A Secret of the Sea. Volume 1 (of 3)

Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Internet web archive
https://archive.org/details/secretofseanovel01spei
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

Transcriber's Notes (Volume 1):
1. Page scan source: Web Archive
https://archive.org/details/secretofseanovel01spei
(University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

A Novel.

By T. W. SPEIGHT,

AUTHOR OF
"IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT," "UNDER LOCK AND KEY," ETC., ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON. 1876.

A SECRET OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE LAWYER'S OFFICE.

It was a December morning, clear and frosty. The timepiece in the office of Matthew Kelvin, attorney-at-law, Pembridge, Hertfordshire, racing noisily after the grave old Abbey clock which had just done chiming, pointed to the hour of ten. With his back to the welcome fire, and turning over yesterday's Times with an air of contemptuous indifference, stood Mr. Podley Piper--whose baptismal name was universally shortened into "Pod"--a short, thickset young gentleman of the mature age of sixteen. His nose was a pure specimen of a pug, and his short scrubby hair was of a colour sufficiently pronounced to earn him the nickname of "Carotty Pod" from sundry irreverent small boys of his acquaintance. His nose and his hair notwithstanding, Pod was a keen, bright-looking lad, with an air of shrewdness and decision about him by no means common in one of his age.

"Awfully dry reading--the Times," muttered Pod, tossing the paper on Mr. Kelvin's desk. "Only one suicide, and not a single murder in it. It's not worth buying. And yet there must be something in it, or so many people wouldn't read it. I suppose that by the time I'm fifty, and wear creaky shoes and carry a big gold watch in my fob, and have to count my hairs every morning to see that I haven't lost one overnight,--I suppose, when that time comes, I shall think as much of the Times as Sir Thomas Dudgeon does. But just at present I'd rather read the 'Bounding Wolf of the Prairies.'"

Hardly were the last words out of Pod's mouth, when the inner door was opened, and Matthew Kelvin walked silently into the room. In silence he sat down at his desk, after one sharp glance at Pod and another at the fire, and set to work at once at the task immediately before him. This task was the opening of the pile of post letters which had been placed ready to his hand by Pod. A brief glance at the contents of each was generally sufficient. In very few cases did he trouble himself to read a letter entirely through. Three or four of the more important documents were put aside to be attended to specially by himself; the rest of them had a corner turned up on which Pod pencilled down in shorthand Mr. Kelvin's instructions for the guidance of Mr. Bray, his chief clerk. It was his cleverness at shorthand that had gained Pod his present situation.

"That will do," said Mr. Kelvin, after a few minutes of this sharp work. "Give those papers to Mr. Bray, and tell him not to come in till I ring."

Something out of the ordinary way was evidently the matter with Mr. Kelvin this morning. After making one or two futile attempts to read over for the second time, and more carefully than before, the letters left behind by Pod, he gave up the attempt as a bad job.

"I don't feel as if I could settle down to anything this morning," he said. "And no wonder. How well the secret has been kept! Even I had not the remotest suspicion of such a thing. What a strange example of the irony of events that I, of all men in the world, should have to break these tidings to Eleanor! What will my proud beauty say when I tell her? I could never have devised so exquisite a revenge. And yet it is not my hand that will drag her down. It is the hand of Jacob Lloyd that smites her from out his grave."

He fell into a reverie which lasted till he was disturbed by a knock at the door. "Come in," he said mechanically, and the head of Pod was thrust into the room.

Matthew Kelvin at this time was thirty-five years old. He was a handsome, large-nosed man, with full grey eyes and rather prominent teeth. He was already partially bald; but what hair he had left was carefully trimmed and parted down the middle, while his bushy dark-brown whiskers showed no traces of age. He always dressed well, and was very particular as to his boots and gloves and the cut of his trousers. He had studied the art of dress as carefully as he had studied many other things, and the result was a success.

For his inferiors and those in his employ, Mr. Kelvin had a brusque, imperious manner that was not unmixed with a sort of hard contemptuousness. For his rich clients and those above him in the social scale, he had a pleasant, smiling, dégagé style, which sat upon him so easily and naturally that it was impossible to doubt its genuineness. To such people he was a man who never seemed to have much to do beyond trimming the nails of his very white hands, and sniffing at the choice flowers in his button-hole, and now and then dashing off his signature at the foot of some document which he never seemed to be at the trouble of reading.

Yet no one ever seemed to doubt Matthew Kelvin's ability in his profession, unprofessional as he was--judged by the ordinary types of provincial lawyers--in many of his ways and doings. But, then, he was a sort of second cousin to Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, and that perhaps made some difference. Many people thought it did, for the Carstairs were a very old family; and where's the use of having good blood in one's veins unless it declares itself in some shape or other?

Mr. Kelvin was fond of hunting, and subscribed liberally to the Thorndale pack. Few faces were more familiar in the field than his, and he was always nominated as one of the stewards of the Hunt Ball. Having a good voice, and being fond of singing, it was only natural that he should be a member of the Pembridge Catch Club; besides this, he was chairman of the Literary Institute. One winter he gave a couple of lectures on "Some Recent Discoveries in Astronomy," with illustrative drawings by himself; while on more than one occasion he had treated the whole of the workhouse children to an Orrery or a Panorama, and even to that wicked place--the Circus.

Matthew Kelvin lived with his mother, in the house where he had been born. His father had been dead some twelve years when we first make his acquaintance. The business had come down from his grandfather, who had been the first Matthew Kelvin known in Pembridge.

Perhaps the finest trait in Matthew's character was his love and reverence for his mother, who had been more or less of an invalid for many years. For her sake, when she was ill, and hungered for his presence by her bedside, he would give up his most pressing engagements, and sit by the hour together reading novels to her--a class of literature to which he rarely condescended at other times.

Mrs. Kelvin, who was a sensible, clear-sighted woman enough in the ordinary affairs of life, still cherished a strange preference for the milk-and-water novels and vapid romances of the Minerva Press school, such as had been fashionable when she was a girl; and it was pleasant to see her son reading out this rubbish to her with the gravest air possible, hiding his contempt and weariness under a well-feigned interest in the fortunes and misfortunes of some book-muslin heroine, or some hero with chiselled features who was never anything less than a lord in disguise.

Of such books as these Mrs. Kelvin never seemed to tire. It may be that they carried her back for a little while to the days of her youth, when she too was young and blooming; and that when buried in their pages she forgot for a brief hour or two that she was nothing now but a grey-haired woman--old, sickly, and a widow.

There were people still alive in Pembridge, to whom the one romantic episode in the life of Barbara Kelvin was known in all its details. It was this:--The present Mathew Kelvin's father had run away with and married Miss Barbara Carstairs, an orphan niece of the late Sir Frederick Carstairs of Wemley, one of the chief magnates for twenty miles round. Miss Carstairs, to be sure, had not a penny that she could call her own, and was living the life of a genteel dependent at Wemley, when young Kelvin--who was passing backwards and forwards between Sir Frederick and his father, in connection with certain law business--persuaded her to elope. But the fact that Miss Carstairs' sole earthly possessions consisted of the clothes on her back and a solitary spade guinea in her purse, by no means lessened the magnitude of the offence of which the audacious young lawyer had been guilty. There was an outcry of horror, accompanied by a turning up of eyes and a holding up of hands, as the news spread from one country house to another; but nothing could be done save to excommunicate the late Miss Carstairs, with "bell, book, and candle," and try to forget that any such creature had ever had an existence.

Whether, when the romance of girlhood was over, Mrs. Kelvin ever regretted that she had forgotten the obligations of caste in order to become the wife of a provincial lawyer, was a fact best known to herself; but if any such regret ever made itself felt at her heart, it never found expression at her lips. Her husband was fond of her, and never stinted her in any way, and her life, quiet though it was, was not without its consolations. It was surely better to have a husband and a home, and to be the recognized leader of middle-class Pembridge society, than to live and die in single blessedness, a wretched nobody, in her uncle's grand cold mansion at Wemley. Like a sensible woman, she made the best of her position. She had her little re-unions, her Tuesdays, when everybody that was worth knowing in Pembridge, met in the little drawing-room over her husband's office, and where her simple hospitalities were dispensed with a grace and refinement that would have done no discredit to Wemley itself. But all those things now belonged to the past. At the time we make Mrs. Kelvin's acquaintance she had seen her sixtieth birthday, and was a confirmed invalid.

This home of the Kelvins for three generations was a substantially-built red-brick house that dated from the era of the second George. It was not in the Pembridge main street, but formed one of a dozen houses similar to itself in a short retired street that opened out of the busier thoroughfare. It was the kind of house that--if houses could do such things--you would naturally expect to shrink into its foundations with horror, if ever compelled to have for its next-door neighbour anything so vulgar as a shop. The massive front door, with its lion's head knocker, opened into a good-sized entrance-hall, at the far-end of which was a tiny glass-fronted den sacred to the use of Mr. Piper; from which coign of vantage that ingenuous youth could see everybody who came in or went out, could tell this person to wait or usher that one into his master's office, and answer all inquiries; and could furthermore refresh himself by keeping up a guerilla warfare of repartee and chaff with the clerks as they passed into or out of their office. On the left as you entered from the street was the door which opened into Matthew Kelvin's private office. On the right hand were, first, the door which opened into the clerk's office, and secondly, the door of a waiting-room. Beyond these was a door which opened on to a private staircase. The real entrance to the private part of the house was down a covered passage at the side. Such passages were by no means infrequent in Pembridge. Many of the best houses in the place opened, not from the street, but from these side entries. Behind the house was an extensive piece of garden ground, containing fruit trees and rustic seats, and any quantity of old-fashioned sweet-smelling flowers such as our grandfathers and grandmothers dearly loved, but which look so dreadfully out of place in these days of riband-gardening and floral mathematics.

"Why, who on earth expected to see you?" said Mr. 'Kelvin, as he shook hands heartily with Miss Deane.

"Not you, I daresay, Matthew," answered Miss Deane, with a blush and a little sigh, as she looked straight into his handsome face.

"Why not I as much as anyone?" queried her cousin with a smile, as he placed a chair for her at no great distance from his own. "You always were fond of change, Olive."

"Because I was speaking to one of your sex. Had I been talking to a man, I should probably have used those very words. Olive, I'm really glad to see you, whether you come holiday-making, or whether you come because you have left Lady----Lady----?"

"Lady Culloden. Yes, I have left her. I grew tired of my situation. Slights innumerable; one petty insult after another: my position not properly recognised: till at last I felt that I must speak my mind or die. I did speak my mind, and in a way that her ladyship is not likely to forget. We parted. I felt a longing to see Pembridge and my old friends. I wanted to see my aunt--and you."

"No better, I am sorry to say; neither do I see much prospect of her ever being so. She is confined very much to her own room."

"Poor dear aunt! I am very very sorry to hear that she is no better. Does she keep up her good spirits?"

"Yes," replied Mr. Kelvin; "her spirits are, as they have always been, something wonderful."

"And then what a gentlewoman she is!" said Olive. "There is as much difference between her and Lady Culloden as there is between a flower cut out of a turnip and a real camellia."

Olive Deane at this time was twenty-eight years old. The money which her mother--a sister of the second Matthew Kelvin--had taken as a dowry to her husband had soon been squandered in wild speculations, and it had been impressed upon Olive's mind, almost from the time when she could remember anything, that she would have to earn her own living; and she started with that idea the very first day she went to school. Her mother died when she was ten years old, and her father when she was fifteen; and from the latter age till now she had been altogether dependent on her own exertions for her daily bread. The Kelvins would gladly have assisted her, both then and subsequently, but the girl would accept no help. She went out as nursery governess in the first instance, and had gone on, step by step, till she could now command her ninety or hundred guineas a year as finishing governess in families of distinction. Olive Deane had taken to teaching as naturally as a duck takes to water. She had had five years at a really good French school before her father's death, but everything else she owed to her own love of knowledge and indomitable perseverance. The wasteful extravagance of which she had been a witness when a child at home, had not been without its effect upon her. She grew up thrifty, self-denying, economical in every way; and now, at twenty-eight years of age, she was mistress of four hundred pounds, which her cousin Matthew had advantageously invested for her in Pembridge gas shares.

Olive's sole recreation was a visit now and then to the theatre. A classical play of the sterling old school, she delighted in. She was an omnivorous reader. Anything, from a French novel to the last philosophical essay, had an interest for her. To learn: to know: was all she asked. The quality of the knowledge mattered little or nothing. Wherever she might be, she generally contrived to have half an hour's reading of the Times, so as to keep herself au courant< br> with the chief political movements of the day. She had a clear, hard masculine intellect, with no sentimental nonsense about it, as her cousin Matthew often declared--and he was a great admirer of Olive: in fact, he had been heard to say that if Olive had been a man he would have made her his partner long ago.

Miss Deane was a little above the ordinary stature of her sex. She had a lithe, slender figure, and in all her movements she was graceful, easy, and self-possessed. She had clearly-cut, well-defined features, and many people would have called her handsome. But she certainly lacked colour. Her clear olive complexion--strangely in accordance with her name--was too clear and too colourless. Only on very rare occasions was its waxen pallor flushed through with the faintest tinge of damask. She had magnificent eyebrows, and eyes of the darkest brown, that looked jet-black by candlelight, with a keen, watchful look in them, begotten, perhaps, of the time when, little more than a child, she had to fight her way through the world and found a thorn or a pitfall at every step she took. Her hair, too, was black, but a dull, dead, lustreless black, without the slightest gloss of brightness in it, and very fine in quality. She almost invariably dressed in black, with white linen cuffs turned up from the wrist, and a white linen turn-down collar fastened with a simple bow of mauve or violet riband. No ear-rings, no brooch, no ornaments of any kind visible, except an inch of the gold chain that held her watch.

"I thought we should have heard the news of your wedding before now, Olive," said Mr. Kelvin.

"Never is a long word, Olive. Such a nice, clever girl as you are can't be destined to live and die an old maid."

Olive's black eyebrows came together for a moment, and she tapped the floor impatiently with her foot.

"It almost seemed at one time, Olive, as if you and I would have come together," went on Kelvin, while his fingers toyed absently with a paper-knife. "Those were pleasant days--those old days on the sands at Redcar, when I was recovering from my sprain, and you did your best to nurse me. You used to read novels to me, and play to me on that vile old lodging-house piano; and out of gratitude I taught you cribbage and écarté. I have never enjoyed a holiday like that. Do you remember our long row by moonlight, and how we kissed as we stepped out of the boat on to the wet sands?"

No word from Olive: only a far-away look in her eyes, and the thin straight line of her lips looking thinner and straighter than before.

"And yet it all came to nothing!" resumed Kelvin, glancing carelessly at her. "It might have come to something: who knows? Only, two hours later, I was telegraphed for to London, and----

"And, as you say, Matthew," interrupted Olive, "it came to nothing. So much the better probably for both of us."

"Certainly so much the better for you, Olive; but whether or not for me, may be open to doubt. Why, even in those old days that now seem so far away, when you and I were girl and boy together, how fond we were of each other! Do you remember that afternoon when the swing broke down and I pitched on my head, and how you cried over my bruises as if your heart would break?"

"Whenever I go into a chemist's shop, it takes me back in memory to your father's little surgery. How cleverly you used to help him with his drugs and mixtures! You seemed to know the contents of every gallipot and bottle almost as well as he did. If you had been a man you would have been a doctor."

"I remember when Farmer Sinclair's dog bit you," continued Mr. Kelvin, "how bravely you bore the pain. The dog died a week after, and some people said you had poisoned it; but I scouted the idea."

"But why call up such reminiscences?" said Olive. "I want to hear about yourself. A rising man like you, Matthew--a man born to fight his way upward--how is it that you are still unmarried? A rich wife would do so much to help forward your ambitious schemes!"

"My ambitious schemes, indeed;" said Kelvin, with a sly twinkle in his eye. "What has a simple-minded country lawyer like me to do with ambition?"

"I know you too well, Matthew, not to feel sure that in ten years from this time you hope to be in a very different position."

Kelvin dropped the paper knife with which he had been playing, and gazed steadily at his cousin for a moment before speaking.

"You are right, Olive," he said, speaking 'gravely enough now. "I do< br> cherish some strangely bold dreams. I am an ambitious man; but you are the only person who seems to have divined that fact. I am far richer than the world knows of; and, but that it would almost break my mother's heart, I should have given up the old business years ago. In any case, I shall dispose of it before long. I can afford now to put it behind me. The first step in my ambition is to get into Parliament. And so you think I ought to get married, eh?"

"Yes--to a woman who could help you forward in your career by sympathizing with and comprehending the aims and objects of your ambition. No mere drawing-room doll must be your wife, but a woman fitted in heart and brain to be your companion."

"I won't say that you are not right," said Mr. Kelvin. "But in these matters men rarely do that which their friends think they ought to do. Cupid, you know, never went to school, and his problems cannot be worked out by rule-of-three."

"That may apply to a very young man, who lacks sense to know what is best for him and where to look for it; but not to you."

"That is just where you make a mistake, Olive. What will you say of my strength of mind--of my common sense--when I tell you that I have fallen in love with a simple country girl with nothing to recommend her save a pretty face and the finest eyes in the world?"

Olive Deane rose slowly to her feet. Her face grew whiter; her eyes blacker; her thick brows made a straight, unbroken line across her forehead. If looks had power to slay, Mr. Kelvin would have been annihilated on the spot. But his face was turned the other way. His own thoughts held him. He was gazing meditatively into the fire.

"And she--she accepted you, of course?" said Olive, at last, her voice hardly raised above a whisper.

"How I hate her for it!" Then she added, under her breath, "But I should have hated her worse if she had accepted him."

"You are the only person in the world, Olive, to whom I have breathed a word of this."

"I am sure of that, and it is a relief to me to talk to you. To you, Olive, I can always talk as to a sister."

"Yes--as to a sister," she said, with a slow nod of the head. Then she shivered slightly, as if with cold, and held out her hands to the blaze. "Go on, Matthew. You are sure of my sympathy in any case."

"I want you to tell me all about the affair, from beginning to end. You have piqued my curiosity, and now you must satisfy it."

"It seems strange to take even you into my confidence," he said, "and yet I feel as if I must tell some one--especially after what happened yesterday. To begin, then. I fell in love with this girl, Eleanor Lloyd--madly, desperately in love. Her father, Jacob Lloyd, was a well-to-do small landowner, whose affairs I managed for him. He seconded my suit, but, as I have said already, the girl rejected me. I am a patient man. I waited six months, and then I spoke to Miss Lloyd again--spoke more warmly and strongly than a less infatuated man would have done. Again she rejected me; this time in a way that I can neither forget nor forgive. I vowed that I would some day humble her haughty pride--and that day has come. Six months ago Jacob Lloyd died without a will. He had been speculating greatly for years, and Eleanor Lloyd, much to her own surprise and that of everyone else, found herself an heiress to the amount of something over twenty thousand pounds. When I first knew this, I thought that the day of my revenge had gone by for ever. But I was wrong. Such was the state of affairs yesterday: to-day they are very different."

"Listen. Before administering to Mr. Lloyd's will, it was necessary that I should be in a position to prove that Miss Lloyd was really the person the world believed her to be. Jacob Lloyd left an immense mass of papers behind him, amongst which I was not long in finding his marriage certificate; but I failed to find any document having reference either to the birth or baptism of his daughter. Having some other important matters on hand just then, and there being no particular hurry in the affair, I did not prosecute my search very vigorously. I knew that about the time Miss Lloyd was born, Jacob Lloyd and his wife were travelling, either for health or pleasure, from place to place, and I had little doubt that when a proper search came to be made I should be able to find the information I wanted. A few days ago, however, there came into my hands certain documentary proofs, full and complete, of the truth of what I am now going to tell you. Eleanor Lloyd is not the daughter of Jacob Lloyd, nor any relation of his whatever. She is neither more nor less than a child adopted in infancy by him and his wife, they having no family of their own. The fortune left by Jacob Lloyd is the property of a nephew, Gerald Warburton, now living somewhere on the Continent. The woman who rejected me is an 'absolute pauper."

"Eleanor Lloyd has to come here two hours hence to sign certain deeds. She will enter this room a rich woman; she will leave it penniless!"

"But has it not been her intention to take up a position in society, such as her supposed wealth would entitle her to occupy?"

"Lady Dudgeon, the wife of one of out Pembridge magnates, has taken her by the hand, and has constituted herself Miss Lloyd's chaperone. Eleanor is to accompany her ladyship to London in the spring, and will then make her début."

"Good. And your idea of revenge is to break this news to Miss Lloyd suddenly here--this very morning--and so crush her?"

"A man's idea--poor and commonplace. Shall I tell you what mine--a woman's idea of revenge--would be in such a case?"

"Were I in your place, I would keep my discovery a profound secret for some time to come. I would let her for a little while taste all the pleasures that wealth can confer. I would let her go on till a life of ease and self-indulgence should have become as it were a second nature to her I would let her live on in blissful ignorance, of the thunderbolt you have in store for her till she has learned to love--perhaps even till she is engaged to be married."

"Eleanor married to another! I never thought of that," said Kelvin, under his breath.

"Then, when you think the comedy has lasted long enough, you shall go to her some day when she is surrounded by her fine friends--on her wedding morning itself, if it so please you--and, touching her on the shoulder, you shall say to her, 'Eleanor Lloyd, you are a beggar!' Her fall from wealth to poverty will then seem infinitely greater than it would do now, and yours will be a revenge worthy of the name."

"A devilish scheme, Olive, and one which only an Italian--or a woman--would have thought of!"

"You flatter me," said Olive, with a little lifting of the shoulders, and the ghost of a smile playing round her thin lips.

