"Mr. Scarsdale is Edmund's man of business," cried Amelia. "Oh, poor dear little Edmund! I never shall forget that scene! Fancy, Sir John, Edmund taking it into his head that he was going to die, frightening poor mamma out of her wits, and sending for the doctor and Mr. Scarsdale long past midnight, when everybody was asleep. I peeped in at the door just after the doctor went, and there was poor Mr. Scarsdale at the table writing Edmund's will. I had such a laugh after I knew all was safe, and my little brother no worse than usual; for, only think of Mr. Scarsdale humouring Edmund, when he knew it was no good, and writing his will!"
"It was very kind of Mr. Scarsdale, Amelia," said Mrs. Stenhouse.
"Oh, it might be, mamma; but wasn't it an odd scene?" cried the beauty, appealing to Sir John, and laughing at her own penetration. That was Amelia's kind of wit--a wit which, being always played against one suitor for the amusement of another, was wonderfully successful. The baronet was extremely tickled with "the scene;" the fair artist went over it again for his behalf, with a ludicrous sketch of Horace, "though he knew it was no good" making little Edmund's will. While this went on, Horace gradually wakened up into a grim surprise at this ridicule, and began to perceive that the object of his love really meant to hold him up to derision, and had changed her tone. The discovery roused him into something of his former self. What had he not done to gain possession of this girl? But to her he was only a common one of her many admirers, to be laughed at and cast aside in his turn. Dead to all better emotions, Horace had yet a little of common life left in him through his intense arrogance and self regard, and this pin-prick found it out.
"When Edmund called upon me to help him, it was not the first time I had been honoured by the confidence of the head of the house," said Horace, with a sinister impulse of revenge--"the other scene might not have struck Miss Stenhouse as amusing, but, as it happened, it was more interesting to me."
As he spoke, everybody looked at Horace. And perhaps then everybody noticed, for the first time, the change which had fallen upon the young man--putting their various interpretations upon it, as was natural. Amelia saw nothing but a desperate struggle of passion, love, and jealousy, most flatteringly tragic, in the white fever which consumed him. Sir John regarded him with his head a little on one side, and made a moral remark upon the effects of dissipation, in his own mind; while Mrs. Stenhouse, leaping at the first troublesome idea which occurred to her, thought instantly, as he had meant them all to think, upon her husband's death-bed disclosure, and how it might affect her son.