Mr. Cattley lifted his head and looked towards the door; Susie involuntarily put down her work. She thought of an accident, in the semi-professional habit of her thoughts, and her mind leaped naturally into the question where she could find bandages and the other appliances? while he, whose duty took another turn, instinctively felt in his breast-pocket for the old well-worn Prayer-book, from which he was never separated. Then there was a clang of the open door, pushed against the wall by some one entering eagerly. And the next moment the parlour door burst open, and Elly appeared—Elly with her eyes very wide open and shining, her mouth set firm, a wind of vigorous and rapid movement coming in with her, disturbing the papers on the table. The curate jumped up in alarm, with a cry: ‘Elly, what is the matter?’ and a changing colour. Susie thought the same as he did—that something must have happened at the rectory, and rose up, but not with the same eagerness as he.

‘Oh, you are here, Mr. Cattley,’ said Elly, with an impatient wave of her hand. She was breathless, scarcely able to get out the words, which ran off in a sort of sibilation at the end. Then she sat down hastily, and paused to take breath. ‘It was Susie,’ she went on, with a gasp, ‘that I wanted to see.’

‘I will go away,’ said the curate, ‘but tell me first that nothing is wrong—that nothing has happened.’

Elly took a minute or two to recover her breath, which she drew in long inspirations, relieving her heart.

‘Since you are here,’ she said, ‘you may stay, for you have known everything. Nothing wrong? Oh, everything is wrong. But nothing has happened to Aunt Mary, if that is what you mean.’

Mr. Cattley grew very red, and cast a glance at Susie, who on her part sat down quickly, silently, without asking any question, which had its significance. Perhaps she only felt that, as there was evidently no need for bandages she could not have much to do with it, either; perhaps—but it is unnecessary to investigate further. For Elly added, immediately,

‘I have got a letter from Jack, which I don’t understand at all.’

She had recovered her breath. There was an air of defiance and resolution upon her face. She drew her chair into the open space in front of Susie, and challenged her as if to single combat.

‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘from you—I don’t mind Mr. Cattley being there, because he knows us both so well, and has been in it all along. I want to know, from you—is there any reason, any secret reason, that he could find out and did not know before, that could stand between Jack and me?’

Susie looked at her with an astonished face, her mouth a little open, her eyes fixed in wonder. She did not make any reply, but that was comprehensible, for the question seemed to take her altogether by surprise.

‘I don’t think you understand me,’ said Elly, plaintively, ‘and I’m sure I don’t wonder. You know, Mr. Cattley, at least; Jack went away full of his great scheme which was to make him rich, which was to make Aunt Mary’s opposition as much contrary to prudence as it was to—to good sense and—everything,’ cried Elly, ‘for of course the only drawback in it, as everybody must have seen with half an eye, was that I was not good enough for him, a rising engineer, with the finest profession in the world! However, we were engaged all the same. People might say not, but we were—in every sense of the word—I to him and he to me!’

Her face was like the sky as she told her tale, now swept by clouds, now clearing into full and open light. She grew red and pale, and dark and bright in a continued succession, and kept her eyes fixed with mingled defiance and appeal on Susie’s face.

‘Now tell me,’ she said, ‘for you must know—is there anything that Jack could find out that would change all that in a moment? What is there that he could find out that would make him think differently of himself and of every creature? Can’t you tell me, Susie? You are his only sister; you must know, if anyone knows. What is it? What is it? Mr. Cattley, her face is changing too. Oh, for goodness sake, make her tell me! If I only knew, I could judge for myself. Make her say what it is!’

The clouds that came and went on Elly’s face seemed suddenly to have blown upon that wind of emotion to Susie’s. After her first look of wonder, she had given the questioner a quick suspicious troubled glance. Then Susie picked up her work again and bent her head over it, and appeared to withdraw her attention altogether. She went on working in an agitated way a minute or two after this appeal had been made to her. Then she suddenly raised her head.

‘What could he have found out? How should I know what he could find out? What was there to find out?’

‘These are the questions I am asking you,’ cried Elly. ‘Here is his letter. I brought it to show you. It is a letter,’ cried the girl, ‘which anybody may see, not what anyone could call a love-letter. I suppose he has found out, after having spoken, that he did not—care for me as he thought.’

‘Elly,’ said the curate, ‘I know nothing about it—but I am sure that is not true.’

‘Oh, you should see the letter,’ she cried, with a faint laugh. The clouds with a crimson tinge had wrapped her face in gloom and shame. Then she paused and put her hands to her eyes to hide the quick-coming tears. ‘Why should one be ashamed?’ she said. ‘I was not ashamed before. It was I who insisted before; for I was quite sure—quite sure—— And now what am I to think? for he has given me up, Susie, he has given me up!’

Susie kept her head bent over her work.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘of something he has found out?’

‘Because of—yes—yes. Read it, if you like—anyone may read it. Because he thought his father was dead and he finds out now that he is alive; but what is his father to me? No father can make a slave of Jack, for he is a man. What have I do with his father, Susie?’

Susie’s work served her no longer as a shield. It dropped from her hands: she was very pale, everything swam before her eyes.

‘Oh, what is it—what is it—what is it?’ cried Elly, clapping her hands together with a frenzy of eagerness and anxiety and curiosity, which resounded through the silence of the house.

CHAPTER XII.

JOHN’S LETTER.

‘Now what,’ said Elly, facing them both defiantly, ‘what does that mean?’

Susie had read it too, at last, though at first she had refused to read it. Did she not know in a moment what it meant? For her there could be no doubt. Since she had grown a woman; since she had learned how things go in this world, and how difficult it is to conceal anything, there had always been a dread in Susie’s mind of what would happen when John found out. This had only come over her by moments, but now, in the shock of the discovery, she believed that she had always thought so, and always trembled for this contingency. She said to herself now that she had always known it would happen, which was going further still—always known—always dreaded—and now it had come. She did not need to read the letter, but she had done so at last, overwhelmed by anxiety and fear. She gave it back to Elly without a word. Of course she had known what it must be. Of course, from the first moment, she had known.

‘Susie,’ Elly said again, ‘tell me, what does it mean?’

‘You know him well enough,’ Susie said, falteringly; ‘you know he would not say what was not true.’

‘But if this is true,’ said Elly, ‘then he has said before what was not true. What can it be to me that his father is living? I do not mind—his father is nothing to me. I don’t want to hurt you, Susie, but if his father swept the streets, if he—oh, I don’t want to hurt you!’