To say that Mr. Kelvin was thoroughly startled, is to say no more than the truth. Olive was right. There would be a refinement--a subtlety--about such a scheme which his own scheme altogether lacked. But, would it not be a mean and dastardly advantage to take of an innocent girl like Eleanor Lloyd? He got up from his chair and crossed to the window, and then walked slowly back again and sat down without a word. He was a man whom circumstances had never before tempted to step out of the beaten track of morality. The orthodox path had for him been paved with golden guineas. So far as he had seen, it was only reprobates who went astray, or were foolish enough to do anything which the general opinion of society condemned; simpletons, in fact, who could not understand that to do right--in a worldly point of view--was a far better paying game than to do its opposite. But Olive's words had found the weak place in his armour. His judgment did not fail him so utterly as to mislead him with regard to the meanness of what he meditated, but his own wishes and desires in the matter threw a sort of lime-light glamour over it, which made it seem something altogether different from what it really was.

"I'll do it, Olive," he said at last. "Yes; for good or for evil, I'll do it! I'll crush her proud spirit to the dust. I will humiliate her as she humiliated me. She shall suffer as I suffered. I will repay scorn with scorn: insult with insult. At the moment of her greatest triumph I will strip her of love, of wealth, of friendship; and show her to the world for what she really is--a pauper and an outcast!"

"Bravely spoken, Matthew! Don't let her soft looks or winning ways melt you from your purpose," said Olive, as she pushed back her chair. "And now I will go upstairs to my aunt."

Kelvin put his elbows on the table, and rested his face in his hands. Olive stood looking down at him for a moment. There was a tear in the corner of her eye, but a smile played round her mouth. She went up to him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder. "I shall see you later in the day, shall I not?"

"Captain Dixon, sir, has sent for you. He's been taken ill and wants his will drawn up without delay."

Kelvin roused himself from his abstraction. "Another fool who has put off till the day of his death what he ought to have done years ago." He began to put his papers together, but still in an absent-minded way. "This is a damnable thing to do. I despise myself for promising to do it," he muttered. "And yet why should she not suffer? I have only to call to mind her words--her looks--that summer evening in the garden, when for the second time I pleaded my love before her: I have only to remember how she turned on me, as if I were a reptile, to feel my purpose harden within me, and every grain of pity melt out of my soul!"

CHAPTER II.

MISS BELLAMY.

The place was Miss Bellamy's lodgings in Ormond Square, Bayswater, and the time eight p.m., on a frosty evening in mid-winter. The people were two: Miss Bellamy herself, and her guest, Mr. Gerald Warburton.

Miss Bellamy was forty-five years of age, but looked older. She was spare in person and lengthy in nose, but still retained considerable traces of former good looks. She wore her hair, which was fast turning grey, in three old-fashioned curls, fastened down with combs on either side her face. She always wore silk in an afternoon, either brown or black--thick, rustling silk, made to wear and last, that would turn and dye, and then look nearly as good as new. Privately, Miss Bellamy used spectacles, but no one had ever seen her wear them except Eliza, the maid-of-all-work; and it was currently reported in the house that that young person had been bribed with two half-crowns never to divulge the terrible secret.

Gerald Warburton was a tall, dark-complexioned young fellow, some six or seven and twenty years old. He had a refined aquiline face, a pair of dark eyes, behind which a smile seemed always to be lurking, and black, silky hair. He had an easy, lounging, graceful manner, more common among Frenchmen or Italians than among us stiff-necked islanders; but then, he had lived so much abroad that he could hardly be said to belong to one country more than another. He possessed the happy faculty of adapting himself with ease to whatever place or persons he might be associated with. Whether living among Laps and reindeer, or smoking the pipe of peace in an Indian wigwam, he made himself equally at home; and what was still rarer, he made those with whom he happened to be feel that, for the time being, he was one of themselves. No Frenchman would have made a mistake as to his nationality, but in a walk down Regent Street or Pall Mall it is not improbable that half the people who noticed him would have set him down as a foreigner.

Just now he was employed, after a thoroughly English fashion, in the slow but sure consumption of a thoroughly English beefsteak. Occasionally he paused to refresh himself from the cup of fragrant tea at his elbow. Miss Bellamy sat opposite to him, looking on with admiring eyes. The more beefsteak he ate and the more tea he drank, the more Miss Bellamy admired him, from which we may conclude that she at least was thoroughly English. Gerald had just reached London, after twenty-four hours of unbroken travelling.

"I wish I could induce you to take another lump of sugar in your tea," said Miss Bellamy. "I never think that you get the real flavour of the leaf without plenty of sugar to assist it."

"There you must allow me to differ from you," said Gerald. "To put sugar in tea seems to me simply to spoil it." Miss Bellamy smiled and shook her head.

"Then you really have some faint recollection of having seen me when you were a child?" she said, after a pause.

"Yes, a very clear and distinct recollection of sitting on your knee and being fed with sugar plums."

"Ah, you are far too big now to care for sugar plums," said Miss Bellamy with a little sigh.

"Not at all too big. Only that I now require a different kind of sugar plum to keep me good, from those I cared for then."

"Four of us, there were, all bosom friends, and they called us the Four Graces in the little town where we were born and brought up; and now I am the only one that is left alive!" said Miss Bellamy, with a little quaver in her voice. "There was Ellen Barry; she married your uncle, Jacob Lloyd. Then there was Minna, Jacob's sister, who married your father. The third was Mary Greaves, who married Mr. Ambrose Murray. There seemed to be no husband left for me: but, thank Heaven, I have never felt the need of one!"

"It is never too late to make a change for the better," said Gerald, demurely, as he pushed away his plate.

"In my case it would have been for the worse. I should only have tormented some poor man's life out of him, and no one can lay that to my charge now."

As soon as Eliza had cleared the table, Miss Bellamy put a tiny copper kettle to simmer on the hob, and then produced a bottle of whisky, a lemon, and the other materials necessary for brewing a glass of punch. From another cupboard she brought out a box of cigars, which she had made a special journey into the City to buy. Being no judge of such articles, or their cost, she had brought back a box of what Mr. Piper would have called "duffers."

"Snuff-taking among gentlemen is going quite out of fashion nowadays," she had said to herself. "But I've no doubt Gerald is fond of a cigar, and I'll not trouble about the curtains for once."

"You don't seem in the least curious about the news I've got to tell you," said Miss Bellamy at last.

"No, I'm very comfortable," said Gerald as he sipped his grog, "and more than that a man need not wish to be."

"And yet I have come all the way from France to hear it! But I daresay it will keep a little longer."

"Just your poor mother's careless way of looking at things," said Miss Bellamy with a smile and a shake of the head. "Just the same easy way that I remember so well." She gazed into the fire for a few moments, her mind far away among the things of the past.

"None whatever. My father knew he was in the wrong, and that only served to embitter him still more against my uncle. My uncle could neither forgive nor forget my father's cruel treatment of my mother. I believe that if a woman's heart was ever broken, hers was."

"Don't talk in that way, Gerald. You must not forget that the man was your father."

"Can I ever forget it?" said Gerald, bitterly. "You were my mother's friend, and I tell you distinctly that my father broke her heart. The bitterest tears that ever I shed, or that I ever can shed in this world, were those with which I mourned her loss."

"I was thirteen years old when I ran away to sea. By that time my father's tyranny had become unendurable. One victim had eluded him by dying, but I was still left. On the morning of my birthday I left home to seek my fortune, my sole earthly possessions being four-and-sixpence in money, two ally-taws, an apple, and a thick slice of bread."

"On two occasions only, and then only at an hotel where we met by appointment. Time had softened my bitterness against him, but not his against me. Had I been a dog at his feet he could hardly have treated me worse. Reconciliation on the terms proposed by him was impossible."

"He left everything to different charities in the town where he died. There is some talk of erecting a statue to him."

"As I best could; but all things considered, I have not done amiss. I stopped at sea till I was seventeen; then I got a situation as a storekeeper on a South American hacienda, and there I stayed till I was twenty. Growing tired of that, I set up a photographic apparatus and travelled some thousands of miles with it, earning my bread as I went. Those were some of my happiest days. When I was of age, I came into possession of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, left me by my mother. Since that time I have lived chiefly on the Continent, pottering about among antiquities, buying now and again a bronze, a coin, or a tazza in a cheap market, and selling it in a dear one; writing at odd times an article for one or other of the magazines; having no settled home, leading a vagabond, Bohemian kind of existence, but by no means an unhappy one."

"And yet you never thought it worth your while to inquire whether he had remembered you in his will?"

"Knowing that he had a daughter, and that he had never seen me since I was six years old, it did not seem to me worth while to make any such inquiry."

"Your uncle died between seven and eight months ago," resumed Miss Bellamy. "I was away in Guernsey at the time, and did not hear of it till my return to London, some seven week's since. It was a great shock to me. Your aunt and I had been like sisters, and after her death the friendship between Mr. Lloyd and myself remained unbroken. It is only about eighteen months since I left Pembridge and came to reside in London; and up to that time I was a frequent visitor at Bridgeley, the place where he lived for the last eighteen years. Several years ago Mr. Lloyd put into my hands a sealed packet of papers, addressed to a certain person, and labelled 'not to be opened till after my death,' with a request that I should keep it till that event took place, and then forward it to the person to whom it was addressed. At the time that he placed the packet in my hands he told me of what the contents consisted. The chief document was a statement of certain events in his personal history which were already well known to me, and about which he and I had often talked. As already explained, I did not know of your uncle's death till six or seven weeks ago, consequently it was not till six months after that event that the packet I held could reach the person to whom it belonged. That person ought to have acted on the contents of the packet without a day's unnecessary delay. Seven weeks have gone by, and as yet he has taken no action in the matter. It is for that very reason that I sent you so imperative a summons to come to me here as quickly as possible."

Gerald stared across the table at Miss Bellamy as if he could hardly believe the evidence of his ears. "But in what possible way can all this affect me?" he asked.

"All this affects you very nearly indeed," answered Miss Bellamy. "Your uncle Lloyd had been a prudent man. When he was dead, it was discovered that he was worth something over twenty thousand pounds. He died without a will, and you are his heir-at-law."

"I my uncle's heir-at-law!" said Gerald, with a little laugh. "How can that be, my dear Miss Bellamy? You seem to forget that my uncle had a daughter."

Gerald sat speechless for several seconds. "If my cousin Eleanor is dead, I certainly never heard of it."

"My dear Miss Bellamy," said Gerald, "will you kindly run a pin into my arm, so that I may make sure I am not dreaming."

"You are not dreaming, Gerald Warburton. The young lady you have hitherto believed to be your cousin, is no relation whatever to you, neither was she any relation to your uncle, Jacob Lloyd. She was simply his adopted daughter."

After hearing this startling news, Gerald's silence was not to be wondered at. He woke up like a man rousing himself from a dream.

"Yes, I have known it all along. But to no one else was the secret ever imparted by your uncle and aunt. Eleanor was adopted by them when she was quite a little thing, and when they were living in a town more than two hundred miles away from Pembridge. For certain reasons they gave her their own name. She never knew, she does not know now, that they were not really her parents. She loved them as such, and they could not have thought more tenderly of her had she been that which the world believed her to be. But Jacob Lloyd was not only a kind-hearted man: he was a just one. He shrank from revealing the truth to Eleanor while he was alive, but it was imperatively necessary, for certain reasons which I may one day explain to you, that she should become cognisant of everything after his death. Hence the sealed packet: which contains a duly authenticated statement of these facts."

"You take my breath away! There is nothing in the 'Arabian Nights' half so exciting," exclaimed Gerald.

"The one unfortunate feature of the case is this," resumed Miss Bellamy. "From what your uncle hinted to me at different times, I am perfectly convinced that it was his intention to provide very handsomely for Eleanor. Unfortunately, he kept putting off the making of his will till it was too late. One morning he was found dead in his bed, and the girl whom he brought up and cherished as his own child is left an absolute beggar."

A tear stood in Miss Bellamy's eye, as she ceased speaking. "There need be no trouble on that score," said Gerald emphatically. "If, as you state, I am my uncle's heir, and the young lady, through an unwise oversight, has been left penniless, why, then, my duty lies clearly before me. Whatever may be the amount that will come to me from my uncle, whether it be a hundred pounds or twenty thousand pounds, this young lady, whom I cannot help looking upon as my cousin, is clearly entitled to half of it. And half of it she shall have, as sure as my name is Gerald Warburton!"

"Don't make any rash promises, Gerald, in the heat of the moment. You may regret them afterwards."

"It was certainly not in my province to send for you, and tell you all that you have just now heard," said Miss Bellamy, "and, under other circumstances I should not have thought of doing so. The lawyer in whose hands was the management of Mr. Lloyd's affairs is the proper person to have communicated with you. He ought to have broken the news to Eleanor, and have communicated with you at the same time. The sealed packet has been in his hands for upwards of seven weeks, and, as yet, he has done neither one thing nor the other."

"Because I had a letter from Eleanor only three days ago, written from Stammars, the residence of Sir Thomas Dudgeon, where I find that she is visiting. She talks of coming to London with Lady Dudgeon very shortly, and says that her ladyship treats her quite as one of the family--proof positive that Eleanor is still living on in happy ignorance."

"Perhaps the lawyer did not know where to find me? Perhaps he has delayed breaking the news to Eleanor on that account?"

"No: I suspect that there is some other motive at the bottom of Matthew Kelvin's strange silence. He has sense enough to know that any letter addressed to you at Brexly would be sure to find you. He knows all about Brexly, and the quarrel between your father and Mr. Lloyd."

"Kelvin--Matthew Kelvin?" said Gerald, musingly. "I seem to have heard that name before."

"You can readily understand why I never breathed even the faintest suspicion of the truth to Eleanor. Such a revelation would be too painful for me to make to a person whom I have known and loved from a child. Therefore I have sent for you: and my advice is that you at once go down to Pembridge, see Mr. Kelvin, give him to understand that you know everything, and demand from him an explanation of his singular silence."

"Is this Mr. Kelvin aware that you have any knowledge of the real facts of the case?"

"His silence certainly seems rather singular; but we shall probably find on inquiry that he has been ill, or away from home, or something of that sort."

Miss Bellamy shook her head. She was far from being convinced. "A clever schemer, but not to be trusted," she said, presumably with reference to Kelvin.

"But about this cousin who is no cousin--about Eleanor," said Gerald. "You know that I have never seen her. What is she like? Is she good-looking? Is she nice?"

"I don't know what you young gentlemen call nice," said Miss Bellamy. "I don't see young ladies with the eyes that you see them with. Eleanor Lloyd is a dear good girl; slightly impulsive, perhaps, but open and honest as the day--a girl that any man might be proud to call his wife."

Gerald pursed his lips a little. Miss Bellamy's outline was too vague to take his fancy. "A country-bred hoyden, evidently, with red cheeks and large hands, and a healthy appetite," he muttered to himself.

"There is one point that you have not enlightened me upon," he said presently. "But perhaps it is one on which I have no right to question you."

"You say that Eleanor, when an infant, was adopted by my uncle and aunt. She must have been somebody's child. You have not yet told me who and what her friends were."

Miss Bellamy's face became more grave and troubled than Gerald had yet seen it. "Pardon me," he said, "if I have unintentionally wounded your feelings."

"You have not wounded my feelings. You have only brought back the memory of a very old trouble. But, as I have told you so much, I see no reason why I should not tell you the remainder. You must learn the story sooner or later, and you had better hear it from my lips than from the lips of anyone else."

"Pray don't say another word. How were you to know?--Yes, Gerald Warburton, I will tell you the story, painful though it be--but not now. You have heard enough to ponder over and dream about for one night. I shall just mix you one more glass, and then I shall send you oil to bed."

CHAPTER III.

THE STORY OF THE MURDER.

Gerald Warburton had not been in London for some time, and two or three days passed quickly and pleasantly away in hunting up old acquaintances, and in seeing sights that he had never seen before. Besides which, he wanted a little time to familiarize himself with the thought of his new-found fortune. By nature and disposition, he was one of the least worldly of men, and the wandering life he had led for many years had tended to make him more unpractical than he might otherwise have been. For money, as money, he cared nothing: nay, he told himself that he thoroughly despised it: but that was probably an exaggeration. He was one of those men who never think of saving--of putting away for a "rainy day," as the phrase goes--and who never can save, not even when their incomes are doubled or trebled, unless some pressure of an extreme kind (a thrifty wife, for instance, who has a will of her own) is brought to bear upon them.

As a matter of course, despite all Gerald's unpracticality, one of the most frequent thoughts in his mind just now--a thought turned over and over in his brain during his long solitary walks through London streets--was what he should do with the ten thousand pounds that was coming to him. He had quite made up his mind that the other ten thousand should be handed over to his cousin Eleanor, as he could not help still calling her to himself. Had anyone asked him a few days previously whether ten thousand pounds would have satisfied all his earthly wants from a monetary point of view, he would have laughed, and answered that half that sum would satisfy his every wish. And yet, now, when so much money was really coming to him, it was quite remarkable what a long list of things that might almost be considered indispensable he could count up in his mind. Instead of ten thousand, thirty or forty would be needed before he could get through even the first few pages of his mental catalogue.

But having got so far, Gerald was obliged to pull himself up suddenly. He called to mind that it was not ten thousand a year that he was coming into, but simply one sum of that value; and that, however pleasant it might be to think how easily and agreeably to himself he could have spent the whole of it in the course of a few days in London or Paris, it would be the height of folly so to do; such an act would indeed be killing the goose with the golden eggs. No: by judiciously investing his ten thousand pounds, he might secure for himself a comfortable little income of five hundred a year, which sum, when added to the income he could already call his own, would serve to make life tolerably pleasant in time to come. He would live in Paris, of course: somehow he always felt more at home in Paris than in London. He would be able to dabble a little more than heretofore among his favourite bronzes, and coins, and old cups and saucers. He could afford a stall rather oftener at the Opéra or the Français. He would drink a choicer wine to his dinner, and honour his wine with a better repast. A month or six weeks among the glaciers, or in the Black Forest, need no longer be a serious question with him on the score of expense. Altogether, he felt very well satisfied with the pleasant future that seemed looming before him. That he was somewhat of an Epicurean, addicted to self-indulgence, and hardly knowing the meaning of self-sacrifice, cannot be denied; but it is to be hoped that we shall not altogether lose our interest in him on that account. He had many vague noble impulses, as most of us have at one time or another; but, as yet, no necessity had arisen in his life for testing whether those impulses were strong enough to bear chaining down to the hard rough usages of everyday life.

Often in his solitary musings he would ask himself of what possible use or service he was to the world in which he found himself; and now and then a dim idea would trouble him for awhile that there were many kinds of wheels turning in it, to one or other of which, if he were so minded, he might put his shoulder with some little profit both to himself and his fellows. But when next day came, it would find him leading his old slip-shod far-niente kind of life. Amid the glitter and bustle of the Boulevards, noble impulses and vague ideals seemed of the stuff that poets rave about, and girls weave into the tissue of their dreams.

The more Miss Bellamy saw of Gerald, the better she liked him. The easy geniality of his disposition, and the soft courtesy of his manner, were alike pleasing to her. Gerald, on his side, conceived a very warm regard for the true-hearted lady who had been his dead mother's dearest friend. He soon got into the way of calling her "aunt"; the relationship seemed a natural one between them, and the assumption was satisfactory to both.

Miss Bellamy's sitting-room was a pleasant apartment, with three French windows that opened on a balcony and that looked out on the grass and trees of the square. It was pleasantly furnished, too; in a somewhat old-fashioned style it must be admitted; but then, Miss Bellamy herself was somewhat old-fashioned, so that there was nothing incongruous between the room and its mistress.

One of Miss Bellamy's most valued possessions was a portrait of her uncle, the late Dean of Winstead. It was a three-quarter-length in oils, with a very ornate frame, and it occupied a post of honour, being hung immediately over the chimney-piece, where it at once attracted the eyes of all who came into the room. The Dean, a very atrabilious-looking gentleman, with a bald head, was represented as seated at a table with one elbow resting on three thick volumes of his own sermons, and with his thumb and forefinger pressed lightly against his cheek. Pens and ink were upon the table, and the Dean was presumably thinking out another of his discourses. Several copies of his sermons, together with an income of three hundred a year, had come to Miss Bellamy on the death of her reverend relative, so that she had ample reasons for cherishing his memory. You could not pay Miss Bellamy a higher compliment than to tell her that there was a strong family likeness between herself and her uncle, and her admiration for him rose almost to the height of hero-worship. She made a point of reading one of his sermons through every Sunday of her life. Her firm belief was that there were no such eloquent and soul-stirring appeals to an unawakened conscience to be met with in the lukewarm religious literature of to-day, and that you must go back to the days of Jeremy Taylor to find anything like their equal. From long habit, when sitting near a table, either thinking or working, she naturally fell into the same pose as that of the Dean in his picture--her elbow resting on the table, her thumb and forefinger pressed against her cheek--and those who knew her weakness--her friends, her toadies, and her pensioners--whenever they saw her sitting thus, would not fail to remark to her how like she was to her Very Reverend Uncle.

However deeply Gerald's curiosity might be excited to hear the sequel of the strange story which Miss Bellamy had promised to tell him, the subject was evidently so painful a one to her that he could not venture even to hint at his wishes in the matter. There was nothing for it but to wait patiently till she should feel in the humour to tell him what he wanted to know. He was in no particular hurry to take the journey to Pembridge, and a few days more or less in London were of no consequence to him. She had promised to tell him all about Eleanor, and he felt sure that she would not break her promise. In so thinking Gerald was quite right, but it was not until the evening of the fourth day after his arrival in London that Miss Bellamy recurred to the subject in any way.

"I will tell you to-morrow," she said to him that evening, as he shook hands with her at parting. "And then you must get down to Pembridge as quickly as you can. You have lingered in London quite long enough."

Miss Bellamy was a believer in suppers. In fact, she still stuck to the old-fashioned hours for meals to which she had been accustomed when a girl at home: dinner at half-past one, tea at six, and supper at ten. In such a case supper is generally the pleasantest and most sociable meal of all; people then seem more inclined for talking than at any other time, and subjects that one hardly cares to mention during the day seem to assimilate themselves quite naturally to the time and place, and come to be discussed without much difficulty.

