"Chaldicotes, 20th February, 185—."My dear Mark,—'Lend not thy name to the money-dealers, for the same is a destruction and a snare.' If that be not in the Proverbs, it ought to be. Tozer has given me certain signs of his being alive and strong this cold weather. As we can neither of us take up that bill for £400 at this moment, we must renew it, and pay him his commission and interest, with all the rest of his perquisites, and pickings, and stealings—from all which, I can assure you, Tozer does not keep his hands as he should do.
"To cover this and some other little outstanding trifles, I have filled in the new bill for £500, making it due 23d of May next. Before that time, a certain accident will, I trust, have occurred to your impoverished friend. By-the-by, I never told you how she went off from Gatherum Castle, the morning after you left us, with the Greshams. Cart-ropes would not hold her, even though the duke held them, which he did with all the strength of his ducal hands. She would go to meet some doctor of theirs, and so I was put off for that time; but I think that the matter stands in a good train.
"Do not lose a post in sending back the bill accepted, as Tozer may annoy you—nay, undoubtedly will, if the matter be not in his hand, duly signed by both of us, the day after to-morrow. He is an ungrateful brute; he has lived on me for these eight years, and would not let me off a single squeeze now to save my life. But I am specially anxious to save you from the annoyance and cost of lawyers' letters; and if delayed, it might get into the papers.
"Put it under cover to me, at No. 7 Duke Street, St. James's. I shall be in town by that time.
"Good-by, old fellow. That was a decent brush we had the other day from Cobbold's Ashes. I wish I could get that brown horse from you. I would not mind going to a hundred and thirty.
"Yours ever,N. Sowerby."
When Mark had read it through, he looked down on his table to see whether the old bill had fallen from the letter; but no, there was no inclosure, and had been no inclosure but the new bill. And then he read the letter through again, and found that there was no word about the old bill—not a syllable, at least, as to its whereabouts. Sowerby did not even say that it would remain in his own hands.
Mark did not, in truth, know much about such things. It might be that the very fact of his signing this second document would render that first document null and void; and from Sowerby's silence on the snbject, it might be argued that this was so well known to be the case that he had not thought of explaining it. But yet Mark could not see how this should be so.
But what was he to do? That threat of cost and lawyers, and specially of the newspapers, did have its effect