‘You don’t hurt me,’ said Susie, with the smile of a martyr. ‘Oh, Miss Spencer, let us leave it alone. You see what he says. He will explain, if you insist, but he would rather not explain. Don’t you trust him enough for that?’

‘Trust him!’ said Elly. ‘I trust him so much that, if he sent me word to go to him and marry him to-morrow, I would do it. I trust him so that I don’t believe it, oh, not a word,’ the girl cried. And then she threw herself upon Susie, clasping her wrists as she tried, trembling, to resume her work. ‘Oh, tell me, what does he mean—what does he mean? What can his father be to me?’

‘Elly,’ said Mr. Cattley, ‘don’t you see how hard you are upon her? Take what Jack says, or let him explain for himself. I will go to him and get his explanation, if you wish—but why torture her?’

Elly shot a vivid glance from the curate to Susie, who sat with her head bent over her work, her needle stumbling wildly in her trembling hands.

‘You think a great deal of sparing her, Mr. Cattley. Aunt Mary says——’

Elly was in so great distress, so excited, so crossed and thwarted, so uncertain and unhappy, that to wound some one else was almost a relief to her. But she stopped short before she shot her dart.

‘I am sure she says nothing that is unkind,’ said the curate, firmly; but his very firmness betrayed the sense of a doubt. Mrs. Egerton had been his idol all this time, and was he going to desert her? Could she by any possibility think that he was deserting her? His own mind was too much confused and troubled on his own account to be clear.

Susie kept on working as if for life and death, not meeting the girl’s look, tacitly resisting the clasp of her hands, grateful when Mr. Cattley distracted Elly’s attention and relieved herself from that urgent appeal, yet scarcely conscious whence the relief came or what they were saying to each other to make that pause. Her needle flew along wildly all the time, piercing her fingers more often than the two edges which she was sewing together: and in her mind such a tumult and conflict, half physical from the flutter of her heart beating in her ears, making a whirr of sound through which the voices came vaguely, carrying no meaning. Elly’s appeal to her, though so urgent, was but secondary. The thing that had happened, and all the questions involved in it: how he had come to light again, that poor father whom Susie had been brought up to fear, yet whom she could not help loving in a way; how John had found out the family tragedy; what it would be to her mother to be brought face to face with it again, and to know that he knew it, whom it had been the object of her life to keep in ignorance. To think that all this had happened, and nobody had told her; that she had not known a word of it till now, when that intimation was accompanied by this impassioned appeal for explanation. Explanation! how could Susie explain? The very suggestion that another mode of treatment was possible from that which her mother had adopted, and that, instead of concealing it at any risk, John was setting it up between him and those he loved most, identifying himself with it, even offering explanation if necessary, was appalling to Susie.

It was only when she had a moment of silence to consider, that it all came upon her. She did not know what they were saying, or desire to hear. She felt by instinct that some other subject had been momentarily introduced, and was grateful for the moment’s relief to think. But how could she think in the shock of this unexpected revelation, and with all that noise and singing in her ears? She came to herself a little when the voices ceased, and she became aware that they were looking at her, and wondering why she did not say anything—which was giving up her own cause as much as if she confirmed the truth. She looked up with eyes that were dim and dazed, but tried to smile.

‘I cannot tell you what John means,’ she said; ‘how could I, when I don’t know what he means? He has—very high notions: and he thinks—nothing good enough for you. We have no—pretensions—as a family.’

Susie tried very hard to smile and look as if John were only very scrupulous, humble-minded, feeling himself not Elly’s equal in point of birth.

‘We’ve gone over all that,’ cried Elly, with an impatient wave of her hand. ‘And what does it matter—to anybody, now-a-days? It is all exploded; it is all antiquated. Nobody thinks of such a thing now. And Jack knows well enough. Besides, it is ridiculous,’ cried the girl; ‘he is—well, if you must have it, he is conceited, he is proud of himself, he is no more humble about it than if he were a king. Do you think I’m a fool not to know his faults? I’ve known them all my life. I like his faults!’ Elly said.

And then there was again a pause. Nobody spoke. It became very apparent to both these anxious questioners—to Elly, when the fumes of her own eager speech died away, and to Mr. Cattley, who was calmer—that Susie did not wish to make any reply, that she knew something of which this was the natural consequence, something which she was determined not to tell, something which was serious enough to justify John’s letter, which showed that it was no fantastic notion on his part, but a reality. Susie herself was dimly aware, even though she had her eyes on her work as before, that they were looking at her with keen examination, and also in her mind that they were coming to this inevitable conclusion: but what could she do?

‘Every family,’ she said, faltering, ‘has its little secrets, or at least something it keeps to itself. I don’t know that there is more with us than with other people——’ But her voice would not keep steady. ‘The only thing,’ she went on, sharply, feeling a resource in a little anger, ‘is that people generally—keep these things to themselves;—but John, it seems that John——’ And here she came to a dead stop and said no more.

Elly had grown graver and graver while Susie spoke. Her excitement and impatience to know, fell still, as a lively breeze will sometimes do in a moment. Her eyes, which Susie could not meet, seemed to read the very outline of the drooping figure, the bent head, the nervous stumbling hands so busy with work which they were incapable of doing. Elly’s face settled into something very serious. She flung her head back with the air of one taking a definite resolution.

‘In that case,’ she said, lingering a little over the words in case they might call forth an answer, ‘in that case, I think I had better go.’

Mr. Cattley, much perplexed, went with her to the door. He went up the street with her, his face very grave too, almost solemn.

‘Don’t do anything rash, Elly,’ he said. ‘We know Jack. I—I can’t think he is to blame.’

‘To blame!’ Elly said, with her head high, as if the suggestion were an insult. Then she added, after a moment, ‘Yes, he’s to blame, as everybody is that makes a mystery. Whatever it is, he might have known that he could trust me; that is the only way in which he can be to blame.’

Susie had thrown away her work in the ease of being alone. It was an ease to her, and the only solace possible. She put her arms on the table and her face upon them, and found the relief which women get in tears. It is but a poor relief; yet it gives a sort of refreshment. Her burning and scorched eyelids were softened—and the sense of scrutiny removed, and freedom to look and cry as she would, was good. But the thronging thoughts that had been kept in check by that need of keeping a steady front to the world, which is at once an appalling necessity and a support to women, came now with a wilder rush and took possession altogether of her being. How was it that he had appeared again, that spectre whom she had feared since she was a child, yet for whom by moments nature had cried out in her heart, Papa! She, like John, only knew the child’s name for him, only remembered him as smiling and kind; though she had learned, as John never had learned, that other aspect of him which appeared through her mother’s eyes. Susie knew something, embittered by the feeling of the woman who had gone through it all, of the long and hopeless struggle that had filled all her own childhood, and of which she had been vaguely conscious—the struggle between a woman of severe virtue, and an uprightness almost rigid, and a man who had no moral fibre, yet so many engaging qualities, so much good humour, ease of mind, and power of adapting himself, that most people liked him, though no one approved of him: the kind of father whom little children adore, but whom his sons and daughters, as they grow up, sometimes get to loathe in his incapacity for anything serious, for any self-restraint or self-respect.