Supper was over, and the cloth removed. The night being cold, Miss Bellamy had drawn her easy chair up close to the fire, and now sat resting her chin in the palm of one hand, and gazing silently into the glowing embers. Gerald, prepared to listen to a sad story, had thrown himself into an easy chair opposite Miss Bellamy on the other side of the fire. At length Miss Bellamy roused herself with a sigh, and turned on Gerald a face that seemed suddenly to have grown five years older.

"Twenty years ago, this very month," she said, "a terrible murder was committed. All murders are terrible in a greater or a lesser degree, but this one was terrible, not merely from the crime itself, but from the after consequences that arose out of it. The name of the murdered man was Paul Stilling; the place where he was murdered was the Pelican Hotel, Tewkesbury; and the name of the man who was accused of the crime was Ambrose Murray."

"Stilling was a young man, the junior partner in a firm of Birmingham jewellers. At the time he met with his death he had property on him of the value of four thousand pounds. It was for the sake of this property that he was murdered. He was found dead in his bed, stabbed to the heart. In the portmanteau of Ambrose Murray, who was stopping that night in the same hotel, was found a bracelet of the value of two hundred pounds, which had belonged to Stilling. No other portion of the property has, to my knowledge, ever been found from that day to this.

"Ambrose Murray was arrested, committed for wilful murder, subsequently tried, and condemned to death in due form," went on Miss Bellamy. "Before, however, the time had come for carrying out the last dread sentence of the law, symptoms of undoubted insanity manifested themselves in the condemned man, and his sentence had to be commuted into imprisonment for life."

"So far, I daresay, you see nothing uncommon in my story--nothing that has any particular interest for you. But when I tell you that Ambrose Murray's wife was my intimate friend, as well as being the intimate friend of your mother and your aunt--when I tell you that Ambrose Murray's wife died heart-broken within twelve months of the time her husband was taken from her; when I tell you that the child adopted by your uncle and aunt was none other than the child of a man condemned to death for murder, and that Eleanor Lloyd is in reality Eleanor Murray--when I tell you all this, you cannot say that my story has no interest for you, you cannot say that I have claimed your attention without sufficient warrant for so doing."

"What a strange chapter of family history you have opened for me," exclaimed Gerald. "What you told me the other night seemed to me sufficiently wonderful, but this is stranger than all. Poor Eleanor poor girl!" he added. "Although I have never seen her, I have always felt that when we did meet I should come to regard her as a sister; and now you tell me that I cannot even claim her as a cousin."

Miss Bellamy said nothing. She was gazing into the fire again, but with thoughts that were far away. She was roused at last by a direct question from Gerald.

"How much of the story you have just told me will be known to this Mr. Kelvin, when he comes to open the sealed packet which you sent him by my uncle's instructions?"

"He will know that Eleanor is no relation of your uncle, and that is the news which he will have to break to her. Inside his own packet is a second packet, sealed up and directed to Eleanor, and to be opened by her alone. This packet will tell her everything."

"You are right, Gerald; it will be a terrible shock. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that I have been spared the pain of enlightening her."

"I would stake my life on Ambrose Murray's innocence. No one who ever knew him would for a single moment believe in his guilt. He was one of the gentlest-hearted men I ever met. There was something almost feminine about him. His was, indeed, a most lovable disposition."

"A doctor. He had been staying at Malvern for the benefit of his health--he was always delicate--and was walking home by easy stages. He had got as far as Tewkesbury, and happened to be stopping there on that one particular night when Paul Stilling was murdered."

"He is. I saw him only a few months ago. In fact, I have been in the habit of visiting him at intervals ever since his wife's death. For many years he did not know me. But gradually--imperceptibly almost--his reason has come back to him, and he is now, and has been for the last five years, as sane as either you or I."

"None whatever, I'm afraid. You see, the crime--assuming him for the moment to have been guilty of it--was committed before his insanity declared itself. It is not as though he had been a lunatic at the time of the murder."

"He knows everything. It is at his own wish that Eleanor has been kept in ignorance of her real parentage for so long a time; and, had Jacob Lloyd lived, the secret would not have been told her even now."

"But how did it happen that none of the gossips of Pembridge found out that Eleanor was not my uncle's child?"

"It was not till about a year after their adoption of the child that your uncle, aunt, and Eleanor made their first appearance at Pembridge, your uncle having just bought Bridgeley, where he lived till he died. They had come from a town two hundred miles away, and did not know a soul in the place."

"Not the slightest, so far as I know. How should she? She was but eleven months old when her mother died: far too young to have the faintest recollection of anything that happened."

At this moment, they both heard a knock at the front door, but without paying any heed to it. Miss Bellamy was never troubled with late visitors. There were other lodgers in the house, and the knock could come from no one in search of her.

But presently came the sound of footsteps on the stairs, followed by Eliza's timid tap at the room door. "Come in," said Miss Bellamy, a little more sharply than usual. She felt annoyed that her tête-à-tête with Gerald should be thus interrupted.

The door opened, and Eliza's head was intruded. "A gentleman to see you, ma'am. He won't give no name."

"A gentleman to see me!" said Miss Bellamy, as she started up in surprise. She felt slightly scandalised to think that any gentleman should be so indiscreet as to call upon her at such an hour as eleven o'clock p.m.

But by this time the gentleman, who followed the girl upstairs, had pushed himself into the room; and Eliza, a little frightened at his audacity, slunk timidly out and shut the door quickly behind her.

"May I ask, sir----" began Miss Bellamy frigidly, and then something in the stranger's face suddenly froze her into silence.

And yet not much of his face was to be seen, all the lower part of it being hidden in the folds of a large plaid, and the upper part shaded by the broad brim of a soft felt hat, from under which looked forth two dark melancholy eyes of singular beauty. Miss Bellamy's hands began to tremble, and she leaned against the table for support.

The stranger did not speak, but swiftly unrolling his plaid, let it half drop to the ground and took off his hat. Miss Bellamy's face grew as white as death. She started forward; and then she shrank back, all a-tremble. Gerald Warburton's eyes turned from the stranger to her, and then went back to the man; a tall, thin, frail-looking figure, with a long white beard, and white hair that fell over the collar of his coat.

"Sir--you--you are either Ambrose Murray or his ghost!" slowly gasped Miss Bellamy. "In Heaven's name, what has brought you here?"

He clasped his hands suddenly above his head, gave utterance to a short, sharp, hysterical laugh, staggered forward a few steps, and would have fallen to the ground had not Gerald Warburton caught him in his arms.

CHAPTER IV.

A BROKEN LIFE.

Gerald Warburton did not leave London for Pembridge next day, nor for several days afterwards.

When Ambrose Murray learned that Gerald was the nephew of Jacob Lloyd, the man who had so befriended his daughter, and that Gerald's mother was the Minna Lloyd whom he remembered, and who had been one of his wife's dearest friends, he clung to him as a man who is being carried away by the tide will cling to the life-buoy which his hands have unexpectedly grasped. And, indeed, this man, who, after having been closely shut up from the world for twenty years, found himself thrown again on the great stream of life, seemed as helpless and bewildered as some weak swimmer who contends in vain against the resistless tide that is fast carrying him away. He was more than bewildered--he was frightened by the vast whirlpool of London life in which he found himself such an infinitesimal atom. There had always been an element of weakness, of vacillation, in his character. He had always been one of those men who are inevitably crushed into the background in the great rush and struggle for life with which they are mixed up--men not lacking talent, but simply from want of energy and physique, and power of elbowing their way to the front, drifting year after year helplessly into the rear, seeing themselves distanced by younger and fleeter feet, and seeing the prizes that in the flush of youth seemed so close at hand and easy of attainment, receding hopelessly into the distance. Sometimes disappointment and bitterness of heart sour such men for ever; sometimes they sink into mere dreamers and idealists, who console themselves for the buffets of the real world by living as much as possible an inner life of their own, in which destiny is carved out by them in accordance with their varying fancies, and in which they grasp--in imagination--whatever prizes please them best.

If at twenty-five years of age Ambrose. Murray had been ill-fitted to withstand the rubs of fortune, it was hardly to be expected that his armour should be stronger or his sword brighter after his twenty years of incarceration from the world. It was, indeed, evident from the first, both to Miss Bellamy and to Gerald, that he would have to be treated in many ways as if he were neither more nor less than a grown-up child. He had forgotten so much, and he had so much to learn! The march of events had left him so terribly in the rear, that it seemed doubtful whether he would ever be able to reach the world's full stride again.

Then, again, as time went on and they grew to know him better, a doubt would sometimes make itself felt, both with Miss Bellamy and Gerald, as to whether some shadow of the terrible affliction which had overclouded his mind for years did not linger there still. On ninety-nine topics out of a hundred he would talk as sanely and sensibly as anyone; but the introduction of the hundredth would elicit from him some observation so bizarre, so outrageous, or, on the other hand, so childishly simple, that his hearers could only look at each other in dismay, and change the conversation as quickly as possible.

Ambrose Murray's chief employment in prison since the recovery of his reason would seem to have been the cleaning and repairing of all the clocks and watches in the establishment. When a boy of twelve at home he had been able to take his father's watch to pieces, clean it, and put it together again. The delicacy of the workmanship, and the exquisite adjustment of each part with reference to the whole, had for him, even at that age, a fascination, a charm, that might have led him, step by step, into the highest walks of mechanics, had not a stern parental will decided for him that he was born to be a doctor.

As a result of his labours on the prison clocks and watches, Mr. Murray had contrived, little by little, to save up the sum of twelve pounds. Ten pounds of this amount he placed in the hands of Miss Bellamy the morning after his arrival in London, with a request that she would act as cashier for him in every way as far as the money would go, and that when it was exhausted she would not fail to let him know--although what he would have done in such a case to replenish his purse it would have puzzled him to say. Just then, however, no such consideration troubled his mind. In his best days he had not understood or troubled himself much about money matters, and nowadays ten pounds seemed amply sufficient to last him for an indefinite length of time. And it did last him a very long time, thanks to Miss Bellamy's remarkable management; for when, at the end of two months, he said to her, "I think the ten pounds must be getting rather low, Maria"--he had always been in the habit of calling Miss Bellamy by her Christian name--she only answered with a smile: "That shows how little you know about money matters. There's more than half of it left yet." Ambrose Murray was quite content to think that it was so, and troubled himself no further about the matter.

That first night Gerald took him to his own rooms; but the question that had to be settled next morning was, where he should live for the future. In London he would undoubtedly be safer from pursuit and detection than in the country; besides which, he wanted to be near Miss Bellamy. She was the one link that connected him with the past: away from her he would have felt as helpless as a being who had wandered by mistake on to a wrong planet. As it happened, there were two furnished rooms to be let in the next house to that in which Miss Bellamy lodged, and it was decided that there, for awhile at least, the fugitive should pitch his tent. It was highly necessary that he should both change his name and disguise himself to a certain extent--not that Murray himself would ever have thought of adopting any such precautions, but would have gone about as openly and unsuspiciously as the freest man in England. That some pursuit would be attempted, that some effort would be made to recapture him, there could be no manner of doubt; and both to Miss Bellamy and Gerald it seemed quite evident that unless some few obvious precautions should be adopted, his whereabouts could not long remain unknown to the police. It was accordingly agreed that for the time being he should change his name from Murray to Greaves--that having been his wife's maiden name; and that he should pass as a cousin of Miss Bellamy, who had come to London to look after some property that was in Chancery. The next thing to do was to reduce the length of his flowing white beard and of his long white hair. What was left was then died black--its normal colour--and this simple change was enough to disguise him beyond the chance of recognition by any one who had only seen him as he was when he first took off his hat and plaid in Miss Bellamy's room.

As he was still barely fifty years old, there was nothing incongruous about his black hair and beard; and when his sartorial needs had been duly attended to, the world saw him as a rather tall, frail-looking man, with a thin, scholar-like face, who stooped a little as he walked, and who seemed ever more intent on his own secret thoughts than concerned with anything that was passing around him. Not that the world, as exemplified by Ormond Square and its neighbourhood, ever saw much of him. He rarely stirred out of the house till dusk, and more frequently than mot it was ten or eleven at night before he crossed the threshold, except when he went to see Miss Bellamy--which he did every day; but as he had only to step from one house into the next in order to do that, it could hardly be considered as going out. The noise and bustle of the streets distracted him--even daylight itself, except when it came winnowed through the interstices of the venetian blinds, seemed distasteful to him. The friendly silence of the long, dark suburban streets, where were no gaudy shops or glaring gin-palaces, suited him best. There he could think his inmost thoughts and commune with his strange fancies in silence and peace. There he could feel sure that no keen eyes were prying into his, and trying to find therein some gleam, some lurking trace, of that terrible demon whose fingers had scorched his brain once already, and who still, at times, seemed terribly near at hand, waiting--as in his childish days he believed robbers used to wait for him--round some dark corner no great distance away, with his black cloak in his hands, ready to throw it over his victim's head the moment he passed that way.

After awhile both Gerald and Miss Bellamy were able to tell when this demon was haunting Murray's steps more closely than common. At such times, when not conversing with others, he would talk inaudibly to himself for hours together, unless interrupted, his lips moving as though in earnest assertion, but no sound coming therefrom. At such times, when walking out, he would turn his head slowly from side to side, but without raising his eyes from the ground, as though in search of something.

On the first occasion that Gerald noticed this peculiarity, they were walking together, and he said to him, "Have you lost something, Mr. Murray?"

Murray started, looked up, smiled, and pressed his companion's arm more closely.

"Yes, I have lost something," he said, with a little sigh. "I don't exactly know what it is--but it's something. I shall find it again one of these days, I do not doubt."

His voice was full of pathos as he spoke. Gerald never mentioned the subject again.

"Now that you are settled for some time to come, I presume that you will not be long before you break the news to Eleanor? You must remember that as yet she knows absolutely nothing."

So spoke Miss Bellamy to Ambrose Murray one evening across the tea-table. Gerald was also there. This was the first time that Eleanor's name had been mentioned since Murray's arrival, and Miss Bellamy could bear the father's strange silence no longer.

"It is not my intention to tell my daughter anything at present. Why should I?" said Murray.

"Why should you not?" she said. "It seems to me that one of the very first things you ought to do is to tell everything to your only child."

"Precisely so. I am a free man because I have broken my prison bonds. I am a free man who is liable to recapture at any moment. I am a free man to whose name the stain of murder still clings."

"But Eleanor would never believe you to be guilty, as I have never believed you, to be guilty."

"Possibly not. But why distress her by making her the recipient of so painful a revelation?"

"As you say, she is my daughter, and perhaps she has a right to be told. But seeing that her ignorance has lasted for twenty years, it cannot matter greatly if she be kept in the same ignorance for a few weeks or a few months longer. That ultimately everything will be told her, I do not doubt; but not now--not till--till----" Overcome by some hidden emotion, he faltered, and was dumb.

Miss Bellamy sighed, but said nothing. If Eleanor was not to be told her father's story till his innocence should be proved, then would it remain untold for ever.

"Do not think," resumed Ambrose Murray, "that I have not thought over, times without number, all that can be urged either for or against the telling of my story to Eleanor, but I have come to the conclusion that for a little while to come it had better remain untold."

"And do you think, Ambrose, that after such a length of time there is any chance, however remote, of your being able to prove your innocence?"

"I don't know: I cannot tell. I can simply hope. The world is full of apparent wonders, and Providence works out its ends in a way that we cannot fathom. I know how vain and futile must seem to you the prospect of my ever being able to prove my innocence; but it is for that purpose, and that alone, that I am now here. Had I not been sustained by such a hope, I believe that I should not have cared to seek my freedom. Years since, the desire for freedom, for freedom's own sake, burnt itself to a cinder in my heart by its very intensity. I came at last to cling to the narrow walls that had been my home for so long a time, as a limpet clings to its boulder on the beach, neither knowing nor caring for any horizon beyond its own few inches of rock and sand. How is it possible for me to make you comprehend what simple things may become dear to a man who has been cut off from the world as I have been? The pair of robins that I used to feed, the candy-tuft that grew outside my bedroom window, the head-warder's motherless child, the laurel-walk in the garden, my box of tools--the source of so many happy hours: it was not without a pang of bitter anguish that I cast these behind me for ever, even though freedom itself was beckoning to me from the hill-tops!

"But an inner voice seemed to urge me forward, a will superior to my own seemed to guide my footsteps. In saying this I may be merely the victim of self-delusion. My hopes and wishes in this matter may have no better foundation than a few incoherent dreams. Once already my mind has been like an empty room that is open to every wind that blows; and sometimes even now--Heaven help me!--I seem as if I had hardly strength enough to hold the door against the troop of demons that press and hustle to get in, and complain that I have dispossessed them of their home. But be this as it may, I am held and sustained by the hope of which I have spoken. It may prove to be nothing better than a broken reed, but till it is so proved, I will in no wise let it go: and till that time shall come, my daughter and I must remain to each other the strangers we have hitherto been."

"Do not ask me!" he said, with a sudden shrillness in his voice. Then, in a moment, he broke down utterly, and began to cry in a helpless, broken-hearted way that was painful to see.

"Oh, Ambrose, forgive me!" she said, with tears in her eyes. "I did not think to hurt your feelings. I cannot tell you how sorry I am."

"It is I who am so foolishly weak," he said; "but I shall be better in a minute or two." He held out one of his hands. Miss Bellamy pressed it affectionately between both hers, and then went softly back to her seat. For a little while no one spoke.

Ambrose Murray was the first to break the silence. "Upwards of twenty years have gone by," he said, "since Paul Stilling was murdered one night at the Pelican Hotel, Tewkesbury, and the prospect of my being able to prove my innocence after such a lapse of time would to most people appear an utterly hopeless one; and even to me, in my most sanguine moments, the chances of success seem very faint and far away indeed. Still, it is for this hope alone that I now live."

"Has any fresh evidence been discovered since the trial?" asked Miss Bellamy; "anything tending to exculpate you and fix the crime on the real murderer?"

"So far as I know, nothing has been discovered. The case virtually came to an end with my condemnation. The world believed me to be guilty--no one cared to sift further into the matter, and I was left to my fate."

"We none of us believed you to be guilty," said Miss Bellamy, with much earnestness. "But the evidence was so terribly against you, and events followed each other so quickly, and we poor women were all so bewildered and heart-broken, that--that we felt as if we could do nothing."

"As you say, Maria--you could do nothing; and I have never wronged any of those who were my friends at that sad time by thinking that more could have been done for me than was done. What was wanted was time, and that the law would not grant: time, and a man of strong will and clear brain, and then, perhaps, the mystery might have been fathomed."

"Then what it is now requisite to do," said Gerald, joining in the conversation for the first time, "is to reopen the case; to set to work on it, in fact, as if the murder had been committed only last week, instead of twenty years ago."

"Max Jacoby?" said Miss Bellamy. "I have not heard that name for years; but what a flood of painful reminiscences the mention of it recalls!"

"You stare at me as if you believed me to be still mad," he added, after a pause, addressing himself to Miss Bellamy: "and you ask me in your thoughts, if you do not with your lips, what evidence I can bring to prove the truth of what I have just stated. My answer is, that I cannot adduce one tittle of evidence that would be considered worth a moment's notice in a court of law: but not the less sure am I that he was the man."

Neither Gerald nor Miss Bellamy could help being impressed by his earnestness, however disposed they might be to think that nothing but disappointment could ever issue from it.

"Have you any clue by means of which it may be possible to trace the present whereabouts of this man, Max Jacoby?" asked Gerald presently.

"I have no clue of any kind." He said this, not despondently, but as cheerfully as though the point involved were of no consequence whatever.

"As you said just now, Gerald, we must go into the case ab initio," he resumed. "I say we, because it may chance that now and then I shall claim your assistance in the matter; and should I have to do so, I know that I shall not claim it in vain."

"That you will not," said Gerald warmly. "You may count on my poor services in any and every way."

"You must bear in mind," said Miss Bellamy to Murray, "that Gerald has not such an intimate knowledge of the case as either you or I have. He has heard a bare outline of the facts from me; but would it not be as well if you were to tell him the story in detail from your own point of view, and so enable him to judge for himself as to the mode in which he might be best able to assist you?"

"You are right, Maria, as you always are," said Murray. "Gerald shall have the story. It will not take long to tell. As a narrative of events, nothing could appear more clear, simple, and straightforward; and yet, underneath it, there still lurks the foul mystery that poisoned my life--that condemned me to a horrible death--that broke my wife's heart--and that made of me the wretched creature I am now!"

He rested his head in his hands, and was silent for a little while, calling up the memories of a bitter past.

"As you are no doubt already aware," he began, "I was brought up, at my father's request, to be a surgeon. I was in practice for myself, and had been married about two years, when my health, which had always been delicate, broke down. I was ordered to Malvern to try the hydropathic system, and there I stayed for four months, gathering strength daily. At length I found myself well enough to start for home. I had always been fond of walking, and on the present occasion I determined to shun the railways and do the entire distance on foot, going by easy stages so as not to over-fatigue myself. In pursuance of this plan I got as far as Tewkesbury, where I had made up my mind to stay all night. But already I found I was doing myself more harm than good by walking, and it was evident that I should have to finish my journey by rail. I sought and found shelter for the night at the Pelican Hotel. My purse was not very heavy, and I joined the company in the coffee-room. The company in question consisted but of two individuals,--Paul Stilling, a young Englishman, and Max Jacoby, a Dutch or German Jew of about the same age as myself. Stilling was a tall, slim, handsome young-fellow, with closely cropped black hair and a thin silky moustache. He was junior partner in a firm of Birmingham jewellers, and it transpired that he was then on his way, with a parcel of valuable jewellery, to the house of a well-known nobleman, resident no great distance from Tewkesbury. There was about to be a wedding in the family, and he was taking a selection of goods from which sundry bridal presents were to be chosen. He had engaged a bed at the Pelican for that night, and had ordered a fly to be ready at ten next morning to take him forward to his destination. Jacoby was a broad-built, resolute-looking man, with a thick sandy beard and ear-rings. He was travelling for a firm of Sheffield cutlers.

