Christmas came, and a month beyond Christmas, and by the end of January Captain Marrable and Miss Lowther had agreed to regard all their autumn work as null and void,--to look back upon the love-making as a thing that had not been, and to part as friends. Both of them suffered much in this arrangement,--the man being the louder in the objurgations which he made against his ill-fortune, and in his assurances to himself and others that he was ruined for life. And, indeed, no man could have been much more unhappy than was Walter Marrable in these days. To him was added the trouble, which he did not endeavour to hide from himself or Mary, that all this misery came to him from his own father. Before the end of November, sundry renewed efforts were made to save a portion of the money, and the lawyers descended so low as to make an offer to take £2000. They might have saved themselves the humiliation, for neither £2000 nor £200 could have been made to be forthcoming. Walter Marrable, when the time came, was painfully anxious to fight somebody; but he was told very clearly by Messrs. Block and Curling, that there was nobody whom he could fight but his father, and that even by fighting his father, he would never obtain a penny. "My belief," said Mr. Curling, "is, that you could put your father in prison, but that probably is not your object." Marrable was forced to own that that was not his object; but he did so in a tone which seemed to imply that a prison, were it even for life, would be the best place for his father. Block and Curling had been solicitors to the Marrables for ever so many years; and though they did not personally love the Colonel, they had a professional feeling that the blackness of a black sheep of a family should not be made public, at any rate by the family itself or by the family solicitors. Almost every family has a black sheep, and it is the especial duty of a family solicitor to keep the family black sheep from being dragged into the front and visible ranks of the family. The Captain had been fatally wrong in signing the paper which he had signed, and must take the consequences. "I don't think, Captain Marrable, that you would save yourself in any way by proceeding against the Colonel," said Mr. Curling. "I have not the slightest intention of proceeding against him," said the Captain, in great dudgeon,--and then he left the office and shook the dust off his feet, as against Block and Curling as well as against his father.