His wife had been the last woman in the world to strive with such a nature, and perhaps the horror that had grown in her, and which she had instilled unconsciously into Susie’s mind, was embittered by this knowledge. Susie knew all the terrible story. How the woman had toiled to keep him right, to convince him of the necessity of keeping right, to persuade him that there was a difference between right and wrong: and she knew that this always hopeless struggle had ended in the misery and horror of the shame which her proud mother had to bear, yet would not bear. All this came back to her as she lay with her head bowed upon her arms in the abandonment of a misery which no stranger’s eye could spy upon. And he had come back? and how was mother to bear it? And how had John found it out? And why did he not hide in his own heart, as they had done, this dreadful, miserable secret? She, a girl, had known it and kept it a secret, even from her own thoughts, for fourteen years. Day and night she had prayed for the unfortunate in prison, but never by look or word betrayed the thing which had changed her life at twelve years old, and sundered her from others of her age, more or less completely ever since. It had separated her so completely that till now Susie had never lived in entirely natural easy relations with other girls, or with men of her own age. There had always been a great gulf fixed between her and youthful friendship, between her and love. This had been somehow bridged over here in this innocent place—and now! Oh, how would mother bear it? Oh, how had John found it out?

She was in the midst of these confused yet too distinct and certain trains of recollections and questions, when her solitude and ease of self-abandonment were suddenly disturbed. She had not heard any step, any token of another’s presence until she suddenly felt a light touch upon her bowed head, and on her arm. Susie had given herself up too completely to her own thoughts to be capable of considering the plight in which she was. She started and looked up, her face all wet with her weeping. She thought, she knew not what—that it was he perhaps, the terror of the family, though she remembered nothing of him but kindness; or John, it might be John, come to fetch her, to claim her help in these renewed and overwhelming troubles. She started up in haste, raising to the new-comer her tell-tale face. But it was not John, nor her father. It was Mr. Cattley who was standing close by her with his hand touching her arm. He had touched her head before, as she lay bowed down and overwhelmed. His eyes were fixed upon her, waiting till she should look at him, full of pity and tenderness.

‘Oh, Mr. Cattley!’ she cried, in the extremity of her surprise. He only replied by patting softly the arm on which his hand lay.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what is wrong. Tell me what is wrong. The secret, if it is a secret, will be safe with me: but you cannot bear this pressure; you must have some relief to your mind. Susie—I will call you what Elly calls you for once—do you know what I was going to say to you when she came?’

Susie raised her tear-stained face to his with a little surprise, and said no.

‘So much the worse for my chances,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘You might have divined, perhaps; yet why should you? I was going to tell you a great many things I will not say now—to explain——’ Something like a blush came upon his middle-aged countenance. ‘This is not the time for that. I was going to ask you if you would marry me. There: that is all. You see by this that I am ready to keep all your secrets, and help you and serve you every way I can. It is only for this reason that I tell you now. Will you take the good of me, Susie, without troubling yourself with the thought of anything I may ask in return? There, now! Poor child, you are worn out. Tell me what it is.’

‘Oh, Mr. Cattley,’ she cried, and could say no more.

‘Never mind Mr. Cattley: tell me what troubles you—that is the first thing to think of. I guess as much as that it is something which poor Jack has found out, but which you knew. I will go further, and tell you what I guessed long ago—that this poor father has done something in which there was trouble and shame.’

He had seated himself by her and taken her hand, holding it firmly between his, and looking into her face. Susie felt, as many have felt before her, that here all at once was a stranger to whom she could say what she could not have said to the most familiar friend.

‘We hoped,’ she said, in a low voice—‘we thought—that nobody knew.’

‘Not John?’

‘Oh, John last of all; that was why he lived here; that was why we left him, mother and I, and never came, and let him think that he was nothing to us. He thought we had no love for him. He said to mother once that she was not his mother. Ah!’ cried Susie, with a low cry of pain at that recollection, ‘all that he might never know.’

‘And now he has found out: how do you think he can have found out?’

Susie shook her head.

‘The time was up; we knew that, and we were frightened, mother and I, though there seemed no reason for fear, for we had left no sign to find us by. Oh, I am afraid—I was always afraid—that to do that was unkind. He was papa after all; he had a right to know, at least; but mother could not forget all the dangers, all that she had gone through.’

‘I suppose, then,’ said Mr. Cattley, with a little pressure of her hand, ‘his name was not your name?’

Susie looked at him with something like terror. Her voice sank to the lowest audible tone.

‘His name—our real name—is May.’

The curate had great command of himself, and was on his guard; nevertheless she felt a thrill in the hand that held hers: Susie sensitive, and prepared to suffer, as are the unfortunate, attempted to draw hers away—but he held it fast; and when he spoke, which was not for a minute, he said, with a movement of his head,

‘I think I remember now.’

The grave look, the assenting nod, the tone were all too much for her excited nerves. She drew her hand out of his violently.

‘Then if you remember,’ cried Susie, ‘you know that it was disgrace no one could shake off. You know it was shame to bow us to the dust; that we never could hold up our heads, nor take our place with honest people, nor be friends, nor love, nor marry, with such a weight upon us as that; and now you know why John, poor John, oh, poor John!’

She hurried away from the table where the curate sat, regarding her with that compassionate look, and threw herself into her grandfather’s chair which stood dutifully by the side of the blank fireplace where Elly and John had placed it. Her simple open countenance, which had hid that secret beneath all the natural candour and truth of a character which was serene as the day, was flushed with trouble and misery. Life seemed to have revealed its sweeter mysteries to Susie only to show her how far apart she must keep herself from honest people, as she said. And her heart cried out—almost for the first time on its own account. Her thoughts had chimed in with her mother’s miseries, but had not felt them, save sympathetically; now her own time had come—and John’s—John’s, who knew nothing, who must have discovered everything at one stroke; he who was not humble, nor diffident, but so certain of himself and all that he could do. What did it matter for anybody in comparison with John?