"The two men had been dining together, and the meal was just over when I entered the room. Stilling at once entered into conversation with me, but the German only sat and looked at us. After I had finished my steak I joined them over cigars and a bottle of port. The evening was chilly, and we all drew up close to the fire. Stilling had evidently been drinking earlier in the day, and his voluble tongue had been made more voluble still by his potations. He did not fail to tell us who and what he was, and the object of his visit to Tewkesbury; in fact, he had the conversation pretty much to himself. I joined in occasionally, but Jacoby did little except smoke and turn his keen eyes from one to the other of us, interjecting now and then a gruff Nein or Ja when a point-blank question was put to him by the jeweller.

"At length nothing would satisfy Stilling but showing us the wedding jewellery, on the beauty of which he descanted in glowing terms. So he ran upstairs as nimbly as a lamplighter, and presently came back, carrying a small, square leather case under his arm. This case, when unlocked, was found to contain a small box, made of polished oak, clamped with silver, and having the initials P. S. outlined on the lid with silver nails. The box was duly opened, and was found to be lined with purple velvet, and divided into compartments which were filled with jewels of various kinds. One after another Stilling lifted them tenderly out of their soft resting-place, in order that we might examine them. They flashed and scintillated in the gaslight, and threw out a thousand brilliant rays. Happening to turn my head, I could not help being struck with the change in Jacoby. He had put down his cigar in order that he might examine the jewels more closely, and was at that moment holding in his hairy, muscular hands a necklace of magnificent brilliants. But his hands were trembling as he held it, and his face had taken a yellow tinge, and his forehead had become clammy, and he was biting his under lip; and while I was looking, he flashed across at Stilling a look which said plainly enough: 'To make these mine I would kill you and a thousand like you!' That was how I read his look then; that is how I read it now. If ever there was murder in a man's eyes, there was in Jacoby's at that moment.

"When the jewels had been sufficiently admired, they were put back into their resting-place and locked up. A little later we bade each other goodnight, and went off to our several rooms. I had ordered an early breakfast, and I left Tewkesbury by the seven a.m. train, having taken a ticket through to Bristol. By the time I reached Gloucester, however, I had changed my mind. The weather was brilliant, and I should not be looked for at home for several days. Why not go down Hereford way, and explore the scenery of the Wye, and by so doing gratify a wish that dated back for several years? I accordingly quitted the Bristol train at Gloucester, and booked myself through by another line to Hereford, which place I reached late in the afternoon. I was sitting next morning in the coffee-room of the hotel, plodding through my breakfast, when the door was opened, and a heavy hand was laid on my shoulder, and next moment I found myself arrested on a double charge of robbery and murder. Stilling had been found dead in his bed at the Pelican Hotel: the silver-clamped box could not be found, and I was charged with the double crime.

"But I must not weary you. At the very bottom of my travelling bag was found a bracelet set with turquoises and diamonds, that had been the property of Stilling. In the murdered man's room was found a handkerchief marked with my initials. I had taken a railway ticket to Bristol, but had left the train at Gloucester, and had gone forward by another line in order to baffle pursuit--so they said. Taken in conjunction, these facts were enough to condemn any man, and they condemned me. Twelve men unanimously found me guilty, and the judge told me that he quite concurred in their verdict. And then I saw the black cap put on, and heard my own death-sentence pronounced, and heard my wife's wild shriek for mercy, where no mercy could be shown. Can you wonder that my brain gave way?"

"The same hand that put the bracelet into my bag put my handkerchief into the murdered man's room. It was the hand of Jacoby! How I know that--how I feel so sure of it--I cannot explain to either of you, and if I could you would only smile at me. In this world much of our highest knowledge comes to us intuitively, and by intuition only do I know that it was Max Jacoby who compassed the death of Paul Stilling--but that suffices for me."

"Then your idea," said Gerald, "is to find out whether this Max Jacoby is still alive?"

"It is. And I want you, out of your knowledge of the world, to advise me as to the best mode of setting about this business."

"I am going out of town to-morrow for a couple of days. I will think over very carefully all that you have said, and will make a point of seeing you immediately upon my return."

With this agreement they separated for the night, and early next morning Gerald set out for Pembridge.

Miss Bellamy had not deemed it necessary to say anything to Ambrose Murray as to the fact of Eleanor still passing as Jacob Lloyd's daughter, and still believing herself to be the heiress to his property. To have told him would only have unsettled his mind still further, and would have served no useful purpose. Besides which, Gerald's visit to Pembridge was for the express purpose of seeing Mr. Kelvin, and of ascertaining from him why he had omitted to carry out the instructions conveyed to him in the sealed packet. In a few days more at the most, Eleanor would learn that she was not the daughter of Jacob Lloyd, and not the heiress she believed herself to be. Meanwhile, it was better, as far as Ambrose Murray was concerned, that these matters should remain untold.

CHAPTER V.

GERALD AT PEMBRIDGE.

The mention of Matthew Kelvin's name by Miss Bellamy touched a chord of recollection in the mind of Gerald Warburton, but some time elapsed before he could trace back in his memory to the particular occasion on which he had heard it last. He had been groping about for some time, when suddenly a single flash revealed to him everything that he was looking for. It showed him a country inn in the Lake district, and two men, weather-bound by the unceasing rain, perforce dependent on each other for companionship and the practice of those minor social virtues which such an occasion should undoubtedly call forth. They meet as strangers meet under such circumstances, but by the end of the third day they seem to have known each other for years. Glad as they are on the fourth morning to find that the clouds have dispersed and that the hill-tops can be seen again, they do not part without a certain feeling of regret, or without a cordial grip of the hand and a hope that, unlikely as such a thing seems, they may one day meet again. One of those men is Matthew Kelvin, the other is Gerald Warburton. Kelvin, at parting, had given Gerald his address, and had begged of him that, should he ever find himself in the neighbourhood of Pembridge, he would not fail to look him up. Gerald, at the time, had no address to give. In fact, it was not as Gerald Warburton, but under the name of "Jack Pomeroy," that he had made Kelvin's acquaintance.

A year or two previously, in the course of one of his rare interviews with his father, the latter had said to Gerald: "You are a disgrace to the name of Warburton!"

"If that is the case, sir," said Gerald, bitterly, "it shall be disgraced no longer."

When he next went out into the world, it was as John Pomeroy. His full name was Gerald John Warburton. So he took the John and tacked it to a name that had been common in his mother's family for generations; and it was as Jack Pomeroy, a vagabondising young artist, rather out at elbows, as clever young men often are, but a decidedly amusing companion for a wet day, that he had made Kelvin's acquaintance.

"I wonder whether he will know me again," muttered Gerald to himself, as he walked down the main street of Pembridge on his way to Mr. Kelvin's office. "There was a little about him that I liked, and a great deal that I didn't like. His joviality was merely on the surface; it had no foundation in his disposition. It was a mere will-o'-the-wisp, flickering fitfully over the darker depths of his character. Me he tolerated as one tolerates a droll when tired of one's own company, and with nothing more serious to do. For the time being he even made believe to be a Bohemian himself. It was a phase of character that he had rarely encountered before, and for forty-eight hours it fascinated him; forty-eight hours later he would have turned his back on it and me with a sneer.

"It is indeed a strange chance that has brought us together again after so long a time! I will tell him neither my name nor my errand for a little while. I will go to him as the Jack Pomeroy in whose society he once spent three days of bad weather. I will even pretend to be hard up, and to stand in need of a helping-hand. Probably he will order me out of the office; perchance he will ask me to dinner and put a sovereign into my hand at parting. It will be time enough to tell him my real business after I have put him to the test. Besides which, by concealing my identity for a little while, I may perhaps be able to glean some information as to his reason for keeping back for so long a time the contents of the sealed packet from Eleanor." It was in pursuance of this idea that Gerald had put on for the nonce an older suit of clothes than common, and had locked up in his portmanteau at the hotel his watch and chain and scarf-pin. He found Kelvin's office in due course, and made his way into the entrance-hall, and was there received by Mr. Piper.

That young gentleman was what he himself would have called "down in the dumps." The obligations of gentility extend from the highest stratum of society to the lowest, and Mr. Piper felt that this morning he had lost caste in the eyes of Mr. Hammond--his guide, philosopher, and--in a far-off, Olympian kind of way--his friend. Mr. Hammond, walking down a by-street on his way to business, had come suddenly on Pod, who, in company with several other youths, was scraping with a knife the sweet interstices of an empty sugar-cask that was standing on the pavement in front of a grocer's shop. Unseen till he laid his gloved hand on Pod's shoulder, Mr. Hammond had said to him: "Here's a penny for you, Piper, to buy some sweetmeats with, but do, for goodness' sake, leave the sugar-cask alone." And so, with a smile and a sneer, had gone daintily on his way. Pod felt as if he could have bitten his head off, had such an anatomical feat been at all possible. He would not have cared half so much had he been seen by anyone else--even by Kelvin himself. But to have been seen thus ignominiously engaged by the elegant, the scented, the fastidious Mr. Hammond! Besides which, this was not the first occasion on which Mr. Hammond had found him engaged in a pursuit derogatory to that assumption of manhood and gentility which it was the secret ambition of his life to maintain in the eyes of his patron. On his way home, one evening, Pod had been overtaken by a temptation which he found it impossible to resist. The temptation on this occasion took the shape of marbles. Pod had fallen in with three or four of his old schoolmates engaged in a game of knuckle-down, and, fired by the recollection of his prowess in olden days, had for once flung gentility to the winds.

Carefully depositing in a corner his chimney-pot hat, for the next ten minutes he was a boy again. This time, also, it was Mr. Hammond's voice which recalled him to a consideration of how far he had forgotten himself. "Well done, Piper," he said, as he came suddenly round the corner. "With practice and perseverance you will make a tolerable player. By-the-by, I promised to buy you something on your birthday. What shall it be? A hoop, or a kite, or a pretty coloured ball that you and the baby can amuse yourselves with in wet weather?"

This had been very galling to Pod, especially when said before his schoolmates; and now, to-day, he had given Mr. Hammond an opportunity of sneering at him for the second time. This Mr. Hammond was Matthew Kelvin's one articled pupil. Attracted by Pod's shrewdness, and keen common sense, he had "taken him in hand," as he himself phrased it; although whether such taking in hand would ultimately prove beneficial to Pod, seemed somewhat doubtful at present. Mr. Hammond found Pod useful as a go-between in his love-affairs. He was engaged to a young lady against the wishes of her friends. Any letters sent by him through the post were intercepted, and it was only by trusting to Pod's skill and diplomacy as a messenger that he could contrive to communicate with her at all. In such a case as this, Pod might be trusted implicitly, and Hammond knew it. He was rewarded chiefly with cigars, and now and then with an odd half-crown, or a pair of soiled lavender kid gloves; which latter articles, when cleaned, looked almost as good as new, and although somewhat large, created quite a sensation among Pod's friends and acquaintances, when worn by him on his evening stroll along the Ladies' Walk. Then Mr. Hammond had made Pod a present of an old silver-mounted meerschaum, which, although he found it somewhat full-flavoured at present, he would doubtless be able to smoke with comfort when he should have practised on it for five or six months longer.

But far beyond any pecuniary reward was to be counted the happiness of being in Mr. Hammond's confidence, and the inestimable boon of his society. Since Mr. Hammond had taken him by the hand, Pod felt himself to be quite a different sort of person--he had, as it were, emerged from the grub into the butterfly. The world and he were on altogether different terms from what they had been on twelve months ago. A year ago, for instance, he would not have thought of wearing a chimney-pot hat, or of wearing stand-up paper collars of the same shape as Mr. Hammond's, or of carrying a slim silk umbrella to and from business. To be sure, the umbrella, however elegant and even useful it might seem when folded tightly up, was in reality so worn and dilapidated as to be quite incapable of being opened; but as this was a secret known to Pod alone, it did not matter greatly. Then it was surely a brilliant stroke of inventiveness to allow himself to be seldom seen in the town without a Times newspaper under his arm--generally three or four days old; but that was of no consequence. To be so seen seemed to add a foot to his stature, and it is impossible to say how much to his consequence.

But with all his precocious ways, Pod was a good son to his mother--a poor hard-working widow with a large family, of whom Pod was the eldest. He did his best to help her in every way, and would nurse the baby for hours together when he got home of an evening. He was not unmindful that his education had been a poor one, and three evenings a week he attended a night school, where he laid a tolerable foundation both of French and Latin; but of this he said nothing to Mr. Hammond. Neither did he say anything of the numerous books he was in the habit of obtaining from the town library, and over which he would pore of a night long after everyone else in the house was fast asleep.

"If you can wait a minute or two, Mr. Kelvin won't be long," he said, as he handed Gerald a chair and a newspaper.

Five minutes later, Matthew Kelvin opened the door and walked in. Gerald rose as he entered, smiled, and held out his hand. For a moment or two Kelvin was evidently at a loss.

"I seem to know your face," he said, "and yet you must excuse me if for the moment I fail to recollect where I have seen it before."

"Of course, of course!" shaking him by the hand. "How one's memory fails as one grows older! But sit down and tell me how you have been getting on all this long time."

"Oh, with the proverbial luck of the rolling stone," said Gerald, as he resumed his seat.

Kelvin by this time had been able to note his visitor's appearance--to note that his clothes, although originally well-made, were now worn and shabby: and Kelvin never liked a man who did not dress well; to note that there was not a single item of jewellery visible, that his scarf was without a pin, and his pocket minus a watch, and that altogether there was a decidedly impecunious look about his unwelcome Bohemian acquaintance. In Kelvin's estimation, a man who could not afford to carry a gold watch was hardly worth knowing. He elevated his eyebrows, and felt sure in his own mind that before ten minutes were over he should be called upon to disburse five guineas.

"That's the worst of making chance travelling acquaintances," he said to himself. "They are sure to turn up at some future date, and want you to do something for them. So many people want you to do something for them!"

"When I saw you last you talked about going to the Antipodes. What has brought you back again?"

"Partly that lack of pence with which all really great men are afflicted, and partly a little private business which required my presence at home."

"You are a born Bohemian, Pomeroy--one of those incorrigibles on whom argument and advice alike are thrown away."

"I am happy to say that I have no prospects in particular. Never had such things in my life."

"How can I be of service to you? Is there anything I can do for you in a modest way?"

"That I'll do willingly. I suppose if the dinner were supplemented with an offer of a five-pound note you would not feel offended."

"Offended! Not a bit of it," said Gerald, with a laugh. "But remember this, Kelvin, I have not asked you for money."

"Oh, I fully appreciate your delicacy of feeling," answered Kelvin, not without a sneer. "Well, we dine at six sharp. No company, only my mother and my cousin."

"I suppose you would find it somewhat difficult," said Kelvin, "after vagabondising about the world for so long a time, to settle down to any quiet steady employment--too monotonous, and that sort of thing--eh?"

"I don't know so much about that," said Gerald. "Certainly liberty is sweet, and it is pleasant to be one's own master. Besides which, as yet I have given no hostages to fortune, and having only my own unworthy self to look after, I dare say that I should find it difficult to settle down into a steady, sober, tax-paying citizen, who sits on a stool from one year's end to another, and who knows the amount of his income to a penny. No, I am afraid that I should find such a life slightly tedious."

"I don't think your heiress is a difficult fish to catch, especially by such a clever angler as I do not doubt that you are. But then you must make up your mind to be indifferent to good looks, and good breeding, and a few other simple et ceteras."

"But do you mean to say that the idea of marrying for money is one that you have never turned over in your mind?"

"I can't say that exactly; but my ideas on the point have been very hazy ones indeed--quite nebulous, I assure you--nothing solid or tangible about them."

"Nebulosity of ideas is a very bad thing in anybody. The sooner you bring them down from the clouds and condense them into a practical shape the better. First catch--not your hare, but your heiress; then bring all your powers of fascination to bear upon her, and then----"

"A dinner, a five-pound note, and exit Jack Pomeroy; that is what Kelvin means," said Gerald to himself. "Well, he might have treated me worse than that. I'll not tell him who I really am till the last minute. I wonder what his motive can be for keeping back the information from Eleanor. But I suppose I shall know all about it by to-morrow at this time."

Gerald passed a by no means unpleasant evening. Neither Mrs. Kelvin nor Olive had ever been further from home than Paris. They were eager in their questions about the different strange places which Gerald had visited on his travels, and he was by no means loth to gratify their curiosity. What pleased Kelvin most was to see his mother so lively and full of spirits.

"Give me a look in at the office about eleven to-morrow," he said to Gerald, as they parted at the door.

Half an hour later, Kelvin received a telegram which necessitated his starting for Scotland by the 7 a.m. train next morning.. He was down betimes to breakfast; but early as it was, Olive was there before him, waiting to pour out his tea and attend to all his little wants.

"I shall not be able to see Pomeroy," he said. "You can explain to him bow I have been called away, and tell him that if he will leave his address I will write to him on my return."

"You were mentioning, the other day, that Sir Thomas Dudgeon was in want of an amanuensis and secretary. It seems to me that Mr. Pomeroy would be just the man for such a position."

"Oh, he's got ability enough for such a berth, I daresay. But, in the first place, I believe the fellow is too much of a Bohemian ever to settle down steadily to anything; and, in the second place, I know nothing about either himself or his antecedents. How would it be possible for me to recommend a man to Sir Thomas respecting whom I know nothing?"

"However much of a Bohemian, as you call it, Mr. Pomeroy may have been, he has both the manners and education of a gentleman; and I daresay that he would be able to satisfy you as to his respectability. Aunt was quite taken with him last evening, and when I went into her room this morning she desired me to tell you that she would take it as a kindness to herself if you would interest yourself for Mr. Pomeroy in whatever way you might think would benefit him most."

"Of course, if I thought it would please my mother, I might stretch a point in his favour, though really----"

"It would please my aunt greatly if you would do so. It struck me that this situation at Sir Thomas Dudgeon's would be just the thing for Mr. Pomeroy."

"But, really, I don't at all see how I can recommend a man about whom I know nothing."

"You are going away; Mr. Pomeroy is to call here at eleven; let me see him in your place, and if he can satisfy me as to the respectability of himself and his connections, may I promise him the situation in your name?"

"Take care that your interest in him does not deepen into something far more dangerous; take care that you don't lose your heart to him."

"Your warning on that point is quite unnecessary, Matthew. But you have not answered my question."

Kelvin looked at his watch, and then rose hurriedly. It was later than he had thought. He had barely time to catch his train.

"Do as you like about it," he said, not without a touch of irritation in his voice. "When my mother and you lay your heads together and conspire against me, I know that I may as well give in at once. Mind you, I don't think this fellow is worth half the trouble that you two women are taking about him."

"Blind--blind as ever!" muttered Olive to herself as she stood at the window and watched Kelvin hurrying down the street in the direction of the station. "A woman of my own age and any brains at all would detect ray motive at once, but a man can rarely see beyond his nose."

CHAPTER VI.

"THAT'S THE MAN!"

As already explained, Mr. Piper had a tiny glass-fronted office, or rather den, all to himself, at the far end of the passage which led from the main entrance to Matthew Kelvin's premises. In the wall that divided the sanctum of Mr. Piper from that of his employer, was a small window of ground glass, which had originally been intended as a means of communication between one office and the other. Of late years, however, it had never been so used, Mr. Kelvin having adopted the modern invention of India-rubber tubes as the readiest and most convenient method of making known his wishes either to Mr. Piper or to the clerks in the general office. Since the little window had fallen into disuse, a thick green curtain had been hung across it, in order that the privacy of Kelvin's office might be still further secured; but, as it so happened, the object in view came at last, to be defeated through this very precaution.

One cold morning, Mr. Piper, while sparring at an imaginary opponent in order to keep up the circulation of his system, sent his elbow incautiously through one of the panes of the little window. There was no great harm done: a shilling or two would pay for the damage; but, for all that, Pod thought it best not to let Mr. Kelvin know of the accident. He knew that Kelvin was going out of town in the course of a few days, and he would take that opportunity of having the window mended at his own expense. Meanwhile, the curtain would effectually hide what had happened from his employer's notice.

In thus making his calculations, there was, however, one point which, to give Pod his due, had altogether escaped his notice. So long as the broken window remained unmended, the privacy of Kelvin's office was altogether gone. Pod had only to put his ear to the fractured pane in order to hear every word that was spoken in the other room. There was nothing but the curtain between him and the speakers. Pod, as a rule, would not have thought it worth his while to listen--would not have condescended to listen; but happening one day accidentally to overhear a few words of a certain conversation, he was induced to listen more attentively, and the result was that he quietly reached his pencil and notebook and took down the whole of the conversation in shorthand.

"If I don't spoil their little game, my name's not Pod Piper!" he said to himself with an air of energy as he shut up his notebook. "The pair of cowardly vipers!"

The conversation stenographed by Mr. Piper, and denounced by him in such emphatic terms, was that which took place between Olive Deane and Gerald Warburton on the forenoon of the day following the visit of the latter to Kelvin's house. When Gerald called at eleven o'clock he was told that the lawyer had been suddenly summoned away, but that Miss Deane was desirous of speaking to him. Inwardly wondering what Miss Deane could have to say to him, he sat down, but was not kept long waiting. Pod went to tell her that Mr. Pomeroy was there, and Olive came at once.

"My cousin has been called from home quite unexpectedly," she said; "and he asked me to see you in his stead."

