching the painful subject to be discussed between them rather irritated than composed him. He came at once to the point, in his own bluntly straightforward way.

“The hotel was very comfortable, Mr. Pedgift, and your son was very kind to me. But we are not in London now; and I want to talk to you about how I am to meet the lies that are being told of me in this place. Only point me out any one man,” cried Allan, with a rising voice and a mounting color —“any one man who says I am afraid to show my face in the neighborhood, and I’ll horsewhip him publicly before another day is over his head!”

Pedgift Senior helped himself to a pinch of snuff, and held it calmly in suspense midway between his box and his nose.

“You can horsewhip a man, sir; but you can’t horsewhip a neighborhood,” said the lawyer, in his politely epigrammatic manner. “We will fight our battle, if you please, without borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet a while, at any rate.”

“But how are we to begin?” asked Allan, impatiently. “How am I to contradict the infamous things they say of me?”

“There are two ways of stepping out of your present awkward position, sir — a short way, and a long way,” replied Pedgift Senior. “The short way (which is always the best) has occurred to me since I have heard of your proceedings in London from my son. I understand that you permitted him, after you received my letter, to take me into your confidence. I have drawn various conclusions from what he has told me, which I may find it necessary to trouble you with presently. In the meantime I should be glad to know under what circumstances you went to London to make these unfortunate inquiries about Miss Gwilt? Was it your own notion to pay that visit to Mrs. Mandeville? or were you acting under the influence of some other person?”

Allan hesitated. “I can’t honestly tell you it was my own notion,” he replied, and said no more.

“I thought as much!” remarked Pedgift Senior, in high triumph. “The short way out of our present difficulty, Mr. Armadale, lies straight through that other person, under whose influence you acted. That other person must be presented forthwith to public notice, and must stand in that other person’s proper place. The name, if you please, sir, to begin with — we’ll come to the circumstances directly.”

“I am sorry to say, Mr. Pedgift, that we must try the longest way, if you have no objection,” replied Allan, quietly. “The short way happens to be a way I can’t take on this occasion.”

The men who rise in the law are the men who decline to take No for an answer. Mr. Pedgift the elder had risen in the law; and Mr. Pedgift the elder now declined to take No for an answer. But all pertinacity — even professional pertinacity included — sooner or later finds its limits; and the lawyer, doubly fortified as he was by long experience and copious pinches of snuff, found his limits at the very outset of the interview. It was impossible that Allan could respect the confidence which Mrs. Milroy had treacherously affected to place in him. But he had an honest man’s regard for his own pledged word — the regard which looks straightforward at the fact, and which never glances sidelong at the circumstances — and the utmost persistency of Pedgift Senior failed to move him a hairbreadth from the position which he had taken up. “No” is the strongest word in the English language, in the mouth of any man who has the courage to repeat it often enough, and Allan had the courage to repeat it often enough on this occasion.

“Very good, sir,” said the lawyer, accepting his defeat without the slightest loss of temper. “The choice rests with you, and you have chosen. We will go the long way. It starts (allow me to inform you) from my office; and it leads (as I strongly suspect) through a very miry road to — Miss Gwilt.”

Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless astonishment.

“If you won’t expose the person who is responsible in the first instance, sir, for the inquiries to which you unfortunately lent yourself,” proceeded Mr. Pedgift the elder, “the only other alternative, in your present position, is to justify the inquiries themselves.”

“And how is that to be done?” inquired Allan.

“By proving to the whole neighborhood, Mr. Armadale, what I firmly believe to be the truth — that the pet object of the public protection is an adventuress of the worst class; an undeniably worthless and dangerous woman. In plainer English still, sir, by employing time enough and money enough to discover the truth about Miss Gwilt.”

Before Allan could say a word in answer, there was an interruption at the door. After the usual preliminary knock, one of the servants came in.

“I told you I was not to be interrupted,” said Allan, irritably. “Good heavens! am I never to have done with them? Another letter!”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, holding it out. “And,” he added, speaking words of evil omen in his master’s ears, “the person waits for an answer.”

Allan looked at the address of the letter with a natural expectation of encountering the handwriting of the major’s wife. The anticipation was not realized. His correspondent was plainly a lady, but the lady was not Mrs. Milroy.

“Who can it be?” he said, looking mechanically at Pedgift Senior as he opened the envelope.

Pedgift Senior gently tapped his snuff-box, and said, without a moment’s hesitation, “Miss Gwilt.”

Allan opened the letter. The first two words in it were the echo of the two words the lawyer had just pronounced. It was Miss Gwilt!

Once more, Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless astonishment.