Mr. Cattley did not disturb her for some time. He let that passion wear itself out. Then he went and stood with his back to the fireplace, as Englishmen use, though it was empty.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘that we understand, let us lay our heads together and think what can be done.’

‘There is nothing to be done,’ said Susie. ‘Oh, Mr. Cattley, go away, don’t pity me. I can’t bear it. There is only one thing for me to do, and that is to go home to mother and John.’

‘I do not pity you,’ he said, ‘far from that. You have got the same work as the angels have. Why should I pity you? It hurts them too, perhaps, if they are as fair spirits as we think. But I am going with you, Susie: for two, even when the second is not good for much, are better than one.’

She clasped her hands and looked up at him with a gaze of entreaty.

‘Don’t,’ she cried, ‘don’t mix yourself up with us! Oh, go away to the people who are fond of you, to the people who are your equals. What has a clergyman to do with a man who has been in prison? Oh, never mind me, Mr. Cattley. I am going to my own belongings. We must all put up with it together the best way we can.’

‘Susie,’ he said, softly, ‘you are losing time. Don’t you know there is an evening train?’

CHAPTER XIII.

THE DARKNESS THAT COULD BE FELT.

John rose late next morning to a changed world. It no longer seemed to be of any importance what he did. For the first time in his life he got up in the forenoon and breakfasted as late as if he had been a fashionable young man with nothing to do. He was not fashionable indeed, but there was no longer any occupation that claimed him. He had nothing to do. He flung himself on his sofa, after the breakfast, which he had no heart to touch, had been taken away. What did it matter what he did now? He had not slept till morning. He was fagged and jaded, as if he had been travelling all night. Travelling all night! that was nothing, not worth a thought. How often had he stepped out of a train, and, after his bath and his breakfast, rushed off to the office with his report of what he had been doing, as fresh as if he had passed the night in the most comfortable of beds! that was nothing. Very, very different was it to lie all night tossing, with a fever swarm of intolerable thoughts going through and through your head, and to rise up to feel yourself without employment or vocation, to see the world indifferently swinging on without you, when you yourself perhaps had thought that some one train of things, at least, would come to a dead stand without you. But there was no stoppage visible anywhere. It was he who had stopped like a watch that has run down, but everything else went on as before.

He had written his letter to Elly on the previous night. Thus everything was crammed into one day—his bad reception at the office, his discovery of the man who had thus injured him, who had injured him so much more sorely by the mere fact of existing; and the conclusion of his early romance and love-dream. He had not sent the letter yet. He had kept it open to read it in the morning, to see whether anything should be added or taken away. So many words rose to his lips which appealed involuntarily to Elly’s love, to her sympathy—and he did not want to do that. He wanted to be quite imperative about it, as a thing on which there could be no second word to say. Elly could not call a convict father. She must never even know of the man who was John’s destroyer, though he was at the same time John’s father. He shuddered at the words, notwithstanding that a great melting and softening was in his heart towards the strange, loosely-knitted intelligence which seemed to drift through everything—life, and morality, and natural affection—without feeling any one influence stronger than the other, or any moral necessity, either logical or practical. To be brought thus in all the absolutism of youth, and in all the rigid rightness of young respectability, face to face with a man to whom nothing was absolute, and the most fundamental principles were matters of argument and opinion, gave such a shock to John’s being as it is impossible to estimate. It seemed to cut him adrift from everything that kept him to his place. Had the discovery been uncomplicated by anything at the office, John might have felt it differently. It would, in any way, have taken the heart out of him, but it would not, perhaps, have interfered with his work. But now everything was gone.

He flung himself down on the sofa, and lay like a man dead or disabled; like a man, he said to himself, who had been drunk overnight, who had come out of dissipation and vice with eyes that sickened at the light of day. And this was John Sandford, who never in his life before, having unbroken health and an energetic disposition and boundless determination to get on, had spent a morning in this way. He almost believed, as he threw himself down on the sofa and turned his eyes from the light, that he actually had been drunk (using the coarsest word, as if it had been of one of the navvies he was thinking) overnight.

And yet his heart was soft to the cause of it all. A feeling which had never been awakened in him, even when she was most kind, by his mother, which seemed out of the question so far as she was concerned, stole in with a softening influence indescribable, along with the image of that disgraced and degraded man, insensible as he seemed to his own disgrace. That easy smile of cheerful vagabondage was the only thing that threw a little light upon the unbroken gloom. It had amused John in the vagrant soul which he had taken under his wing; it was awful and intolerable to him in his father: yet unconsciously it shed a sort of faint light upon the future, from which all guidance seemed removed. What was he to do in that changed and terrible future, that new world in which there was no longer any one of all the hopes that had cheered him? Elly was gone, as far as the poles apart from him and his ways, and so were his ambitions, his schemes. There remained to him in all the world nothing but his mother and sister, who had deceived him, and whom he could now serve best by going away out of their ken for ever: and this poor criminal, abandoned by all—the convict who had no friend but Joe, who had wronged and cheated John, and brought him to the dust, but who yet was the only living creature that belonged to him and had need of him now.

He was roused from his first languor of despair (though that was a condition which could not have lasted long in any circumstances) by the entrance of the little maid to lay the table for another meal. Another meal! Was this henceforward to be the only way in which his days should be measured? But no, he said to himself, jumping up with a sort of fury from his sofa, that could not be, for there would soon be nothing to get the meals with in that case: at which thought he laughed to himself. Laughing or crying what did it matter, the one was as horrible as the other.

‘Missis said as she thought perhaps you would be wishing your dinner at ’ome to-day,’ said the maid, startled by his laugh.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said John; but, when the food came with its savoury smell, he found out, poor fellow, that he was hungry, very hungry, having eaten nothing for—he did not recollect how long, weeks it seemed to him, since that peaceful breakfast before anything had gone wrong. At twenty-one a young man’s appetite cannot be quenched by anything that may happen. He ate, he felt enormously, eagerly, and afterwards he was a little better. When that was over he drew himself together, and his thoughts began to shape themselves into a more definite form.

In his profession, young as he was, he had already seen something of emigration, and had contemplated it more familiarly than is usually the case. He had been in America. He knew a little of the works that were going on in various distant regions, and he had that confidence which belongs to a skilled workman in every class, that he must find employment wherever he went. Anyhow, wherever he might decide to go, the world would be a different world for him. He would be cut off from everything with which he was acquainted or which was dear to him, as much in London as at the Antipodes. Therefore, the wiser thing was to go to the Antipodes, and make life outside at once as strange as the life within.