"No compliments, if you please, Mr. Pomeroy. I think that neither you nor I care greatly for that sort of thing. Besides, I am here to discuss a matter of business with you. Pray pardon the question, but are my cousin and I right in assuming that if some situation could be found for you, the duties of which would not be onerous, which would bring you into contact with 'good' people, and which might open up for you a channel to something far better in the future, you would not be unwilling, after due consideration, to accept it?"

Gerald hesitated. With the knowledge that ten thousand pounds would fall into his pocket in the course of a few days, he might well pause before answering such a question.

"Really, Miss Deane, you quite take me by surprise. I have led a vagabond existence for so many years, that the idea of a situation of any kind that would at all cramp that freedom of action to which I have been so long used, and which has become so sweet to me, could not but be somewhat distasteful. Still, if I ever do intend to settle down into a respectable member of the community, it is quite time I began to think of doing so, and the picture just drawn by you is not without its allurements. You will not therefore, I hope, think me presumptuous if I ask you to favour me with a few more particulars."

"I will be quite candid in the matter with you," said Olive. "The situation to which I refer is that of amanuensis and secretary to Sir Thomas Dudgeon, the newly-elected member for Pembridge. My cousin has the management of Sir Thomas's affairs, and has been asked to find some one suitable for the situation in question."

Gerald was at a loss what to say. The mention of Sir Thomas's name at once brought to his mind what Miss Bellamy had told him--how Eleanor Lloyd had been taken up by Lady Dudgeon, was now living with the family, and was to go to London with them when they moved there for the season. But how would all that be when Miss Lloyd should be proved to be penniless?

"You hesitate," said Olive, after a few moments. "You hardly know whether to say Yes or No."

"You are right--I don't," said Gerald, frankly. "At the same time, my warmest thanks are due to you and Mr. Kelvin for thinking of me in the way you have."

"Take time to think over what I have said. Don't give me an answer now. Suppose you either call and see me, or let me have a line from you by to-morrow morning? Or shall you want a still longer time before making up your mind?"

"Thanks," said Gerald, with a laugh; "but till to-morrow will be quite long enough."

"Matthew mentioned something to me of the conversation that passed between you and him," said Olive, with a smile. "He told me of his suggestion that you should elevate your fortunes by marrying an heiress."

"Seriously, I know of no reason why I should not, except this--that all the ladies with whom I have the happiness to be acquainted are very little better off than myself."

"Should you agree to become Sir Thomas Dudgeon's secretary, you will have an opportunity, while under his roof, of ingratiating yourself with a veritable heiress."

"Come, come, the plot is thickening fast," said Gerald, and he hitched his chair a little nearer Miss Deane.

"Yes, a veritable heiress, young and charming into the bargain, and one whose affections, I have every reason to believe, are totally disengaged."

"Pardon me for saying so," said Gerald, "but it seems highly improbable to me that any relative of Sir Thomas Dudgeon would condescend to look upon that gentleman's secretary in the light of a suitor for her hand."

"The lady in question is no relative of Sir Thomas--she is merely a visitor under his roof; but a visitor who will probably stay there till a husband shall take her away to a home of her own. Why should not you be that husband, Mr. Pomeroy?"

"Why not, indeed! But would it be a breach of confidence if you were to tell me the lady's name?"

"It would be no breach of confidence," said Olive, "although it was not my intention to reveal to you the lady's name at present. However, having been frank with you so far, I may as well continue to be so. The lady to whom I refer is Miss Eleanor Lloyd--of course, a perfect stranger to you. Her father died a few months ago, and left her a fortune of twenty thousand pounds."

All Gerald's self-control was needed to keep him from betraying himself to the pair of keen eyes that were fixed so steadily on him. He turned his head away, and affected to be deeply considering the words he had just heard. He wanted time to recover himself.

Up to a few moments ago, not the slightest suspicion had entered his mind that the offer which Kelvin had made him through Miss Deane had sprung from anything but a feeling of genuine friendship on the lawyer's part; and even when Olive had propounded her theory that he ought to recoup his fortunes by marrying an heiress, he had looked upon it as so much quiet chaff on her part, never thinking that any serious meaning was attached to her words.

But the mention of Eleanor Lloyd's name had changed all this. Suddenly he seemed to see a pitfall at his feet. His mind, ever active in moments of emergency, at once whispered certain questions to him, not one of which he could answer to his own satisfaction. What object had Kelvin in view in offering to procure for a man whom he I knew only as a nameless adventurer a situation of trust and responsibility in the house of such a man as Sir Thomas Dudgeon? What object had Olive Deane in view in trying to persuade this same nameless adventurer to make love to and win the hand of Eleanor Lloyd? Was it with Kelvin's knowledge and sanction that Miss Deane was thus trying to persuade him? or was she doing it merely in furtherance or some hidden scheme of her own? Was Miss Deane aware, as Kelvin undoubtedly was, that Eleanor was not the heiress people believed her to be, nor any relation of Jacob Lloyd; and if so, what could her object possibly be in trying to bring Jack Pomeroy and Miss Lloyd together? Finally, came the oft-recurring questions: Why had not Kelvin written to him as Gerald Warburton, the real heir; and why had he neglected to reveal the contents of the sealed packet to Eleanor? There seemed to be something under the surface that at present he could in no wise fathom. He could not rid his mind of the suspicion that there was some hidden link of connection between the concealment of the sealed packet by Kelvin, and the evident desire of Olive Deane that he should win Eleanor for his wife. And yet how could there be any such link of connection? In any case, he would meet stratagem with stratagem. It should be a case of diamond cut diamond.

He would still be Jack Pomeroy to them, and would seem, for a little while at least, to fall in with all their views and wishes.

"Really, Miss Deane," he said at last, "you have piqued my curiosity in the strangest possible way. I hardly know in what terms to answer you, The position of this Miss Lloyd, who is so far above me in the social scale, would seem to render utterly absurd and Quixotic on my part any advances that I might make with the view of ultimately winning her hand."

"Of course, if you are lacking in boldness and audacity," said Miss Deane, with the faintest possible sneer, "those are qualities which no one can lend you for the occasion, and the sooner we bring our interview to an end the better. But if your hesitation arises from the fact of your being short of funds, you need be under no apprehension on that score. Pardon me for speaking so plainly, but my cousin gave me to understand that you were not one of the richest of individuals--he insinuated, in fact, that you were almost penniless."

"Not for the first time in my life, Miss Deane--in fact, I rather like being penniless, it keeps the circle of one's friends and acquaintances so limited and select."

"The first necessity in your case is that you should have the dress and appearance of a gentleman."

"I quite agree with you, Miss Deane. We owe much to our tailor--in the way of gratitude."

"I have said nothing to you respecting your friends and connections. I have assumed all along that you would be able to satisfy Sir Thomas on those points, should he ever choose to question you respecting them--which I don't for one moment think that he will do."

"On the points you speak of, I do not doubt that I could satisfy either Sir Thomas Dudgeon or any one else."

"Such being the case, and with the manners, dress, and appearance of a gentleman, it seems to me that you would have the campaign almost entirely in your own hands. You would be under the same roof with Miss Lloyd--an inestimable advantage in your case. You would be in the habit of seeing her daily, and might make yourself agreeable to her in many ways. Under such circumstances, where would be the harm if, now and then, you were to hint vaguely at your expectations--at your rich relations--at your fashionable friends? Neither would you altogether omit an occasional mention of your undergraduate days at Cambridge, nor of your travels abroad."

"My dear Miss Deane, you might safely leave all the delicate little details, all the nuances of the picture, to me."

"I am quite sure of that. Miss Lloyd is nothing but a simple, country-bred girl: you are a man of the world. Voilà tout."

"I may just mention this," said Olive: "Miss Lloyd will be of age in a few months. She will then be entirely her own mistress, and can give her hand, and her twenty thousand pounds with it, to the man she likes best, and no one will have the right or power to say her nay."

"You will let me hear from you, Mr. Pomeroy, by to-morrow morning at the latest?"

"The answer is, that if Matthew Kelvin can obtain this situation for me, I will gladly accept it. To tell the truth, I am somewhat tired of the nomadic sort of life that I have been leading since I was quite a lad. I think I am sufficiently tamed to settle quietly down to work--provided there is not too much of it, and I am allowed to have pretty much my own way."

"Any person who chooses to assert himself can have his own way with Sir Thomas Dudgeon. I am glad that you have decided to accept the position. I feel quite sure that you will have no cause to regret doing so."

"It is you who have persuaded me. I feel sure that Kelvin would not have succeeded as you have."

"You will leave me an address before you go, by means of which my cousin can communicate with you. You may expect to hear from me in a week at the latest."

Gerald pencilled down the address of a London friend, to which any letters for him might be sent. A few minutes later he took his leave.

This conversation it was that Mr. Piper thought it worth his while to take down in shorthand.

"My cousin Matthew's revenge shall be worthy of the name," said Olive to herself; as soon as she was alone. "Let this Eleanor Lloyd but engage herself to Pomeroy--let her marry him if she will--and on the day that Matthew tells her the secret of her birth, he can tell her also that the man to whom she has given her heart is but a sorry impostor, whose sole object in marrying her was to obtain possession of that money which is hers no longer. When that day comes, may I be there to see! Her proud beauty shall be humiliated to the dust."

When Gerald got back to London, he told Miss Bellamy everything that had happened. She quite concurred with him that it looked very much as if some strange conspiracy were afoot; but what the nature and objects of it might be they were altogether at a loss to imagine. In any case, it could do no harm for Gerald to retain his incognito for a little while longer.

A few days later, Gerald received by post a bank-note for fifty pounds, with Miss Deane's compliments. Mr. Kelvin had not yet got back home, she wrote, but would doubtless communicate with Mr. Pomeroy immediately after his return. Mr. Pomeroy pinned one note to the other, and having sealed them up in an envelope, he put them carefully away in his writing-desk.

A day or two later, Ambrose Murray called upon him at his rooms. "If you have nothing better to do," he said, "I wish you would give up the day to me. I want to visit my wife's grave. She lies among some of her own people in a little country churchyard, about a couple of miles from Welwyn. To me such a journey seems quite a formidable undertaking, and I want you, if you will, to go with me."

Gerald at once assented. They took the train from King's Cross to Welwyn, and then walked the remainder of the distance. When the churchyard was found, Gerald left Mr. Murray to himself for half an hour.

It was still broad daylight when they got back to the station. They were pacing the platform slowly, waiting for their train, when the up express came rushing past at the rate of forty miles an hour. They stood for a moment to watch it. Suddenly Ambrose Murray gripped his companion by the arm.

"Look! look!" he cried. "That's the man! As I live, that's the face of Max Jacoby!"

Gerald looked, but already the train had gone too far to allow him to distinguish any particular face.

"I should know him at the end of a thousand years!" exclaimed Murray, his whole frame trembling with excitement. "Max Jacoby is still among the living. The next thing to do is to find him."

CHAPTER VII.

MISS DEANE FINDS A NEW HOME.

When Matthew Kelvin reached home from his journey, he was certainly surprised at the budget of news which his mother had ready for him.

"Where's Olive?" was the first question he asked, as he sat down to his dinner, after kissing his mother, and satisfying himself that she was no worse in health than when he left her.

"She's gone to see the Leightons, and won't be back till to-morrow, so that I shall have my dear boy all to myself this evening. It was very considerate of Olive, I must say."

Mrs. Kelvin was a handsome, stately old lady, with silvery hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. She wore a richly brocaded dress, a China crape shawl--even in the house she always wore a shawl--and a black lace cap of elaborate construction. To see her sitting in her easy chair by the fire, no one would have suspected her of being an invalid; but for many years past she had suffered from a spinal complaint which almost entirely disabled her from walking.

"She is going to Stammars, as governess to Lady Dudgeon's two little girls. At her own terms, too--a hundred guineas a year."

"Well done, Olive!" cried the lawyer. "A clever girl, very; but I'm afraid that she and Lady Dudgeon won't agree long together."

"She may perhaps have a private reason of her own for so readily accepting Lady Dudgeon's offer. Mind, dear, I only say she may have; I don't say she has."

Matthew Kelvin knew that it was expected of him to show some curiosity in the matter.

"Shall I be set down as unduly inquisitive," he said, "if I ask you to tell me what you suppose this private reason to be?"

"I think it quite possible that Olive may be willing to go to Stammars, because--well, because Mr. Pomeroy will be there also."

Mrs. Kelvin drew her shawl round her with quite a relish, and shook her head meaningly at her son.

"Because Mr. Pomeroy will be there also!" said Mr. Kelvin, like a man who could hardly believe his ears. "Who says that Mr. Pomeroy is going to Stammars?"

In the pressure of far more important matters, he had almost forgotten the existence of an individual of so little consequence as Jack Pomeroy.

"Why, Matthew, dear, I thought it was all arranged that as soon as you came home, Mr. Pomeroy was to be made Sir Thomas Dudgeon's secretary, or something of that kind; and Olive and I have advanced him fifty pounds to provide him with an outfit. You know you told me yourself that you didn't suppose he had a shilling in the world."

It tested all Mr. Kelvin's powers of self-control to keep down an explosion of temper. He remembered in time that any outbreak on his part would be sure to upset his mother and make her ill for several days, so for a minute or two he did not speak. He put down his knife and fork, and sipped at his claret, as if in deep thought.

"It is a great deal of money, Matthew, of course; but Mr. Pomeroy understands that he is to pay the amount back out of his salary."

"The whole affair seems to be cut and dried, and I have not even spoken to Sir Thomas about the man!" he said, not without a touch of impatience. "For anything I know to the contrary, Sir Thomas may have filled up the situation himself, while I have been away."

"I am sorry, dear, if I have done anything against your wishes; but really I thought I was managing everything for the best."

Matthew Kelvin could see a tear in a corner of his mother's eye, and he could not bear that.

"There, there, mother, don't put yourself out of the way," he said. "Fifty pounds won't ruin us, even though we should never get a penny of it back."

"But Mr. Pomeroy was such a nice young man!" continued Mrs. Kelvin. "So good-looking and well-educated; so gentlemanly in every way."

"Some of the most unmitigated scamps I have ever met with were very nice young men indeed," returned Matthew. "Not that I know anything to Pomeroy's discredit; at the same time, I know nothing very greatly to his credit. He has been a Bohemian--a wanderer to and fro on the face of the earth for years; and to introduce such a man, about whom, be it remembered, I know absolutely nothing, into the household of Sir Thomas Dudgeon, is a serious responsibility."

"Oh, I believe Olive satisfied herself thoroughly as to the respectability of Mr. Pomeroy and his connections."

Mr. Kelvin smiled grimly at the idea of Olive Deane getting more information about himself out of Jack Pomeroy than that individual might be inclined to give; but, as we have already seen, Olive never troubled herself with any such unnecessary details.

"If women would but refrain from meddling with matters that they don't understand, what a blessing it would be!" said Kelvin to himself.

"What was that you said just now about Olive and this fellow Pomeroy?" he asked, presently.

"Why, simply this: that I rather fancy Olive has contracted a penchant in that quarter. Something has given me that idea, but I may be quite mistaken."

"Of course she is old enough to choose for herself," he said, "and, as a rule, I think Olive is quite capable of taking care of her own interests: but if she should ever fall in love, I should like it to be with a man that one knows something about, and not with a mere adventurer."

"I can't help thinking that you are a little too hard on Mr. Pomeroy. It is a long time since I was so taken with any one as I was with him. A modest, sensible, well-informed young man I set him down as, and a gentleman withal, or else I don't know what a gentleman is."

"I suppose we men of law see with different spectacles from anybody else," said Matthew. "Suspicion is part of our stock-in-trade."

"I was certainly very much taken with Mr. Pomeroy," returned Mrs. Kelvin; "but at the same time my suspicion with regard to Olive made me interest myself more in his case than I should otherwise have done."

Mrs. Kelvin was not a woman to readily abandon any point that she had set her mind on carrying. Before bidding her son goodnight, she won from him a promise that he would do his best to obtain for Mr. Pomeroy the coveted situation.

Olive Deane was quite aware that her cousin would be greatly annoyed when he should come to ascertain what had been done during his absence, and she wisely left to his mother the task of telling him. Certainly she would have been anything but satisfied--anything but pleased--had she heard the conversation between her aunt and her cousin. The reference to a possible liking on her part for Pomeroy would have touched her pride to the quick. Very, very different was the feeling at work deep down in her heart.

Mrs. Kelvin, in fact, had been altogether mistaken with regard to the reasons which had induced Olive to accept the situation of governess to Lady Dudgeon's children. Olive had no option but to accept it--or felt that she had not. When Lady Dudgeon made her the offer, and when her aunt said, "It would be a capital situation for you, and were I you I should certainly accept it," Olive felt that she was not at liberty to do otherwise--not at liberty to live an idle life any longer. She had always given her aunt to understand that she was merely taking a few weeks' rest before looking out for another situation. Here was an excellent situation ready to her hand. How was it possible that she should refuse it?

And yet--and yet no one but herself knew how bitter it was to her to have to quit that roof; no one but herself knew how infinitely sweet to her had been those few weeks of sojourn with her cousin and her aunt! She had loved Matthew Kelvin with an undivided love from the time when, as girl and boy, they had played together. It was a love that had grown with her growth, and had rooted itself more firmly in her heart with each passing year.

She was clear-sighted enough to know that never since the time of that brief, romantic episode at Redcar, when she had had him all to herself for a blissful fortnight, had Matthew Kelvin felt for her anything warmer than a mere cousinly, or, at the most, a quiet, brotherly affection. She was sufficiently versed in worldly knowledge to be aware that the chances that she, a poor governess, neither very young nor very handsome, should ever become the wife of her ambitious, well-to-do cousin were about as remote as it was possible for them to be. And yet, for all that, a dim, faint hope had always held possession of her heart--so dim and so faint, that she herself seemed to be hardly aware of its existence--that among the unknown chances and changes of the future, that out of the involvement and evolution of the great unrehearsed drama of life, with its unforeseen exits and entrances, such a happy climax might somehow--she could not tell how--be brought about.

She had got into the way of looking upon her cousin as a man not likely to marry. If this view of his character struck the foundation from her own hopes, it seemed to preclude fear from any other quarter. When, therefore, Matthew told her the story of his love for, and rejection by, Eleanor Lloyd, it came upon her with all the force of an astounding revelation. Happily there seemed no likelihood of Miss Lloyd altering her determination not to accept Mr. Kelvin; therefore, as far as she--Olive--was concerned, she would not look upon the campaign as entirely lost even now.

Many a husband has been won through his rejection by a rival. Men at such times are prone to seek the first pleasant shelter that offers itself to them. They want to lie quiet and heal them of their wounds; and there are plenty of women in the world ready to act the part of physician to the wounds inflicted by another, provided only that the wounded knight will agree to wear no other gage than theirs in time to come.

Such a physician would Olive gladly have become, rather than lose her knight, if he would but have consented to such a method of treatment. But Mr. Kelvin was no soft-hearted swain who thinks the world is no longer good for anything because a certain pair of white arms refuse to coil themselves round his neck. It is true that he had told her of his wounds, but he had expressed no desire to be healed of them; he had given Olive no encouragement whatever to offer herself as his nurse. He had expressed himself very bitterly with regard to the person who had so wounded him, and Olive had done her best to intensify that bitterness; but that was all. She felt that she was not one step nearer the capture of her cousin's heart than on that day, now several weeks ago, when he had first told her of his love for Miss Lloyd. But was that love really dead? Was it not, unknown to himself, still smouldering in his heart, ready at the slightest provocation to burst into a flame tenfold more ardent than before?

She felt instinctively that no other woman would ever become the wife of Matthew Kelvin so long as Eleanor Lloyd remained unmarried; and this feeling it was that was at the bottom of the plot for inducing Pomeroy to make love to the latter. That dangerous rival once out of the way for ever, Olive's ambitious scheme would not look so entirely hopeless as it did just now.

Chagrined as Olive was at having to quit her cousin's roof with the hidden purpose of her life no nearer its accomplishment than before, she yet acknowledged to herself that she would much rather go to Stammars than anywhere else. She had all a woman's curiosity to see that other woman about whom she had been told so much, and who had been in her thoughts, day and night, ever since she had heard the first mention of her name. At Stammars, too, she would have an opportunity of seeing Matthew now and then when he should come there to visit Sir Thomas on business. Then, she would be on the spot, ready, with deft fingers, to tie up any threads of her plot which might be accidentally broken, or to hasten Pomeroy's footsteps along the path she wanted him to tread, should it prove needful to do so. In any case, she need not stay there longer than was necessary for the carrying out of her own views. At any time she could pick a quarrel with Lady Dudgeon, throw up her situation, and go back for a while to the shelter of her aunt's roof.

Five days after her cousin's return, Olive Deane found herself duly installed in her new home, and two days after that Mr. John Pomeroy made his appearance at Stammars.

Mr. Kelvin, despite his irritation and chagrin at what had taken place during his absence, did not fail to carry out the promise he had made to his mother. The situation was still open, and Sir Thomas at once promised it to Pomeroy. Then Kelvin wrote to the latter, telling him when he would be expected at Stammars, but not in any way alluding to the loan of fifty pounds. As a matter of course, on passing through Pembridge, Gerald called to see Kelvin, but the lawyer was not at home--purposely. He had done his duty by his mother, but he had no wish to see the man who had caused him so much annoyance; he only hoped that Pomeroy would do nothing to disgrace his recommendation. For the present he washed his hands of him.

Mr. Kelvin had not been without his own thoughts all this time as to the course he had taken at Olive's suggestion in keeping from Miss Lloyd the contents of the sealed packet sent him by Miss Bellamy. He was not usually a man whose mind vacillated with regard to any of his intentions or purposes. "There's no shilly-shallying about Matthew," his mother would often say. "When he sees his point he goes straight at it: fire and water would hardly keep him back."