“I have known a good many of them in my time, sir,” explained Pedgift Senior, with a modesty equally rare and becoming in a man of his age. “Not as handsome as Miss Gwilt, I admit. But quite as bad, I dare say. Read your letter, Mr. Armadale — read your letter.”

Allan read these lines:

“Miss Gwilt presents her compliments to Mr. Armadale and begs to know if it will be convenient to him to favor her with an interview, either this evening or to-morrow morning. Miss Gwilt offers no apology for making her present request. She believes Mr. Armadale will grant it as an act of justice toward a friendless woman whom he has been innocently the means of injuring, and who is earnestly desirous to set herself right in his estimation.”

Allan handed the letter to his lawyer in silent perplexity and distress.

The face of Mr. Pedgift the elder expressed but one feeling when he had read the letter in his turn and had handed it back — a feeling of profound admiration. “What a lawyer she would have made,” he exclaimed, fervently, “if she had only been a man!”

“I can’t treat this as lightly as you do, Mr. Pedgift,” said Allan. “It’s dreadfully distressing to me. I was so fond of her,” he added, in a lower tone —“I was so fond of her once.”

Mr. Pedgift Senior suddenly became serious on his side.

“Do you mean to say, sir, that you actually contemplate seeing Miss Gwilt?” he asked, with an expression of genuine dismay.

“I can’t treat her cruelly,” returned Allan. “I have been the means of injuring her — without intending it, God knows! I can’t treat her cruelly after that! ”

“Mr. Armadale,” said the lawyer, “you did me the honor, a little while since, to say that you considered me your friend. May I presume on that position to ask you a question or two, before you go straight to your own ruin?”

“Any questions you like,” said Allan, looking back at the letter — the only letter he had ever received from Miss Gwilt.

“You have had one trap set for you already, sir, and you have fallen into it. Do you want to fall into another?”

“You know the answer to that question, Mr. Pedgift, as well as I do.”

“I’ll try again, Mr. Armadale; we lawyers are not easily discouraged. Do you think that any statement Miss Gwilt might make to you, if you do see her, would be a statement to be relied on, after what you and my son discovered in London?”

“She might explain what we discovered in London,” suggested Allan, still looking at the writing, and thinking of the hand that had traced it.

“Might explain it? My dear sir, she is quite certain to explain it! I will do her justice: I believe she would make out a case without a single flaw in it from beginning to end.”

That last answer forced Allan’s attention away from the letter. The lawyer’s pitiless common sense showed him no mercy.

“If you see that woman again, sir,” proceeded Pedgift Senior, “you will commit the rashest act of folly I ever heard of in all my experience. She can have but one object in coming here — to practice on your weakness for her. Nobody can say into what false step she may not lead you, if you once give her the opportunity. You admit yourself that you have been fond of her; your attentions to her have been the subject of general remark; if you haven’t actually offered her the chance of becoming Mrs. Armadale, you have done the next thing to it; and knowing all this, you propose to see her, and to let her work on you with her devilish beauty and her devilish cleverness, in the character of your interesting victim! You, who are one of the best matches in England! You, who are the natural prey of all the hungry single women in the community! I never heard the like of it; I never, in all my professional experience, heard the like of it! If you must positively put yourself in a dangerous position, Mr. Armadale,” concluded Pedgift the elder, with the everlasting pinch of snuff held in suspense between his box and his nose, “there’s a wild-beast show coming to our town next week. Let in the tigress, sir; don’t let in Miss Gwilt!”

For the third time Allan looked at his lawyer. And for the third time his lawyer looked back at him quite unabashed.

“You seem to have a very bad opinion of Miss Gwilt,” said Allan.

“The worst possible opinion, Mr. Armadale,” retorted Pedgift Senior, coolly. “We will return to that when we have sent the lady’s messenger about his business. Will you take my advice? Will you decline to see her?”

“I would willingly decline — it would be so dreadfully distressing to both of us,” said Allan. “I would willingly decline, if I only knew how.”

“Bless my soul, Mr. Armadale, it’s easy enough! Don’t commit you yourself in writing. Send out to the messenger, and say there’s no answer.”

The short course thus suggested was a course which Allan positively declined to take. “It’s treating her brutally,” he said; “I can’t and won’t do it.”

Once more the pertinacity of Pedgift the elder found its limits, and once more that wise man yielded gracefully to a compromise. On receiving his client’s promise not to see Miss Gwilt, he consented to Allan’s committing himself in writing under his lawyer’s dictation. The letter thus produced was modeled in Allan’s own style; it began and ended in one sentence. “Mr. Armadale presents his compliments to Miss Gwilt, and regrets that he cannot have the pleasure of seeing her at Thorpe Ambrose.” Allan had pleaded ............