It would, perhaps, ease the horrible annihilation of every hope if everything external were changed, and he could imagine that it was Australia or New Zealand, and not some awful fate that had done it. And now henceforth he would have one companion—one poor companion from whom he could never cut himself free—his father! who would have to stand to him in place of a family, in place of Elly, over whom he would have to watch, whom he must never suffer to steal from his side, whom perhaps he might guide into some little tranquil haven, some corner of subdued and self-denying life where he might wear out in safety. But, alas! John recoiled with a thrill of natural horror, first at the circumstances, then at himself, for building upon that. His father was not old as fathers ought to be. He was not more than fifty, and, though this is old age to persons of twenty-one, the young man could not so far deceive himself as to see any signs of failing strength or life drawing towards its close in the man whom the austerity of prison life had preserved and purified, and whose eye danced with youthful elasticity still. He was not like an old father of seventy or eighty, the conventional father whom fiction allots to heroes and heroines, and who is likely to die satisfactorily at the end, at least, of a few years’ tenderness. No. May would live, it might be, as long as his son. This was an element of despair which it was impossible to strive against, and equally impossible to confess; even to his own heart John would not confess it. It lay heavily in the depths of that heart, a profound burden, like a stone at the bottom of a well.

‘Yes,’ he said to himself, with a little forlorn attempt to rouse up and cheer himself on, ‘to the Antipodes!’ where perhaps there might be something to do, of as much importance, or more, than draining the Thames Valley: where the primitive steps of civilisation had yet to be made, and he might be of use at least to somebody. That was one thing to the good at least, to have decided so much as that. And then he seized his hat and went out. There was still one preliminary more important than any other, and that was to find the cause of all this ruin, the future object of his life. Everything else must go; his scheme—he had thrown down all his papers on the office-table, and left them there, for what was the good of them now? his love? He took up finally the letter to Elly, and with his teeth set dropped it into the box at the first post-office he came to. Having done this he stood all denuded, naked, as it were, before fate, and went forth to seek him who was the cause of it all—his father the convict; the man whom it would be his duty to serve and care for, who was all that was left to him in life.

Perhaps, if it had not been for this failure in respect to his work, for the betrayal of which he had been the victim, and the prompt discovery and consequent abandonment of him by his employers which had followed, John would not have been so certain of his duty. He never could have taken his mother’s advice and altogether forsaken the father whom he had so unfortunately discovered. But he might have been induced to conceal May’s existence, and to make some compromise between abandoning him altogether and burdening his life with the perpetual charge of him, as he now intended. The conjunction of circumstances, however, had narrowed the path which lay before him. Never, in any case, could he have kept Elly to the tie, which as yet was no tie, when he discovered the disgrace which overshadowed his family; and with both his great motives withdrawn—his love and his ambition—what did there remain for John? To enter with his reputation as a social traitor the service of Spender & Diggs? As soon would a soldier in the field desert to the enemy. And what, then, remained for him to do? Australia, where there was a fresh field, and where not only he but the poor burden on his life, the soiled and shamed criminal, would be unknown, and might begin again.

The first thing, however, was to find him; but John had not much doubt on that point. After a little pause of consideration he set out for Montressor’s lodgings, feeling convinced that the actor would at least know where he was to be found. The Montressors, notwithstanding their return to fortune through the success of Edie, were still in the old rooms in one of the streets off the Strand, up three pairs of stairs, the same place in which John had supped upon hot sausages on his first night in London. How strange it was that an incident so trivial should have altered the colour of his whole life! For had he not, in his boyish folly, called himself John May to that chance friend, it might so have been that this discovery never would have been made. It was with a sigh that John remembered, shaking his head as he went up the long dingy stairs, that after all this had nothing to do with it, and that it was something more uncalled-for still, an accident without apparently any meaning in it, which had brought him directly in contact with his father, on the first night on which that contact was possible. The very first night! He had to break off with a sort of satirical smile at this accidental doom, when the door was opened by Mrs. Montressor, who looked at him with a startled expression, and not the welcoming look with which on his rare visits she had always met him.

‘Oh, Mr. May!’ she said; then paused and added, hurriedly, ‘Montressor is out, and I am just going to fetch Edie from the rehearsal. I am so sorry I cannot ask you to come in.’ He thought she stood against the door defending it, and keeping him at arm’s length.

‘It does not matter,’ he said. ‘I had—no time to come in. I wanted to find out from Montressor the address—of a friend.’

‘What friend?’ said the woman, quickly.

‘He must have told you, Mrs. Montressor, of the discovery we made: that his friend May—was—my father: no more than that: though it had been kept from me and I didn’t know.’

‘Oh, no, Mr. Sandford,’ cried Mrs. Montressor, ‘that was a mistake, I am sure. You see I know your real name. I found it out long ago, but I never told Montressor. No, no, Mr. Sandford, it is all a mistake. He is no relation of yours.’

A sudden gleam of hope lit up John’s mind, but faded instantly.

‘He is my father,’ he said, ‘there can be no mistake.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ said the woman, beginning to cry. ‘It can’t be, it shan’t be; there is none of that man’s blood in you.’

‘Hush,’ said John, ‘he is my father. Tell me where I can find him; that is the best you can do for me, Mrs. Montressor.’

‘I can’t, then,’ she said, ‘I don’t know. I will tell you frankly he has been here, but I would not have him; I know him of old: and where he is now I don’t know.’

‘But Montressor knows.’

‘Very likely he does. I can’t tell you. He is out. I don’t know where he has gone. I’ll give you no information, Mr. Sandford, there! If he has the heart of a mouse in him, he will never let you know.’

‘And what sort of a heart should I have if I let him elude me?’ said John. ‘No, if you would stand my friend, you must find him out for me. I am going abroad. I am leaving England—for good.’

‘Is it for good?’ said Mrs. Montressor. ‘Oh, I’m afraid it’s for bad, my poor boy.’

‘I hope not,’ said John, steadily, ‘at all events it’s all the good that is left me. And I cannot go without him. Tell Montressor, for God’s sake, if he wants to stand my friend, to bring my father to me, or send me his address.’

It took him some time to convince her, but he succeeded, or seemed to succeed, at last. And he went away, not at all sure that the object of his search was not shut up behind the door which Mrs. Montressor guarded so carefully. He resumed his thoughts where he had dropped them, as he went down again the same dark and dingy stairs; they seemed to wait for him just at the point at which he had left off. The very first night! he almost laughed when he thought of it: and then he began to account to himself for that meeting, following up the course of events to the time of his first acquaintance with Joe. He went back upon this carelessly enough, remembering the man in the foundry at Liverpool, and before that, before that—— John started so violently that he slipped down half-a-dozen steps at the bottom of the stairs, and a sort of stupor seized his brain till he got into the open air and walked it off.