But in this matter of the sealed packet he did shilly-shally painfully, blowing hot and cold by turns, making up his mind one day that he would tell everything, and being as stedfastly determined the next that he would do nothing of the kind. He was not unaware of the meanness of what he was doing; it was altogether foreign to his notions of right and wrong, to act with anything but the strictest honour towards his clients, rich or poor. Still, about this particular case there was something so exceptional as to remove it out of the ordinary category of purely professional business--that is what he said to himself: but the real reason was that his own feelings were more deeply interested than they had ever been before. Under such circumstances it is by no means difficult to argue oneself into the belief that although the action on which we are engaged may not be positively meritorious, it is, at least, one from which no one will suffer. "I am only doing Miss Lloyd a negative wrong," Kelvin would sometimes say to himself. "If anything, she ought to thank me for keeping the secret from her as long as possible." Having put off the revelation for so long a time, he shrank more than ever from telling her now. One morning on getting up he would swear to himself that he had never loved Eleanor Lloyd as he loved her now: next morning he would vow that he had never hated any human being as he hated her. He had been rendered very wretched by Miss Lloyd's rejection of his suit; but with all his unhappiness he had never till now lost his own sense of self-respect: not that he would have admitted for a single moment that he had so lost it. He made believe, even to himself, that it was still as safely in his possession as ever it had been. But the acute consciousness of its loss which came over him at odd times--only to be at once thrust into the background with a firm hand--by no means tended to mitigate the intensity of his determination to be avenged, in one form or another, on the woman to whom he owed this strange new feeling, which not seldom made him shrink within himself, as though he were in reality little better than a whipped cur.

Stammars, the residence of Sir Thomas Dudgeon, was, as a family mansion, still quite in its infancy, being something under twenty years old. Sir Thomas had stuck to the old house as long as it was safe for him to do so; but when, during a night of terrible storm, a great part of it was blown about his ears, he began to see that it would not be advisable to delay his removal much longer. So, on a windy knoll about half a mile from the old house, the new mansion was built. It was built with all modern conveniences and appliances. The rooms were large and lofty, and had huge plate-glass windows with venetian blinds. Round about were gardens, and shrubberies, and hothouses, with a view beyond over miles of pleasant Hertfordshire scenery. Everybody expressed themselves as being enchanted with the house, and yet everybody felt that it lacked one essential. There was no homelike comfort about it. Whether it was that the rooms were too big and the fire-places too few; whether it was that the house was built so high above the surrounding country as to be exposed to every wind that blew, and so had never been able to get itself warmed through; or from whatever other cause it might arise, certain it is that Stammars never seemed otherwise than cold and comfortless. Each room in the house seemed to have its own particular draught, while the wind seemed to be for ever playing at hide-and-seek up and down the great wide corridors and staircases, banging every now and then a bedroom door, or creeping with snake-like motion under any piece of carpet that had not been firmly nailed down.

The old mansion of Stammars had dated back for upwards of four centuries, and had originally been the home of the Fyzackerleys, one of the most ancient families in the county. So ancient, indeed, had the Fyzackerleys at length become that they had died out, and the estate had been brought to the hammer. The fortunate purchaser was the present Sir Thomas's grandfather, at that time a sugar refiner in the Minories, and some five years subsequently Lord Mayor of London. While filling the latter office he had the good fortune to be knighted, and later still by two or three years he was created a baronet. Why such an honour had been conferred on the worthy but obscure sugar refiner, no one seemed to know. There was some question about it at the time, and certain people went so far as to whisper that the baronetcy had been given in return for a loan of twenty thousand pounds made to a certain august personage, who would have found repayment of the same a somewhat inconvenient matter. But such a report was probably the invention of pure malice. Be that as it may, the sugar refiner took his title and his money down to Stammars; and there he died, and there in due course he was buried. After him came his son, and then, in the ordinary course of events, his grandson, the present Sir Thomas Dudgeon and the third baronet of that name.

Sir Thomas, at this time, was close upon sixty years of age, and was a short-statured, podgy man, with white hair, and a red, good-natured face. He almost invariably wore a black tail-coat, black waistcoat, pepper-and-salt trousers, and shoes. He wore starched check neckcloths, and pointed collars that nearly touched his ears. His hats were always of fluffy, white beaver and as they were very rarely brushed, they gave him a certain shaggy and unkempt appearance. He had a trick of whistling under his breath when he had nothing better to do, and of jingling the keys and loose change in his pocket. It was a peculiarity of Sir Thomas that his shoes always creaked when he walked. No one could tell why every pair of shoes that he had should do so, but they did. At Stammars everybody was so accustomed to this creaking that if by any possibility he had become possessed of a noiseless pair, his family would certainly have been alarmed: they would have taken it as an omen that something dreadful was about to happen. It was told in Pembridge as a good thing that when Sir Thomas was presented to his Sovereign, his shoes creaked so loudly that the eyes of all the great functionaries were turned on him in horror; but that the little man backed smilingly out of the royal presence, blandly unconscious of the consternation he had excited. When we first make his acquaintance he had just been elected member for Pembridge, in place of the late Mr. Rackstraw, who had represented that borough for more than twenty years. Parliament would meet in February, when the family would go up to town, and Sir Thomas would take his oaths and his seat, and do his best to justify the hopes of his Pembridgian supporters, that he would speedily become one of the shining lights of his country's senate.

Lady Dudgeon was a tall, large-boned woman, some half dozen years younger than her husband. She had a loud, rough-edged voice, and a magisterial cross-examining manner. She was never happier than when laying down the law to some of her servants or dependents, or scolding them for an infringement of one or another of the innumerable rules and regulations with which she strove to fence round the daily lives of all those over whom she had any control. Had she been a man, Lady Dudgeon would infallibly have developed into a Justice of the Peace, and as such have been a terror to all the evil-doers of the neighbourhood. With two exceptions, everybody at Stammars, her husband included, stood in awe of her. Those exceptions were her eldest daughter, Sophia, aged thirteen; and Eleanor Lloyd.

Lady Dudgeon had only two children living--the aforesaid Sophia, and Caroline, who was two years younger than her sister. For their behoof it was that an engagement had been entered into with Olive Deane. They were two handsome, resolute girls, full of high spirits and mischief who looked upon governesses as their natural enemies. Three ladies of this profession they had already worried into resigning their position at Stammars, and they had looked forward with considerable glee to worrying Miss Deane in like manner.

It was on a complaint from Madame Ribaud, who was governess number two, respecting some terrible act of mutiny, that Sophia obtained a signal victory over her mother, and from that time she had never let go the advantage thus gained. In consequence of Madame's complaint, Lady Dudgeon had taken Sophia by the hand, and had led her away with the avowed intention of shutting her up in a certain dark closet under the stairs, and there leaving her to do penance during the whole of a long summer's day--a day when the sun was shining and all the birds in the shrubbery were calling to her to go out of doors and be one with them.

"Mamma, you are not going to shut me up in that horrid hole?" said Sophia, when the door had been flung open for her to enter.

"I certainly am going to shut you up here," said Lady Dudgeon, with a portentous shake of her head.

"You are going to have a dinner-party on Friday," said Sophia, with determination. "In the middle of the dinner I will walk into the room and tell everybody that you wear a wig and have five false teeth!"

Lady Dudgeon glared down into the girl's bold face as if she could hardly believe the evidence of her ears. What Sophia had just stated she had hitherto fondly believed to be a secret known to her husband and her maid alone.

"You naughty, vile girl," she stammered out. "I will send you right away from home to a school on the Continent, and you shall not come back any more until you are quite grown up."

"All right, mamma; I'll go," said the undaunted girl; "but I'll write to everybody by post and tell them about the wig and the teeth;" and, as Lady Dudgeon knew, her daughter was just the girl to carry out the threat. Her ladyship was puzzled. "Look here, mamma," said Sophy: "between you and me, Ribaud's nothing but an old stupid, and no more fit to be a governess than I am. You take my advice, and send her about her business. I'm going to get my rope and have a jolly skip round the laurels."

And almost before her ladyship knew what had happened, she had been well hugged, and found herself alone, staring blankly into the closet under the stairs.

A few days later Madame Ribaud received a month's notice, and Lady Dudgeon never attempted extreme measures with Sophia after that time.

It is not improbable that she had this very incident in her mind during her first interview with Miss Deane after the latter's arrival at Stammars. "I place them entirely in your hands," said her ladyship, in reference to her two girls. "Exercise whatever discipline over them you may think best, only don't box their ears, and don't trouble me. If you find that they are becoming your master instead of you being theirs, don't come and complain in the expectation that I shall assist you to maintain an authority that you are not strong enough to keep in your own hands. Should such a contingency arise, it would be better for you to resign your situation at once."

For the first two or three days all went tolerably well, but hardly to Olive's satisfaction. There were no overt signs of rebellion, but the girls seemed unaccountably stupid. Whether their stupidity arose from inattention, from weakness of memory, or from a natural lack of intelligence, she was for some time at a loss to judge. But, by-and-by, she began to suspect that this stupidity was merely an assumption on their part purposely to annoy her, and that all the time they were laughing at her in their sleeves. But at such a game as that, Olive knew that her patience was far more than a match for theirs, and so it turned out. Miss Deane seemed so quiet and easy, that there was evidently no fun to be got out of her without trying something more practical than stumbling over one's French verbs, or making mistakes in the spelling of one's copies. Thus it fell out on a certain morning when Miss Deane was going out for a walk, that she found it impossible to get her arms into the sleeves of her waterproof On examination, it was found that the sleeves had been sewn up at the wrist. Miss Deane hung the waterproof up without a word, and took off her bonnet. Then she said, "I think, young ladies, we will not go for our usual walk this morning." Sophy and Carry, half frightened and half defiant, were nudging each other and making believe that it was great fun.

When they got back into the schoolroom, said Miss Deane: "As you young ladies appear to be so fond of playing off practical jokes on other people, you cannot reasonably object to one being played off on you. You will, if you please, write out in detail and learn by heart, pages twenty-five to twenty-nine of the irregular verbs in your French Instruction Book. And you will not leave the room till you can repeat the lesson to my satisfaction."

The two girls made a face at each other, but said nothing. It was not the first time they had had a big task set them for a punishment, but they had always contrived to win the day either by force or stratagem, and they did not doubt their ability to do so in the present case.

By luncheon time they had got the lesson written out. It was not pleasant to have to sacrifice their luncheon, but they were prepared to submit to that: dinner would make up for everything. They did not expect that Miss Deane would let them go down to dinner as usual, but they did expect that she would go down herself, as Madame Ribaud had done in similar cases. When this had happened, one of the housemaids had always supplied them surreptitiously with a basket of provisions, which they had drawn up to their window by means of a cord, and had afterwards feasted on in secret. No dinners had ever tasted half so sweet. Thus provisioned, they had been able to set Madame Ribaud at defiance, who, indeed, had never the heart to extend their quarantine beyond the usual hour for tea, and would then set her rebels free, with a little sigh and an ominous shake of her head. As it had happened before, so would it fall out again, thought the girls; but they did not know Olive Deane.

Between luncheon and dinner-time they dawdled over their lesson, skimming it carelessly over a few times, but employing themselves more in drawing caricatures than in anything else. After a time the dinner-bell rang--they dined early at Stammars when there was no company--but apparently Miss Deane took no notice.

"Yes, I heard it; but I don't want any dinner to-day. I am going to stay here with you."

The girls looked at each other. Carry's eyes flushed with tears; but Sophy clenched her sharp white teeth, and said something under her breath. All the same, she was as hungry as a young wolf. Both the girls, in fact, were blessed with fine, healthy appetites, which they took care to indulge on every possible occasion; and now their appetites cried out in a way that it was almost impossible to resist.

Candles were lighted, and the afternoon wore itself wearily on till tea-time came round. Anxious eyes were turned on Miss Deane. Surely she would go down to tea; if not, what could she be made of? But no, Miss Deane merely changed one book for another, and went on with her reading, totally unconcerned.

Carry snivelled a little in secret, but Sophy looked as fierce as a young brigand. Presently Sophy wrote a little note, and flung it across to her sister. "If she doesn't let us out soon, I'll kill her and roast her for supper."

This made poor Carry tremble violently. She fully believed in her sister's ability to carry out her terrible threat. And so another wretched hour doled itself wearily out.

Sophy's wolf was becoming very ravenous indeed. She saw clearly that her enemy was too strong for her. By-and-by she tossed a scrap of paper to her sister, on which she had written the words: "It's no use. She carries too many guns for us"--this was a favourite phrase of her father. "I'm going to learn my task, and I advise you to do the same."

Three-quarters of an hour later, Sophy walked up to Miss Deane and held out her book in silence. Then she went through her task without a single mistake. She took back the book, made Miss Deane an elaborate curtsey, and marched out of the room with the dignified air of a young duchess.

Carry did not manage so well. She broke down when about half-way through, and burst into tears. Olive quietly shut the book, drew the girl to her and kissed her, and then bade her run off and get some supper.

CHAPTER VIII.

GERALD AT STAMMARS.

A pleasant morning-room at Stammars. Lady Dudgeon is busy with her correspondence. To her enter Sir Thomas and Mr. Pomeroy. The former has a volume of Hansard under his arm, the latter carries a roll of manuscript. Lady Dudgeon lays down her pen and looks up.

"There is no fear, I hope, Mr. Pomeroy," she says, "that Sir Thomas's letter of thanks to his supporters will be too late for the next issue of the 'Pembridge Gazette'?"

"Have you got the speech ready that Sir Thomas is to deliver at the Farmer's Dinner on Tuesday next?"

"And you doubtless found that Mr. Pomeroy had succeeded in faithfully reproducing your views and ideas with regard to the various important topics on which you are desirous of addressing our friends on Tuesday next?"

"That is nonsense, dear. No one but yourself must be the exponent of your own ideas. Mr. Pomeroy's share in the transaction is a purely mechanical one--that of finding words wherewith to clothe the thoughts of a profoundly original mind. Am I not right, Mr. Pomeroy?"

"So be it," said Sir Thomas. "Anything for a quiet life. But I'll be hanged if I ever knew before that I had such a lot of ideas."

"That is just what I have said all along, my dear. If you had never succeeded in getting into Parliament, what would have become of the splendid abilities, of the choice gifts of intellect, with which Nature has so liberally endowed you? They would simply have been wasted, and your country would have been so much the poorer by the loss of them."

"That is all very fine, your ladyship; but as for my splendid abilities--fudge! My abilities lie among my turnips and short-horns, and not in speechifying to a lot of fellows who laugh at me the moment my back is turned."

"I have not been your wife all these years, Sir Thomas, without being aware that you were born to be a landmark in your country's history."

Sir Thomas sighed deeply, jingled the change in his pocket, and looked out of the window. Presently he began to whistle under his breath.

Her ladyship folded and addressed a note with slow, mechanical precision. Turning to her husband, she said--

"You will have to be very industrious in order to get your speech off by heart in readiness for Tuesday's dinner."

"I shall indeed--more's the pity! I never could get my lessons off by heart when I was a school-boy, and it is not likely that I can take kindly to the task at my time of life."

"Now that your election is safe, there will be no necessity for you to speak, except on very rare occasions. There are too many empty-headed speakers, too many frothy orators, in Parliament already. All the more will your grand faculty of silence be invaluable to your country. We want men of profound thought, with the ability to express themselves in the fewest possible words. When once it is understood by the House that you are not a speaker, but a thinker, you cannot fail to be appreciated. Am I not right, Mr. Pomeroy?"

"Undoubtedly you are right, madam. The House will soon learn to appraise Sir Thomas at his proper value."

"You will be a man, dear, much sought for on committees. Your opinion will carry immense weight with it, because it will be so seldom expressed. There is a massive solidity of brain about you, such as few of your contemporaries can hope to rival."

"That's all very well; but don't forget to let me have a supply of lozenges on Tuesday. If I haven't a lozenge in my mouth while I'm speaking, I shall be sure to break down."

"The lozenges shall not be forgotten," said her ladyship. "I will make a note of it."

"And I shall want a spare handkerchief in my pocket. Something to fumble with, you know. I can't bear to be empty-handed when I'm speaking. So awkward, you know."

"Everything shall be attended to." Then, turning to Mr. Pomeroy, she added, "How delightful it is to note the little peculiarities of genius! Lozenges and a spare handkerchief for one; for another, an orange or a toothpick! When Sir Thomas's biography comes to be written, these little traits of character must not be forgotten."

Gerald (or, as we had better perhaps call him during his sojourn at Stammars, Jack Pomeroy) could never feel quite sure whether Lady Dudgeon in her own mind really believed her husband to be possessed of those superior qualities the presence of which she was continually striving to impress as an undoubted fact on the minds of all around her, or whether it was merely an effort on her part to blind people to the deficiencies of her very commonplace idol.

How was it possible, Jack often asked himself, that such a woman as Lady Dudgeon could be self-deceived in so simple a matter? On every other subject her ladyship was shrewd and clear-headed to a degree. She could scold her servants, or check her tradesmen's accounts; she could discuss the last fashion in bonnets, or the last bit of gossip anent a neighbour's shortcomings, as effectively and with as much relish as any middle-aged lady in the three kingdoms. And yet with regard to Sir Thomas she seemed so thoroughly in earnest, her admiration of him (while keeping the matrimonial yoke fixed tightly on his shoulders) seemed so genuine, that it was next to impossible to believe that she was merely acting a part in furtherance of certain hidden views of her own. It was a problem that Jack set himself to study from the day of his arrival at Stammars; but at the end of a month he found himself no nearer its solution than he had been at first.

Sir Thomas himself was by no means elated by the honour which the electors of Pembridge had thrust upon him. He felt it especially hard that he should have to leave the country, which he loved so much, and be obliged to mew himself up in London during the six pleasantest months of the year.

"What do I want with being M.P.?" he would often ask himself, with a sort of mild despair. "When a man has got his cows, and his sheep, and his grass crops, and his wheat to look after, as I have, what more can he want to make him happy? What a fool I must have been to let Matilda persuade me as she did! And then that speechifying! Ugh! Matilda may say what she likes, but I've not got what Cozzard calls 'the gift of the gab;' and if I had, there's far more talking done in the world now than there's any need for. If people would only work more and talk less, we should be all the better for it."

The "Cozzard" alluded to was Sir Thomas's factotum and chief business man in all inferior matters. Mr. Kelvin looked after his interests in matters superior. Cozzard was something more than a gamekeeper, without coming up to the modern notion of a bailiff. Being Sir Thomas's foster-brother, he could do and say things that nobody else would venture on, and was more in his master's confidence, and knew more of his master's secrets, than Lady Dudgeon herself.

In search of this faithful retainer, Sir Thomas bent his steps this morning towards the stables, after leaving his wife and Mr. Pomeroy. He found Cozzard in the harness-room, smoking a short black pipe and mending a fishing-rod: a spare, grizzled, hard-featured man, in a velveteen coat and gaiters, with an unmistakable something about him that spoke of horses, and dogs, and guns, and a free life in the woods and fields.

"Morning, Cozzard," said Sir Thomas. "I've just looked in to tell you that we're off to London next week."

"It's all through that confounded 'lection. I wish with all my heart that you'd lost it!"

"So do I wish with all my heart that I'd lost it--only I wouldn't for the world have her ladyship hear me say so."

"Lord! how we shall all miss you down here at the old place! But there! it seems months now since we saw you about the fields with your billycock on your head and your spud in your hand, or riding Gray Dapple from one farm to another, and all through that confounded 'lection. And now Gray Dapple's that fat for want of exercise she can hardly get out o' the stable door, and everything looks different since you took to them 'lectioneering ways."

"I should think you just was, Sir Thomas.--Why even old Granny Roper at the toll-bar says to me, only yesterday, says she: 'My snuff doesn't seem to have the right flavour now the squire's not here to dip his fingers in my box.'"

"The old girl said that, did she! I'll send her a quarter of a pound of the best rappee this very afternoon."

"Why the very dogs, Spot, and Ranger, and Lob, seem to miss you. I know they do. And poor old John Nutley as died t'other day--eighty and five weeks was his age--what were his last words? Why these: 'Give my respex to Sir Thomas,' says he, 'as has been a good master to me, and tell him as I should like to have seen him again afore going home. He would have shaken bands with me, I know he would, if he had been here.'"

"You were speechifying at Pembridge," said Cozzard sententiously, not without a touch of contempt in his voice.

Sir Thomas coughed and turned the subject. "What I want you to do," said he, "is to write me a long letter once a week while I'm away in London, telling me how everything is going on. Not but what I shall drop down and see you sometimes on a Saturday. I would come every week--it's not a long journey--only you know----," and Sir Thomas actually winked at Cozzard.

"That's just it. When I'm not busy at the House she will want me to go out with her. She doesn't like me to be gadding about by myself."

"You will write me the letter, won't you, Cozzard--a good long one every Saturday? You will tell me how the stock is getting on, and how the crops look, and give a look at the kitchen garden, and see that a couple of hampers of fresh vegetables are sent up to us every week, and----"

"But, Sir Thomas----!" pleaded Cozzard, with a visible lengthening of his thin visage. "I couldn't put down half that, not if I was to write all day on Sunday. Six lines is the most as ever I could manage, and then there mustn't be any long words in it."

"Then I'll tell you what you shall do: you shall get my god-daughter, Sally, to do the writing part. You tell her what to say, and she'll put it down all right and ship-shape, and I'll bring her a new silk gown when I come back from London. And now get Gray Dapple saddled, and find my favourite spud. You and I, Cozzard, will go round the farms this very morning."

It had been altogether a surprise to Pomeroy to find Miss Deane in the position of governess at Stammars. Was the coincidence of her being there at the same time as himself due altogether to accident, or was there some hidden purpose underlying it?--Was it, or was it not, connected in any way with the concealment by Kelvin of the contents of the sealed packet? And yet, how was it possible that Olive Deane could have any knowledge of the sealed packet? Matthew Kelvin was not a man who would be likely to take anyone into his confidence in such a matter. No; Miss Deane's presence at Stammars must evidently be set down as one of those fortuitous events which happen so often in real life; events which would seem as if they must have their origin in some set purpose or prearranged design, but which are in reality due to the merest accident.