There came before him like a picture the evening walk with Mr. Cattley, the tumult outside the ‘Green Man,’ the half-drunken tramp who wanted some woman of the name of May. Good God! was he so near the discovery then, and yet had no notion of it! He remembered the very attitude of the man sitting with his back against the wall, maundering on in his hoarse tones, half-drunk, muddled yet obstinate, about his mate’s wife and the news he was bringing. Could it be his mother—his mother! the fellow was seeking all the time: and had he got thus closely on the scent from some vague information about the change of habitation made by his grandparents? How strange all seemed, how impossible, and yet how natural! And to think of the boy going gravely by, disgusted yet half-amused, with his lantern, looking down from such immense heights of boyish immaculateness upon the wretched, degraded creature who played the helot’s part before him, and called forth his boyish abstract protest against the cruelty of the classic moralists who thus essayed to teach their children by the degradation of others. It all came before him, every step of the road, the aspect of everything, every word almost that had passed between Mr. Cattley and himself. And all this time it was himself whom Joe was seeking, and at last—at last—his message had come home! He seemed to be gazing at the village street, and that first act of the tragedy played upon it, with a smile to himself at the strange, amazing, incredible, yet still and always so natural—oh, so natural—sequence of events—when all of a sudden his heart seemed to turn that other corner under the trees, and, with a rush of misery, it came back to him that Elly, Elly, was and could be his Elly no more.

He never knew very well how it was that he spent the rest of this long afternoon and evening. He walked about, looking vaguely for some trace of his father, or Montressor, or Joe, but saw nothing of them, as may be supposed; and then he went from shop to shop of the outfitters, where emigrants are provided with all they want on their voyage: and finally went back to his rooms, and, in the blank of his misery, went to bed, not knowing what to do.

And thus, in the changed world, in the darkened life, the evening and the morning made the first day.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION.

Night and day were much the same to John in this dreadful pause of existence. Sometimes he dozed in the day, in utter weariness and sickness of heart, after coming in from an unsuccessful search for some trace of any one of those three men who had so changed the course of his life; often lay awake through the slow and terrible night, in which all manner of miserable thoughts came crowding about him like vultures, so that he did not know which was most insupportable, the night or the day. The wondering looks of the people in the house, the shaking of the head of his landlady, Mrs. Short, who saw all her fears realised, and made no doubt whatever that John had been tempted, and had fallen, and had been dismissed by his employers with obliquy, did not affect him, for he was unconscious of them. He sought no comfort from his mother, who was the only confidant he could have had—indeed, he sought comfort nowhere. He did not recognise the possibility of any succour existing for him at all.

Again he had slept late on the morning of the third day. By that means he seemed to cheat time of one little bit of its tedious, soul-consuming power. The day was a little less long when he thus managed to steal an hour from it, and this habit, which the troubled and sorrowful share with the idle and dissipated, easily steals upon those who are unemployed and unhappy. He felt that he hated the light, as so many have done before him. To turn his face to the wall, to close his eyes upon it, to push as far from him as possible the new day, in which there could be nothing but evil, was a little gain in the dearth of all comfort. John was roused with a start by some one knocking at his door, to bid him make haste and come downstairs, where two ladies were waiting for him.

‘Missis wants to know if she’s to send up breakfast for them?’ the serving maiden inquired.

John, in his consternation, did not answer the question. Two ladies! After a while, he said to himself, while he completed his dressing hastily, that no doubt his mother had sent for Susie, and that together they had come to plead with him to abandon the unfortunate, to keep everything secret. John smiled at himself in his glass at the thought. Abandon him! The poor culprit, the convict, the deserted father had been more magnanimous than they were, and had fled from him not to shame him. So much the less could his son abandon him. He prepared himself to tell them his resolution as he finished his dressing. Susie would cry, perhaps, but neither of them would care much: why should they care? He had never entered actively into their lives. It would be nothing to them to lose him. They might, indeed, have been proud of him, had he come to be, as he believed he should so short a time ago, a successful and famous engineer. But pride and love were two different things. They might plead as they pleased, but he would not give in to them. What, preserve this hideous secret, cheat the world into supposing them an honourable family? That might have been, perhaps, had John been entering upon a successful career, accompanied by the plaudits of the office, and with many things depending upon him. But now when nothing depended upon him, when he was considered to have justified all prejudices against him (of which now he knew the cause) and to be himself a traitor—now that he should shrink from doing his duty! No, no! His father after all was everything that belonged to him, as he was the only thing that belonged to his father.

He went through all this with himself as he prepared to go downstairs. And he threw himself into their thoughts. He fancied how, as they heard his step coming down, they would say over to each other the arguments it would be best to use, and the mother might perhaps suggest to Susie to be more loving than usual to win him. It was very likely that she would do that. And when John opened the parlour door and found himself in a moment caught in some one’s arms, the first flush of consciousness in his mind was that to the letter the programme was being carried out.

But that flush of consciousness was very brief. The next was different, it was rapture and anguish mingled together. For the arms that were flung about him, the face that was put close to his was not his sister’s but Elly’s—Elly’s! Good heavens!

‘Don’t!’ he cried, putting her away from him, putting away her hands from his shoulders. ‘Don’t! for the love of God.’

‘Jack!’ she cried, ‘Jack!’ and kissed him determinedly, openly, without a blush, flinging off those deterring hands.

‘Oh, Jack, my boy, what does all this mean?’ said another voice behind. Had he gone mad, or was he still in a dream? For this mocking spirit seemed to speak with Mrs. Egerton’s voice. The whole world seemed to swim in his eyes for a moment, and then things settled back into their place, and he found himself standing in his parlour with two ladies indeed, but the ladies were Elly and her aunt. Mrs. Egerton was seated in the only easy-chair in the room, the one which May the convict had preferred, and Elly stood all eagerness and life, like a creature made out of light, in the full shining of the morning sun which came in at the end window, and which had caught and translated itself bodily to her hair.

John stood apart, like the shadow of this lovely group, which was of the light, as he said to himself, and could not have too much shining upon it, while he was of the dark and could do nothing but retire into the gloom. He turned towards Mrs. Egerton with a trembling which he could not disguise.