"You did not expect to see me here, Mr. Pomeroy," said Olive with a smile, as she shook Jack's hand about an hour after his arrival at Stammars.

"When I saw you last, I had no idea whatever of coming here. Lady Dudgeon, knowing I was out of a situation, called on me some three days after your departure from Pembridge, and offered me the charge of her two daughters--a charge which I was glad to accept. When one has to work for one's daily bread, it does not do to be idle for too long a time."

"I have been used to idleness--to comparative idleness, that is--for so long a time that I am afraid it will go rather against the grain to settle down to any daily occupation."

"And yet it must be their very rarity which makes the idle hours of a busy man seem so peculiarly sweet." Then she turned the subject. "Miss Lloyd is away visiting in Leicestershire, and will not be back for about a week." This she said with her searching eyes bent full upon him.

"So I have been told already," said Jack, drily: but he could not prevent a little tell-tale colour from mounting to his cheek.

Nothing more was said at that time, nor was Miss Lloyd's name mentioned again between them till after that young lady's return.

Jack was very eager that she should return. He chafed and fumed at her absence, but why he should do so he could not have told anyone, unless it were that he thought he could have spent his time much more pleasantly and profitably to himself than in cataloguing the books, and writing the letters, of an unfledged country M.P. But having advanced so far in his enterprise, he was by no means minded to give it up. He would await the return of Eleanor Lloyd even though she should be two months away instead of a single week. He had not yet decided as to what his line of action should be when he should meet her. All that he left to time and circumstance: at present he asked only that he might see this girl about whom so much had been told him, and towards whom he stood in a relationship so peculiar and uncommon.

Always a great walker, Jack found his greatest pleasure, since he had come down to Stammars, in long, solitary rambles along the pleasant Hertfordshire roads, and the more lonely the road, the better he was pleased. As he was posting along at the rate of four miles an hour one afternoon towards the end of January, swinging his walking-stick, and watching the flying clouds, his ear was suddenly caught by a low, plaintive cry that evidently came from somewhere close at hand. He stood still to listen. Presently he heard it again, evidently the wailing cry of a very young child. He looked round him on every side, but there was not a human being nor even a house visible from where he was standing. Once again the cry came, this time louder than before. His eyes, drawn by the sound, concentrated themselves on the root of a large tree, of a tree which grew out of the hedge and overshadowed the road. Between the footpath and the hedge was a tiny watercourse, now covered with a thin coat of ice. Over this Jack strode, and began to peer about in the hedge bottom. He was not long in discovering the origin of the cry that he had heard. In a sort of tiny recess formed in part by the gnarled roots of the tree, and in part by the close-woven shoots of the hedge, lay a child--a child of apparently some six months old, with a tiny, pinched face, and dark, serious eyes, that gazed up wonderingly at Pomeroy for a moment and then filled with tears.

"A pleasant predicament truly!" muttered Jack to himself. "There must surely be somebody belonging to it close by."

He swung himself up on to the root of the tree, and took a long, steady look round. The point where he now was was exactly on the crown of a small hill. Right and left of him the road dipped down into a valley with bare, treeless fields on either side. Nowhere was there a human being visible: had there been one he could hardly have failed to see it. The child had evidently been deserted--left there to be found by chance, or otherwise to die.

When Jack had satisfied his mind on this point he dropped quickly from his perch, flung his stick over the hedge, picked up the child as tenderly as he knew how, stepped lightly across the brook, and set off on his way back to Stammars--a three miles' walk. He felt very awkward indeed, and was possessed by an acute sense of the ludicrous appearance he must have presented had anyone been there to see him, which fortunately there was not. The child seemed wrapped up warmly enough, its outside covering being an old black skirt of some cheap material. Whether it were a boy or a girl, Jack had no skill to judge, nor was that a point which had much interest for him. That strange, serious look in its eyes troubled him a little; but when, after it had finished its examination of him, a wintry smile flickered over its little white face, while it seemed to nestle nearer to him, he could not keep his arms from folding themselves still more closely round it.

The difficulty that now presented itself to Jack's mind was how to dispose of the child. It would never do to take the little waif to Stammars: Lady Dudgeon would have been horrified: and yet Jack shrank instinctively from the thought of leaving it to the tender mercies of the workhouse authorities, although that was clearly the proper thing to do. He was still debating the question, when he heard the noise of wheels behind him. He turned instinctively, and to his great dismay saw a pony phaeton coming rapidly along the road, driven by a youth in livery, beside whom was seated a lady--whether young or old Jack could not yet tell--but evidently well wrapped up in furs. The hot colour rushed to his face. What should he do? What indeed could he do? There was no bye-lane up which he could slink--no stile through which he could wriggle, and so put the shelter of the thick hedge between himself and the road; and it was quite evident that he could not leave the child on the footpath and take to his heels. All that he could do was to pull his hat savagely over his brows, set his teeth, and march stubbornly on, as if it were the most natural and proper thing in the world for a gentleman in a fashionable overcoat and kid gloves to be strolling along a country road in the middle of the afternoon, hugging a baby--and not a nicely dressed baby either--and acting generally the part of a nursemaid.

"I hope she's an old lady--a grandmother, or at least a mother," said Jack to himself in desperation. "In that case, it mightn't be a bad thing to appeal to her, and tell her how I came to pick up this pitiful little vagabond. It's quite evident that I can't walk into Pembridge like this."

But, as it happened, the lady who caused poor Jack to quake so terribly was neither a grandmother nor a mother. She was, in fact, no other than Eleanor Lloyd, who was on her way back to Stammars a couple of days before she was expected there. One of the children having been taken suddenly ill at the house where she had been staying, she had hurried her departure. She had quitted the train a couple of stations short of Pembridge in order to call upon another friend, and it was in this other friend's phaeton that Miss Lloyd was now being conveyed to Stammars.

As the phaeton drove past, Pomeroy, struggling gallantly on, with a very red face, could not resist shooting a little glance out of the corners of his eyes at the occupant of the carriage. She was young and had blonde hair--so much he could see; and then he set his eyes stubbornly before him and would not look again. He could see too that she gave him one quick comprehensive glance in passing. He thought the worst was over, and began to breathe again. But hardly had the phaeton passed him a score yards when a small hamper that had been tied up under the back seat slipped, and fell to the ground. Unconscious of her loss, the lady drove serenely on. What was to be done? Unless Jack should call out, the hamper would be left behind in the road; and if he did call out they would drive back, and then all concealment on his part would be impossible. "I'm in for it now and no mistake!" he muttered to himself, and then he called at the top of his voice.

By the time the phaeton had been driven back and the hamper picked up, Jack, who had been walking steadily forward all the time, was within half a dozen yards of the lady. She turned to thank him, but he could see that all the time she was speaking her eyes were fixed in a sort of mild surprise on the burden in his arms.

"If you are going my way, perhaps you will allow me to help you along the road," she said.

"You are very kind, and I will gladly avail myself of your offer," he replied. "But first a word of explanation. I found this little waif in the hedge bottom about half a mile from here, evidently deserted. Of course I could not leave it there; but now that I have brought it away I am really at a loss to know what to do with it."

"Deserted, did you say?" exclaimed Miss Lloyd, and she was out of the phaeton in a moment. "Poor, poor little darling!" and before Jack knew what had happened, he found himself relieved of his burden. Miss Lloyd's next act was to stoop and kiss the child. When she looked up, her lovely blue eyes were brimmed with tears, but a half-smile still dimpled the corners of her mouth. Pomeroy vowed to himself that never in the whole course of his life had he seen anything half so charming.

Then they got into the phaeton, Jack sitting behind, and Miss Lloyd still holding the baby.

"What a cruel thing to do!" she said. "Who would believe that there could be such hard hearts in this beautiful world!"

Jack did not answer, but his heart gave a little sigh. "What a darling she is!" he thought. "I wonder whether Eleanor Lloyd is half as pretty. And yet, why wonder, for what is Eleanor Lloyd to me, or I to Eleanor Lloyd?"

He could not keep his eyes off her, and Miss Lloyd could not keep hers off the baby. "If it were a duchess's child she couldn't take to it more kindly," said Jack to himself. "What strange creatures women are!"

Presently Miss Lloyd turned with a bright look in her eye. "How good it was of you to pick up the child, and bring it away with you!"

"Under the circumstances, I don't see what else I could have done," said Pomeroy, simply.

"Many people would have left the child where they found it, and have satisfied themselves with telling the inmates of the nearest house of their discovery."

"That is a plan I never thought of," said Jack, with a smile, "or else I should very likely have adopted it."

"In any case, now that I have saddled myself with the young shaver, I'm quite at a loss to know what to do with him."

"Do with him, indeed!" exclaimed Miss Lloyd. "Don't you know, sir, that it's a little girl?"

"I certainly didn't know anything of the kind," said the crest-fallen Jack. "But at that age they are all so much alike."

"Ah, you gentlemen are very ignorant of many things." Then she added, "I suppose it would never do to take the child to Stammars."

"To Stammars!" exclaimed Jack, in astonishment. "That is the place where I am living at present."

"Hardly that. My name is John Pomeroy, and I am only Sir Thomas's new secretary."

Pomeroy did not answer. He was confounded. But through him there shot a strange, rapturous thrill, such as he had never felt before. "I wish we were going to travel together for a thousand miles instead of three!" was the unspoken thought in his heart. "This is she whom I have secretly longed to see ever since I was quite a boy. Her name itself had always a strange fascination for me. And now I see her and know her. If there be any wit in my brain, any power of pleading in my tongue, any strength of purpose in my heart--then shall this sweet creature become my wife!"

"I think," said Miss Lloyd, "that for the present, at least, we could not do better than place this little darling under the care of Mrs. Nixon, the wife of the under gardener at Stammars. She is a mother herself, and will treat it kindly. We shall then have time to think about its future. It is very singular that you and I should have met thus. When I passed you on the road I was certainly puzzled at first to make out what it was that you were carrying," she added, with a smile. "But when I saw what it really was, I thought that you were perhaps doing it for a wager. Such things have been done, I daresay. But to do what you did out of pure compassion, was very nice of you indeed."

CHAPTER IX.

FOUND.

On the eve of his departure for Pembridge, Gerald Warburton had promised Ambrose Murray that immediately after his return he would consult with him as to the steps which it would be advisable to take in furtherance of that quest on which the mind of the elder man was so firmly bent, but which to the younger one looked, at that time, so thoroughly hopeless. The momentary glimpse which they obtained of Jacoby while standing on the platform of Welwyn Station, happening just then, came like an apt and singular confirmation of the story told by Murray. It acted as a spur to Gerald's flagging purpose, and would have served as an additional incentive to Murray, had any such been needed, to press forward unflinchingly towards the end he had in view. From that day forward no one could accuse Gerald of any want of enthusiasm for the cause he had adopted as his own. He put his hand to the plough, and he never looked backward again.

The first, and perhaps the most difficult, move in the game they had set themselves to play, had been solved for them by the merest accident. Jacoby was still alive. There was no need for them to trouble themselves further on that score. The next move, and one hardly less difficult than the first one, was to find out where Jacoby was now living; and the question that Gerald at once set himself to answer was this: What is the likeliest and readiest mode of discovering the whereabouts of this man?

Among the papers which had come into the hands of Miss Bellamy at the death of Ambrose Murray's wife, were certain verbatim accounts of the trial for the Tewkesbury murder. These papers Miss Bellamy had carefully preserved, and they were now handed over by her to Gerald, who proceeded to read them carefully through three or four times, by which means he made himself master of all the details of the case as they had presented themselves at the trial. A certain Mr. Frodsham had been Murray's counsel on that occasion, and very admirable had been the speech, and very cogent the arguments, employed by him in his attempt to prove the innocence of his client--an attempt which, as we have already seen, did not succeed. To Gerald, turning the whole case over in his mind, it seemed that the first thing to do was to find out this Mr. Frodsham, see him, consult with him, tell him in confidence of Murray's escape, and ascertain whether, after so long a time, his experience could suggest any feasible plan for proving, or even attempting to prove, the innocence of a client for whose sake, twenty years ago, all his eloquence had been exerted in vain.

In setting about the task which he had thus taken in hand, and which he was thoroughly determined to go through with, Gerald did not expect to derive much assistance from Murray himself, nor, in fact, did he. Murray was altogether too unpractical; he had been shut up too long from the busy, struggling world around him to enable him to cope with it face to face, or to grope his way through such a blind man's maze as his own case necessarily involved, at every step of which a knot would have to be disentangled, or a difficulty of some kind encountered and overcome. He could asseverate earnestly enough that Jacoby was the murderer, and that the sole object for which he now lived was to bring the crime home to him; but when asked by what means that was to be done, he was like a child who had lost itself in some dark place. He could only cling to Gerald, and ask him to think, to devise, to scheme for him. "I have faith--faith the most intense," he would sometimes say, "that the world will know me for what I am before I die. Why else was my reason given back to me? why else was a way of escape shown me? why else am I here, except to prove this thing? And, oh, Gerald! why has an over-ruling Intelligence sent to me you, the son of my lost darling's oldest friend--you, with your kind heart, and clear brain, and knowledge of the world and its ways--except to assist me, to give to my forlorn weakness that strong helping hand, without which I can do nothing! Other men might ask: Why should I help this escaped lunatic? Why should I trouble myself about this criminal madman, on whose head the guilt of blood still rests? But not you--not you! You and I, Gerald, have been mysteriously drawn together by the bonds of an invisible sympathy. We have been brought together, not that we may be to each other as mere touch-and-go acquaintances, but for the working out of some hidden purpose. For good or for evil, the issues of your life and mine are inextricably mingled; like streams from two distant sources, they have met, never again to be disunited, till they fall into the far-off Hidden Sea!"

Mr. Frodsham had been too well known in the legal profession for Gerald to experience much difficulty in obtaining answers to his inquiries respecting that gentleman. It did not take him long to ascertain that Mr. Frodsham had been dead for several years. But from the same source whence he derived this positive information, came another piece of information not quite so positive, which, being of no apparent use, was thrown in gratis, as it were, to the effect that although Mr. Frodsham was dead, Mr. Peter Byrne, who had been his confidential clerk for many years, was supposed to be still alive. To Gerald this extra piece of information seemed of no use whatever. His idea in wanting to see Mr. Frodsham had been, not to obtain facts--those he had already--but to seek his advice, his counsel, perchance his assistance. But of what use or assistance Mr. Frodsham's confidential clerk could be to him, he could not for the life of him see. Still, as it behoved him to neglect no source of information, however trivial or apparently unimportant it might seem to be, and as he was rather nonplussed for the time being as to what was the next step which it behoved him to take, he decided to have this Mr. Byrne hunted up, if it were possible to find him, and then see him in person, on the very faint chance that something might be elicited from him which would tend to show what line of action it would be advisable to adopt next.

Five days later Gerald received Mr. Byrne's address by post. It was No. 2, Amelia Terrace, Claridge Road, Battersea, which place Gerald next day made it his business to go in search of.

Amelia Terrace was in a desolate locality enough, being shut out from the world by wide intervening stretches of market garden, very useful and very productive, no doubt, but which seemed to lack every pleasant attribute with which a garden is usually associated in one's mind. The particular house that Gerald was in search of was one of twenty others exactly similar to it in pattern and design. Little shabby-looking six-roomed houses, the cheap stucco with which their fronts were plastered peeling off already in great ugly blotches, the yard of "garden" on to which their windows looked protected by cheap railings, broken away in many places, and thick with rust, or twisted out of shape in others. Inside, the rooms were close and frowsy, with doors and windows that in some cases would not shut, and in others left crevices that in this wintry weather had to be stuffed up with rags, or old newspapers, or even here and there with an old bonnet. At one corner was a flaring gin-palace, and at the other a huckster's shop, only its proprietor did not call it a shop, but an "emporium."

Yes, Mr. Byrne was at home, said the slatternly servant who answered Gerald's knock at No. 2.

Before more could be said, some one called out from the parlour, "Walk in, sir, walk in, if it's me you are in want of. I saw you when you were over the way, but I didn't know that you were looking for No. 2."

Gerald accepted the invitation and walked into the parlour, a shabbily-furnished little room, pervaded by a vile odour of stale tobacco-smoke. Mr. Byrne, in red morocco slippers, a Turkish cap, and a faded dressing gown of a flowery Chinese sort of pattern, rose from the sofa to receive him.

Peter Byrne was a man of sixty, but looked quite ten years younger than that age, thanks to his dyed hair, his artificial teeth, and the faintest possible suspicion of rouge, without which, when got up for the day, he never ventured abroad. But so deftly and artfully was the hare's foot applied, that not one out of a dozen of his acquaintances accepted as other than genuine that pleasant, healthy colour which, whatever the season might be, Peter Byrne's cheeks never failed to display. He was rather under than over the medium height, was lightly built, and was very active for his age. His head was large, and somewhat disproportionate to the size of his body. He had large, but regular features, and had doubtless thought himself very good-looking when a young man; but the lines of his face were now coarse and fleshy, and seemed to indicate a too free indulgence in the good things of the table, and possibly too great a fondness for after-dinner potations. He had clear grey eyes, with a keenness and a steadfastness in them that Gerald liked; and yet there seemed something factitious about his smile--it came and went too readily to seem altogether genuine.

Gerald having introduced himself and taken a chair, proceeded at once to the object of his visit.

"In my search for certain information," he said, "I have been recommended to call upon you as having been the confidential clerk of the late Mr. Frodsham."

"I certainly was Mr. Frodsham's confidential clerk for several years," said Byrne, "and any information that may be in my power I shall be happy to afford you--provided, of course, that such information involve no breach of business confidence."

"You need be under no apprehension on that score," answered Gerald. "I must ask you, in the first place, to let your memory travel back for twenty years, and then to tell me whether you have any recollection of a somewhat remarkable case in which Mr. Frodsham was engaged for the defence. It was a murder case, and was tried at the Gloucester Spring Assizes. The crime was committed at Tewkesbury, the murdered man's name was Paul Stilling, and the prisoner's name Ambrose Murray."

"I remember the case in question quite well," answered Byrne. "In fact, I was in court when the trial took place. Mr. Frodsham was busier than usual that circuit, and he took me with him."

"So far that is fortunate," said Gerald. "Then you will probably recollect that one of the chief witnesses at the trial was a Dutch or German Jew of the name of Max Jacoby?"

"My object in coming to see you to-day is to ask you whether you can in any way assist me to discover the present whereabouts of this man, Max Jacoby?"

"It's a hard nut, sir, that you've set yourself to crack--the finding of a man like that after twenty years; and--and really I hardly know in what way I can help you."

"Why don't you apply to Scotland Yard for assistance?" asked Byrne, after a pause.

"I have private reasons for not doing so," answered Gerald. "But there is no reason why you should not treat me as your client in this matter, and endeavour to obtain this information for me either from Scotland Yard or elsewhere."

"Get me the information I ask for, or even show me that you have done your best to get it but have failed, and we shall not quarrel about the price."

"But the man may have died years ago, or, being a foreigner, he may be living in some little town on the continent, in which case our inquiries could hardly hope to be successful."

"Oh, come, there's something tangible about a fact like that. And you know nothing more concerning him?"

Mr. Byrne, with due solemnity and deliberation, proceeded to charge and light a long-stemmed pipe with a painted China bowl, which stood propped against the chimney-piece ready to his hand.

"I will be candid with you, Mr. Warburton," he said, after a few preliminary puffs. "I don't anticipate that there will be so much difficulty in tracing this man Jacoby as there might be in the case of a great many other people."

"Because he is a man with whom the police have had dealings, directly or indirectly, not on one occasion only, but several times. There is no need for me to say more at present, except this, that such a man is seldom altogether lost sight of, unless he leaves the country and goes to live abroad. Still, I should not advise you to be too sanguine."

Gerald promised not to be too sanguine, but still had good hopes of success. He then went into some monetary details with Mr. Byrne, and after that he rose to go.

"I dare say you wonder a little to find a man like me living in a dog-kennel of a place like this," said Byrne, with his expansive smile, as he stood for a moment or two airing his back at the fire.

"I have seen too much of the world to wonder greatly at anything," said Gerald, ambiguously.

"You see, this is how it was," said Byrne, confidentially. "I was Mr. Frodsham's clerk for a great number of years--not that I ever liked the profession, but my bread and cheese was dependent on it, and I was bound to stick to it. By the death of a relative, I came in for ten thousand pounds, and I at once retired to live on my means. I had always been fond of the turf, I had always fancied that I knew something about that noble animal, the horse, and I now determined to turn my knowledge to account. I made up my mind that I would turn my ten thousand pounds into thirty thousand. Sir, I did not turn it into thirty thousand pounds, but into thirty thousand pence. In fact, I lost the whole of it. I was too old to re-enter the profession, and having an income of eighty pounds a year for life, I determined to settle down upon it, and make the best of a bad job. This locality, if not the most genteel in the world, is cheap and salubrious, and here Miriam and I have pitched our tent for a little time, while waiting for summer weather. Relatives, sir, can't live for ever, especially when turned eighty years of age, and asthmatical into the bargain."

"Miriam, sir, is my daughter--an only child, and a jewel of a girl, though I say it who ought not. Nature, sir, has been liberal to her, having endowed her with beauty and talents that would fit her to adorn a sphere far superior to this one. I hope and trust that there is a brilliant future in store for her."

This interview with Mr. Byrne took place between the time of Gerald's first visit to Pembridge and that second visit which resulted from his acceptance of the position of secretary to Sir Thomas Dudgeon. He gave Byrne Miss Bellamy's address, to which any communication for him was to be sent. Such communication would be re-addressed and forwarded to him at Stammars by Miss Bellamy. He had been at Sir Thomas Dudgeon's about a week, when he received the following brief note from Byrne:--

"With reference to the subject respecting which you spoke to me a few days ago, no time has been lost in taking the preliminary steps, and I am happy to inform you that I believe we are already on the right track. I hope in a week at the most to be able to supply you with some positive information. But we must not be too sanguine.