‘Why,’ said he, ‘did you come here? Why have you let her bring you—Why have you brought her here?’

‘Jack,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘what does it all mean? Do you think anyone who cared for you as we do could be satisfied with what you said?’

‘But you—didn’t much care for me,’ he said, feeling stupified and unable to face the real issue. She made a little gesture of impatience.

‘I know you have some reason to speak. I was against you: but that’s a very different thing from this. Do you think your friends could give you up when you were in trouble, my poor Jack? Oh! no! no——’

‘Oh no, no, no,’ echoed Elly. ‘Not even papa. He said that we must come and see——’

‘Yes,’ cried Mrs. Egerton, ‘my brother himself. He said what of course anybody would say, that to let you go off and make a martyr of yourself for some unknown reason was out of the question. He would have come himself, but you know he never goes anywhere.’

‘And Mr. Cattley offered to come,’ said Elly, ‘but we felt that we were the right people to come, Jack.’

He stood stupified listening to the alternation of the voices, both so soft in their different tones, both—in view of him, and in the ease and everyday circumstances of his lodging, and his appearance, which was little changed—beginning to feel at their ease too, and as if nothing could be so terrible as they had supposed. It relieved their minds beyond description to see everything in the usual order of a place in which people were living. No man could be in the depths of a catastrophe who had his breakfast-table neatly set out and the Standard folded by his plate. ‘He has given us a fright for nothing,’ Elly had said. The appearance of John indeed gave them a moment’s pause, for he was very pale, and his eyes had a worn and troubled look which it was impossible not to remark. But two days’ illness, or the failure of his scheme, or any other trifling (as these ladies thought) matter, would have sufficed to do that. As he did not say anything, being too much confused and disturbed and miserable and (almost) happy, to do so, Mrs. Egerton went on, in her calm voice, the voice of one who was accustomed to no infringements of the happy ordinary course of life,

‘Now that we are here, don’t you think you might give us some breakfast, Jack? We have travelled most part of the night.’

He went and gave the necessary orders without a word—which, however, was not necessary, for Mrs. Short herself met him in the passage, bringing up the ‘things.’ The sight of these visitors had at once set John right in his land-lady’s mind. Mrs. Sandford, who was his ma, was a dignified functionary, and worthy of every respect, but she was still only Mrs. Sandford of the hospital: whereas the ladies who thus arrived with their travelling-bags in the early morning were ladies to their finger-tips, and had every sign of belonging to that class of the community, more respected than any other by the masses, which has nothing to do. And before he could remark upon the extraordinary position, the horror and the ridicule of it, John found himself sitting down to table with his cheerful guests, who were delighted to see that there was really nothing much to make any fuss about, and put off the explanation till after breakfast with the greatest composure, making themselves in the meantime very much at home.

Elly pried about at all his treasures, found out her own photograph in the place from which he had not removed it, shut up in a little velvet shrine—and opened his books, and took out a rose-bud from among the little knot of flowers which one of John’s pensioners brought him regularly. She gave him a bright glance of love and sauciness, and put the rose into her bodice. Poor John! How happy it would have made him a week ago: what an aggravation of misery it was now: an anguish made more poignant by this mingled sweetness, which broke the poor fellow’s heart.

They breakfasted, almost gaily, making even John for a moment or two forget himself. And then when the meal was over the examination began.

‘Jack,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘it has been a great comfort to see you—though you wrote in such a solemn tone—looking fairly well upon the whole. Tell us, what made you do so, now?’

Elly sat down beside him, leaning against his chair.

‘Yes, tell us, Jack,’ she said.

She was smiling, almost laughing, at his paleness, at his trouble, with not the faintest notion what it was, or indeed that it could be anything worthy, she would have said, of ‘the fright he had given them.’ Her attitude, her smile, the way in which she looked at him, so tender, so saucy, so frank, overwhelmed poor John. He got up hurriedly, leaving her astonished, deserted in the place she had taken, and confronted them both in an access of self-controlled, yet impatient misery, with his back to the wall.

‘I will tell you,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘if you insist upon it. I said so in my letter. It would have been kinder to let me go away, and take no notice. But if you insist I must explain.’

‘Insist! Explain!’ said Mrs. Egerton. ‘How is it possible not to insist when you speak as you have done. Did you expect us really to let you break off everything and disappear without a word?’

‘Mrs. Egerton,’ said poor John, ‘you said there was no engagement to be allowed between Miss Spencer and me.’

Elly got up at this amazed, and went and stood by him, and touched his arm with her hand. ‘Oh, Jack!’ she said, with a reproach which went to his heart.

‘Well,’ said Mrs. Egerton, ‘that is true. I said I would not hear of it; but that is very different from suddenly breaking it off on the man’s side, without a word.’

‘Oh, very, very different!’ cried Elly. ‘Aunt Mary, he never, never could intend to use me so.’

It was all a sort of sweet trifling to Elly, a sort of quarrel to be made up, though without any of the harshness of a quarrel—a little misunderstanding that could only end in one way.

And he stood leaning up against the wall facing them, with his sad knowledge in his heart, knowing that it was no trifle that stood between them, but a great gulf which neither could cross. He stood and gazed at them for a moment, his eyes and his heart and every member of him thrilling with insupportable pain.

‘I will tell you if you wish it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to tell you, but if I must, I must. I told you that I always believed my father to be dead. He was nothing but a vision to me. I remember him only as a child does. I believed he was dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Egerton, interested, but mildly, while Elly continued to look up, smiling into his face.

‘I remember, too,’ she said, ‘how he used to come in and take you out of bed.’

The unfortunate young man shuddered. It was so dreadful to think of this now, and to think that the cause of all his trouble remembered it too, as the one distinct thing when so much was blank. And to see the untroubled curiosity in their faces, so unexpectant of the thunderbolt which was about to fall!

‘The reason he has been out of sight so long is—that he has been in prison for forgery for fourteen years. He came out about a month since, and I found him the first night, but without knowing who he was. He is a convict, and has been in prison for fourteen years.’

Mrs. Egerton uttered a low cry as if somebody had struck her. As for Elly, she did not understand, but looked at him again with growing wonder, as if she knew only from his face, not from what he said.

‘It is easily explained, isn’t it?’ he said, with a strange smile; ‘not much trouble, that is how it is. I knew nothing, no more than you did, or I should be inexcusable. Now you have heard it, take her away. Oh, Mrs. Egerton, now you know—spare me, and take her away.’

‘Jack! God bless you, my poor boy. Oh, Jack, I never dreamt of this. God help you, my poor boy.’

‘Yes, I hope He will: for nobody else can. It is like that in the prayer-book—“Because there is none other that fighteth for us.” Take her away. She can’t understand. Oh, Mrs. Egerton, for God’s sake, take her away.’

‘Yes, Jack; yes, I will; that is, I will if I can. Elly, do you hear him? He does not want us; not now, not at this dreadful moment. Oh, my poor, heart-broken boy! Oh, God help you, my poor Jack!’

Mrs. Egerton got up, as if she intended to go away; but then she stopped and held out her hands to him, and finally drew him to her, and gave him a kiss upon his pale cheek, bursting out into crying as she drew him, resisting, into her arms.

‘Oh, my poor boy! oh, my poor boy! how are you to bear it?’ she cried.

Oh, if he could but have put his head on her motherly bosom, and cried like a child, as even a man may do, like one whom his mother comforteth! But John, with Elly on the other side of him, resisted, and would not do this. He said, hoarsely:

‘I can’t bear it—I must bear it: only take her away.’

‘Elly—Elly! do you hear? We make it worse for him. You and I must not make anything worse for him. Elly, let us go away.’

‘It seems as if I had nothing to do with all this,’ said Elly, with trembling lips. ‘Yet I thought it was me you loved, and not anyone else. I thought——’

‘Oh, Elly!’ Mrs. Egerton cried, weeping, ‘don’t you see you are torturing him? Oh, I wish I knew what to do! Elly, don’t you see you are breaking his heart? Come away, and leave him to himself. It is perhaps the kindest thing we can do.’

Elly did not move. She did not cry, though her lips quivered. She stood up straight by his side, as if nothing would ever alter her position.

‘You may go,'she said, ‘Aunt Mary. You are not so very near a relation: but I am not going, not a step. What, just when he wants me? Just when it is some good to have some one to stand by him. I shall not move, not a step. I am in my proper place. Is that all you know of Elly, Jack?’

There had been a faint tapping for some time at the door, which in the excitement and agitation of the little company within had gone on without notice. They were all too much absorbed to be conscious of it, or, if conscious, to think of it as appealing in any way to them. To John it had been a faint additional irritation, a something which penetrated through all the rest like a child crying or a door swinging, nothing that affected himself or made any call upon him. At this point, however, the patience of the applicant outside failed, the door was opened softly, and first a head put in, and then the entire person. It was Mrs. Egerton who first caught sight of this intruder. She dried her eyes hurriedly and looked, with a hasty attempt to recover her composure, at the wistful but still cheerful countenance, with a smile upon it like the smile of a child who has been punished for some fault, but comes back propitiatory, with looks intended to conciliate, and a humble yet not uncomplacent consciousness of being good, and ready to make amends. A child in such a frame of mind is always amiable, and so was, to all appearance, the man who stepped softly in, with his hat in one hand and a bundle of papers in the other. He was scarcely young enough for the pose, or for the look, or the desire to please and to be forgiven, and to make all up again, which was in every line of his face. But to Mrs. Egerton the face was a pleasant one, with a good, innocent expression, which made her feel that this conciliatory personage could not be a very great offender. He made her a little bow when he caught her eye, and seemed to take her into his confidence as he stood there deprecating, smiling. John did not perceive him till he had come into the room, and in the same deprecating manner closed the door behind him. Then he made a step forward, holding out the papers in his hand.

‘Here,’ he said, and the ladies, watching with sudden interest, were startled by the bound John made at the sound of this unexpected voice. ‘Here are your papers—Mr. Sandford.’ He made a little pause before the name. ‘I had no right, I believe, to take them away, but at the moment it did not occur to me in that light. I thought—— ah!—no, no, that is all—nonsense. Don’t think of it any more.’

For John had darted towards him, caught him by the arm, and said ‘Father!’ in the midst of the little speech he was making.

‘No, no,’ he repeated, ‘that is all nonsense. Nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. Here are your papers, which is the only thing to think of. I have brought you—your papers. That is all. I didn’t intend to disturb you in the midst of your friends.’

He would have slid out again, or at least he made a semblance of wishing to slide out, though in reality his eyes were full of curiosity respecting John’s friends, who on their side gazed at him with an almost ludicrous dismay. This, at least, was the feeling of Mrs. Egerton, who stood with a helpless gasp of incredulity and amazement gazing at this criminal, this untragical, unterrible apparition of whom she had been thinking a moment before with horror in which no mitigating circumstance had any part.

‘I did not think,’ said the culprit, with his deprecating look, ‘that you would have been at home at this hour. I thought I would find the room empty when I got here. I had these back from Spender & Diggs last night. I intended only to leave them—not to disturb you among your friends.’

John’s mouth was so dry that he could scarcely speak. He took May by the arm and almost forced him into a chair.

‘I did not seek you,’ he said, ‘God knows. It would be better for us if you had been dead as I thought. But you cannot go away now on any pretext of disowning who you are. This is my father, Mrs. Egerton. I have told you who he is and what he is—there’s no more to say. As for Miss—as for—for Elly—— Oh, my God!’

He stood holding his father by the arm, but with the other hand he covered his face. Such a cry of anguish could find no words except in the inevitable universal appeal which human nature takes its final refuge in, whatever its misery may be.

Even at this moment, however, the comic element, which mixes with almost every tragedy, came in when it ought least to have shown itself. May struggled against the detaining hold with a look of injured amiability and innocent amazement.

‘I’m not used to be kept by force,’ he said, turning to the elder lady with that look of taking her into his confidence. ‘He grips me like—like a policeman. I don’t know what he wants to do with me: to expose me to ladies who don’t know me: to make you think—— If I’ve made a mistake, why, there’s your papers again, and all’s right between us. Let me go.’

Elly stole round to the other side of the prisoner’s chair.

‘Oh, sir,’ she said, ‘I don’t know who you are: but you must stay if Jack wishes you to stay. He is unhappy, do not cross him now. If you are his father, we are your friends as well as his.’

May’s countenance changed. He looked at her with an anxious, furtive pucker of his eyelids.

‘Young lady,’ he said, ‘who are you? are you—Susie?’ with a shade of sudden gravity on his face.

‘No,’ said Elly, casting at John a glance of radiant defiance, unable even at that moment to take his rejection seriously. ‘I am—engaged to Jack.’

The man who had brought such dismay and misery with him had no lively sense of shame, but he had occasional perceptions as keen as they were evanescent. He looked for a moment at the group round him, and divined all it meant. It was not easy for the quickest wit to find a remedy.