A few days later Gerald went up to town to transact certain business for Sir Thomas Dudgeon, and having some spare time on his hands, he spent most of it either with Miss Bellamy or Ambrose Murray. It was while they were all three sitting together one afternoon, that the postman brought a second note from Byrne to Gerald.

"The person respecting whom you spoke to me at my house is now, I believe, passing under another name. If you will meet me either this or to-morrow evening at seven on the steps of the General Post Office, I will take you to a place where--yourself unseen--you can see the man to whom I allude, and so have the means of identifying him. Should he prove to be the person you want, I will afterwards furnish you with his address. If you decide upon meeting me this evening, wire me to that effect.

At seven o'clock that evening, Gerald Warburton and Ambrose Murray found themselves at St. Martin's-le-Grand, where, two minutes later, they were joined by Mr. Byrne.

"As I myself am totally unacquainted with the person we are in search of, never to my knowledge having seen him," said Gerald to Byrne, "I have been compelled to bring this gentleman with me. Jacoby was well known to him by sight many years ago, and he does not doubt his ability to identify him now."

Byrne bowed slightly, and threw a keen glance at Murray; but the evening was cold, and the latter was so muffled up that very little of his features could be seen.

They were still standing on the post-office steps, when Byrne, turning to Gerald, said--

"The man I am about to show you lives in the city, and has done so for several years. When in town he always dines at one particular tavern. He is generally to be found there from half-past six till half-past seven. He dined at this place yesterday and the day before, and I have no doubt that he is there at the present moment. We must wait near at hand till he comes out, and then you will have an opportunity of getting a clear view of him by the light of the lamp over the door."

Here and there in some quiet city nook may still be found one of those homely, old-fashioned taverns, innocent of lacquer-work and gilding--panelled, not with looking-glass, but with substantial mahogany, dark with age, such as were common in the days when Charles Lamb or Washington Irving were peripatetics about the streets of London, but which are becoming rarer with each recurring year. To several of these taverns is attached a dining-room, where a fried sole or a cut off a wholesome joint may be obtained as late as six or seven o'clock, and where any one who is known to the house may have a chop or a steak done to a turn up till midnight. There is no bustle and confusion here; you are not hurried over your meals; you need not quit your seat the moment you have swallowed your last mouthful, in order to make room for some one else. Day after day the same people come--punctual to the minute, as a rule. They are all on hob-nobbing terms with each other, and fresh faces are rarely seen.

It was over against such a tavern as this that our three conspirators now stationed themselves. The street was very narrow, and exactly opposite the tavern was a dark passage leading to sundry suites of offices, now silent and deserted. Within the shelter of this passage they took their stand. Not long had they to wait. Presently the swing doors were pushed open from the inner side, and the man whom they had come to see issued forth into the street--a man of fifty, or perhaps fifty-five, broad-chested, strongly built, and with a face that might have been carved out of lignumvitæ, so hard, resolute, and determined was it in every line. He stood for a moment in the full light of the lamp over the doorway, and then he walked slowly down the street.

"Is that the man you wanted me to find? Is that Max Jacoby?" asked Byrne, in a low voice.

"We must give him time to get clear away," said Byrne, "and then I will show you the place where he lives."

Five minutes later they left their hiding-place. Byrne, taking his companions through several short cuts and narrow ways, brought them presently to another part of the city, and came to a halt close against a tall, substantial-looking house. It stood in a narrow way intended for foot-passengers only, that led from one great artery of city traffic to another. One side of this footway was bounded by the blank wall of a range of huge warehouses that had their frontage in another street. The opposite boundary of the footway consisted of a low stone wall, crowned with rusty railings, that shut in an ancient graveyard. The church that once on a time had appertained to the graveyard had been demolished years ago; but the dilapidated tombstones, with their "forlorn Hic jacets" all overgrown with rank and frowsy herbage, were still there, together with a miscellaneous assortment of old shoes, broken bottles, and other rubbish. As usual, it was Nobody's business to bring about a different state of things, and Nobody did his business thoroughly by leaving it altogether undone.

The house to which Byrne had brought his companions was built into the graveyard, and its front door was in a line with the raised wall already spoken of. It was an old-fashioned, red-brick house, and had doubtless at one time been the residence of the rector, or of some other functionary connected with the church that was no longer there. From the windows, both back and front, the view must have been dismal in the extreme. To-night the whole house looked as dark and deserted as the graveyard in which it stood. Not a single glimmer of light was visible in any of its windows. Byrne, after taking a cautious look round, drew his companions forward. There was a square brass plate let into the door, on which, by the light of a lamp near at hand, they all three read these words:

MAX VAN DUREN.

"There's nothing to wonder at in that," said Byrne, with a shrug. "In London one comes across queer changes every day."

CHAPTER X.

IN HARLEY STREET.

By the end of the first week in February Sir Thomas Dudgeon and his family were comfortably settled in Harley Street.

Sir Thomas, having no permanent residence in London, had been obliged to take a furnished house for the season. Since the early years of their marriage, the baronet and his wife had never spent more than three weeks, or, at the most, a month, of each season in town; neither had they travelled much abroad. Their adoption of a quiet country life all these years had not been without good and sufficient reasons. The chief reason of all was a laudable desire to economize in money matters. The estate had come to Sir Thomas considerably burdened, and till every penny of mortgage upon it should be cleared off, both Sir Thomas and his wife were determined to cut down every expense as much as possible. The establishment at Stammars was kept up with due regard to comfort, as well as to the family's position in society; but no luxuries were indulged in, and all extravagances were carefully eschewed. A whole season in town, and an autumn on the Continent, however much she might have enjoyed them, would certainly have been set down by Lady Dudgeon as needless extravagances: and she had sufficient heroism in her disposition to give them up without a word of repining. But all this now belonged to the past. Every penny of incumbrance had been cleared off the estate some two years ago, and matters of late had been still further assisted by a handsome legacy from a distant relative. Then, just in the nick of time, had come the opportunity for Sir Thomas to offer himself as member for Pembridge. Lady Dudgeon had been the first to seize the occasion. From the first, she had seen in her mind's eye all the brilliant results that might be made to follow "in sequence due" this one bold step. As in a vision, she had seen the whole glittering pageant. No longer would she be compelled to content herself with a miserable three weeks in London: she would have a whole glorious season to flutter through. She would have a new brougham, and there should be no handsomer horses than hers seen in the Park. As for garden parties and flower shows, as for the opera and the theatre--she would simply do her best to make up for lost time. Poor Sir Thomas, when he allowed himself; very much against his will, to be nominated at the hustings in place of the late lamented Mr. Rackstraw, had not the faintest notion of the splendid conceptions which even then were fermenting in his wife's brain. But he had not been many days in London before he got some glimmering of what was in store for him.

"I feel, dear, as if we had been buried all these years--as if we had never really begun to enjoy life till now," said her ladyship to him one morning at breakfast.

"And yet it seems to me that we have spent many happy days at Stammars," returned Sir Thomas.

"Happy after a fashion, of course; but so different from life here!" continued her ladyship.

"To-morrow is my birthday, Thomas; and as you always make me a present on that occasion, I want you, this year, to let me choose for myself what it shall be."

"That noble heart of yours! What I want is that you shall take me to Long Acre, and buy me a new carriage."

"As the wife of the member for Pembridge, I could not think of being seen about London in a hired brougham; neither, I am sure, would you wish me to do anything so paltry."

"A market-cart, my dear--neither more nor less than a market-cart," cried Lady Dudgeon. "I should be the laughing-stock of the Park. No; if you cannot afford me a new brougham out of your legacy, why, I'll go about in a hansom. I'd far rather do that than be seen in one of those horrid livery-stable abominations, which always put me in mind of fevers and other dreadful things."

When in London, Sir Thomas was always one of the most wretched of men; indeed, a town of any kind was to him a place to be escaped from as quickly as possible. To him it was ever a mystery how people could be found to dwell contentedly for years among acres of brick and mortar, inhaling diluted smoke, and leading lives that were one perpetual round of noise, turmoil, and confusion. He had not been in London more than three days before there came over him a longing, that was almost painful in its intensity, to get clean away out of sight of it--out of hearing of it--if only for a few hours. Taking advantage of a visit of his wife to her milliner, he stole out of the house--and he really felt as if he were doing something that he ought not to do--and a swift hansom soon set him down at "Jack Straw's Castle." A long stretch through the valley on the other side of the Hampstead hills, amid the sights and sounds of country life, sent him back to Harley Street a happier man for the time being.

But the watch which her ladyship kept over him did not allow of a too frequent indulgence in such forbidden luxuries.

"I hope, my dear, that you will not be long before you decide as to the particular question that you intend to make your own this session," she said to her husband one morning, about a fortnight after the opening of Parliament.

"Really, my dear," said Sir Thomas, insinuatingly, "everything is so strange to me just at present--the forms of the House, and all that, you know--that I have hardly had time to give my mind to anything else."

"Just so, my love. Of course, every allowance must be made for that. But still I think you ought to be preparing--working up a subject, mastering the details, and so on. What do you say to the Sugar Duties, now? That is a topic about which the public are likely to be greatly interested before long. Or Indian Finance? That is a fruitful subject."

"So much the better. You will bring to the study and discussion of these great questions a mind fresh and unprejudiced--a mind unfettered by the bonds of tradition or the obligations of party."

"But, in addition to not knowing anything about the Sugar Duties or Indian Finance, I don't care about them--no, not a brass farthing."

"All the more will you be able to discuss them with impartiality. Your capacious intellect will enable you to look at a question from several different points of view, and to give to each its proper value."

"But, even supposing I had the inclination--which I certainly have not," persisted poor Sir Thomas, "I have not the remotest idea how to set about working up any such subjects as those mentioned by your ladyship."

"My dear, you surprise me! What is Mr. Pomeroy for? It cannot, of course, be expected that you should waste your time in picking out a lot of dreary statistics, or in wading through a heap of dry, mechanical details. All that forms part of the duties of your secretary. It is his place to bring to a common focus all the various facts and figures that may have any bearing on the subject in hand. Such a summary of facts and figures could be readily mastered by you in the course of a morning's study. You would then have to consider the line of argument which you would adopt in stating your case to the House; and having divided your subject into two or three heads, you would have, finally, to work up the various points in the most effective manner possible, taking care to conclude with one of those glowing perorations--one of those spontaneous bursts of eloquence--for which you are so justly famed."

Sir Thomas sat staring at his wife in speechless dismay. After a little while he got up and walked to the window, and stood there jingling his loose silver.

"What a pity it is, Matilda, that you are not the member for Pembridge instead of me! You would have done far more justice to the position than I can ever hope to do."

"Tut! tut! my dear. You must not talk so foolishly," said her ladyship, complacently. "I know your abilities far better than you do yourself. All that you lack is confidence, and that will come to you in due time."

"I suppose those worthy people down at Pembridge wouldn't feel satisfied unless I made some sort of an attempt at a speech some time before the session's over, eh?"

"Certainly not. So the sooner you take the plunge, the better for everyone. How would you like to meet your constituents in the autumn, if the sound of your voice had never been heard in the House?"

Sir Thomas stood without speaking for a minute or two. At last he said, "I think I'll go and have a little talk with Pomeroy."

"Do so, my dear. I have no doubt that his views will coincide with mine. Mr. Pomeroy is a very clever young man--and so exemplary too! I am highly pleased with him."

Sir Thomas found Jack in the library, where, having nothing to do for his employer, he was trying to hammer out a few verses for one of the magazines; only, as the fair face of Eleanor Lloyd would keep coming between his muse and him, it is to be feared that he was not making very satisfactory progress.

Sir Thomas gave a little sigh, and sat down at the opposite side of the table. "Pomeroy," he began presently, "her ladyship seems to think that it's about time I made a little bit of a splash in the House. Rather out of my line, you know; but I suppose it has to be done, and the sooner it's got over the better. So what I want you to do for me is this: there's to be a big debate on the Sugar Duties in about a month's time, and I want you to work the subject up, and write out a bit of a speech for me that I can get off by heart. I know that's a sort of thing that comes easy enough to a clever young chap like you, but it would be deuced difficult to me; just as difficult, I daresay, as it would be for you to buy half a score bullocks at a fair, and make sure at the same time that you were getting full value for your money."

"I shall be glad to have a little more to do, Sir Thomas. At present I don't feel as if I were earning my salary."

"You mustn't make the speech too long, you know, or else I shall be sure to forget some of it--and you mustn't even hint to her ladyship that it's not my own composition."

"And then I want you to write out a second speech, which must be simply an amplification of the first, with a few fine words and big phrases dropped in here and there, like plums in a dumpling. This second speech is for my constituents, and you must arrange with the editor for its appearance in the Pembridge Gazette on the Saturday following my delivery of speech number one in the House."

"You are a good fellow, Pomeroy--a very good fellow," added Sir Thomas. "I like you much. Her ladyship likes you much. She quite values you. But not a word to her about our little arrangement--and don't forget the plums in the dumpling."

Sir Thomas had hardly been gone five minutes, when there came a discreet tap at the door, and in walked Olive Deane.

"Good morning, Mr. Pomeroy," she said. "I hear that the box has arrived from Mudie's. Her ladyship gave me the privilege of ordering two or three books on my own account, and I am anxious to see whether they have come."

"Here is the box," said Jack, "unopened as yet; so that you will have the pleasure of being the first to explore its contents."

"You seem to understand our sex--a little," said Olive, as she turned over the books. "It is singular, but true, but I should not derive half so much pleasure from turning over the contents of this box had anyone, especially another woman, done it before me. But we women are full of contrarieties."

"It is precisely those contrarieties which make your sex so charming. You are so full of surprises. No woman, it seems to me, can ever be altogether commonplace."

"Oh, I grant you that we are full of surprises," said Olive. "A man, for instance, has only one or two ways of showing his temper, whereas we have fifty ways, all different from each other: which prevents monotony. If we cannot startle you with a wise or a witty remark, we prefer to try an inane one, rather than not startle you at all. We are melodramatic to the backbone, and are always studying a climax or a surprise, if it be only in the petty details of everyday life."

"I feel that I ought to say something pretty here, in deprecation of the severity of your judgment," said Jack, with a smile, "but nothing worthy of the occasion occurs to me at present. I fear that I am even more stupid than usual this morning."

"Stupidity is certainly the great failing of your sex," said Olive, with candour. "How seldom one meets with a man who has anything to say worth listening to; or if he has, how rarely he knows how to say it. No; in comparison of your sex as against ours, it seems to me that there is only one point wherein we fail--only one grand faculty that men possess and that we have no idea of."

"The faculty of silence. The want of that, and of that alone, has lost us the supremacy of the world."

It had been a debatable point with Lady Dudgeon whether or not she should take her children to London with her; but Sophy's earnest pleading not to be left behind had at last won a half-reluctant consent from her ladyship. But there was another reason, of which Sophy knew nothing, why the young ladies should accompany their mamma. The truth was that her ladyship found Miss Deane's services so useful to her in many ways, that she could by no means make up her mind to let Olive stay behind at Stammars. By so doing she would have to take on herself again a number of duties of which Miss Deane had of late relieved her; and how would it be possible for her to do that, with all the extra demands on her time which a residence in town necessarily implied? If Miss Deane had been useful to her in the country, in London she would be invaluable: so to London Olive and the young ladies were transferred in due course.

Lady Dudgeon was one of those people who delight in keeping an elaborate series of housekeeping books, in which every item of domestic expenditure is carefully tabulated, and against which the tradespeople's accounts can be minutely checked. During the last few months, however, her ladyship's eyesight had begun to fail her, whereupon her medical man had threatened her with spectacles unless she would consent to give her eyes a little more rest. The threat frightened her. She could not afford to give up her diary; she could not find in her heart to curtail her correspondence; she must perforce give up her housekeeping accounts, or delegate the labour connected with them into other hands.

When, some three months later, Olive Deane arrived at Stammars, her ladyship's book-keeping had got terribly into arrear. She was greatly perturbed in her mind thereby, feeling perfectly sure that her tradespeople were all aware that she no longer checked their accounts, and that they were leagued together to overreach her in every possible way. Olive had not been many days at Stammars before she found out what was amiss, whereupon she begged so earnestly that the books and accounts might be put into her hands, that her ladyship, not without a considerable degree of reluctance, agreed at last to entrust them to her. And she had never had cause to regret having done so. Everything was done almost--not quite, but almost--as well as she could have done it herself; and her ladyship was not slow to sing the praises of Olive.

If there was one thing on which Lady Dudgeon prided herself in secret more than another, it was upon her epistolary talents. She was, indeed, a most voluminous and untiring correspondent. However trivial might be the subject about which she was writing, she had a copious stream of words at command--a stream that never ran itself dry. The involution of her sentences was only equalled by the ambiguity of their meaning. Because her correspondents acknowledged that they had to read her letters two or three times over before they could thoroughly comprehend all that was intended to be conveyed by them, she--and in some cases they also--came to look upon it as a sign of profundity, of deep thought, clothed with the fine flowers of rhetoric, that such a difficulty should be so generally admitted to exist. To have written out a plain statement of facts in a few plain words, was a feat of which her ladyship was quite incapable, and one which, to do her justice, she would have despised herself for even attempting. She had been so often complimented on her letter-writing (and knowing for a fact, as she did, that several of her correspondents carefully preserved her epistles) that there had grown up in her mind a sort of vague idea that, after her demise, some one would certainly be found who would look upon it as an act of pious duty to awaken the world to a sense of its loss, to let it see for itself what a genius had dwelt for years in its midst, save by a few choice spirits, unappreciated and unknown. There was only one way by which a heedless world could be thus enlightened, and that was by publishing--posthumously, of course--a selection of her ladyship's correspondence. The fame denied to her during her lifetime would be hers after death. After this fashion it was that Lady Dudgeon fed her imagination: and yet there were not wanting people who denied her the possession of any such commodity, and who mentally catalogued her as one of the most prosaic and commonplace of her sex.

"I hope you have not forgotten our conversation in my cousin's office at Pembridge?" said Olive suddenly to Jack, as she shut down the lid of the box and put her own two particular volumes under her arm, preparatory to leaving the room.

"I have sometimes thought since how very foolish it was of me to talk to you in the way I did on that occasion. But you had only yourself to blame."

"I am not aware that there was any foolishness in the matter: quite the contrary. But tell me in what way I was to blame."

"In causing my aunt to feel such an interest in you. Me, too, you interested. We were both anxious to assist you, if it were possible to do so."

"And you have assisted me, and I thank both you and Mrs. Kelvin very heartily for it."

"You seem to have succeeded in interesting her, as you interested my aunt and me," said Olive, with one of her wintry smiles.

"Miss Lloyd has seen so little of the world, and is so fresh and untutored, that anyone could interest her whose conversation was not absolutely stupid."

"John Pomeroy, the Hesperian fruit is within your grasp!" said Miss Deane, changing her manner in a moment to one of intense earnestness. "Put forth your hand and seize it. Be not slow to make it your own. If you are, be sure that some one else will quickly claim the golden prize." Her black eyes, fixed steadily on his face, seemed full of some hidden meaning. With a grave inclination of the head, she turned and slowly left the room.

"I will seize the golden fruit, chère demoiselle; I will make it my own!" muttered Pomeroy to himself, as Olive closed the door. "Though why you should feel so strange an interest in my fortunes is more than I can comprehend. A crooked brain and a dark heart are yours, Olive Deane, or else my reading of your character is altogether a wrong one."

CHAPTER XI.

IN KENSINGTON GARDENS.

The feeling of curiosity which had actuated Miss Deane in her desire to see her rival, as she called Eleanor Lloyd in her thoughts, had been almost as powerful as that which, for the time being, had made John Pomeroy its slave. When Miss Deane did see Eleanor, she could not help acknowledging to herself that Matthew Kelvin's violent passion for that lady was not without some justification. That Miss Lloyd was indeed very lovely, she at once admitted; for Olive was free from that common feminine failing which refuses to acknowledge that another, and more especially a rival, can be the possessor of superior charms, either of person or mind; and she told herself at once that, as far as mere good looks went, she could not hope to stand the slightest chance in a comparison with Miss Lloyd. So long as Miss Lloyd should remain unmarried, Matthew Kelvin would never look with serious eyes elsewhere; and Olive saw with a sort of savage satisfaction how quickly and readily Mr. John Pomeroy had fallen into the same toils in which the lawyer had been enmeshed before him. Her keen eyes saw that which was suspected by no one else--that a few short hours had indeed sufficed to seal Pomeroy's fate. So far everything had gone well with her; everything had answered her highest expectations. But when she looked on the other side of the question; when she came to ask herself, "Does this girl return this man's love?" she could not feel quite so sanguine as to the result. That Eleanor liked the company of John Pomeroy, and that his conversation interested her, Olive could see clearly enough. But liking is not love, though it is often a big stride on the road towards it. All that was left her to do was to hope for the best and to remain as quietly watchful as she had hitherto been.

Of all these plottings and counter-plottings that were going on under her very nose, poor innocent Lady Dudgeon dreamt nothing. She had long ago made up her mind that her ensuing season in town should be fruitful of much pleasure and much enjoyment to her. But chief of all the pleasures that she looked forward to was that of assisting her darling Eleanor to select--or, better still, of selecting for her--a suitable partner for life. She had not been more than a fortnight in Harley Street before she began to cast wary eyes around, and to make cautious inquiries here and there with respect to the pretensions and positions of certain individuals who, even thus early, had evinced a generous alacrity to sell themselves for life for the sake of twenty thousand pounds--the young lady who was tacked to the money being of course thrown in as an unavoidable necessity.

The interest shown by Lady Dudgeon in the fortunes of Miss Lloyd had its origin in a feeling that dated from the time when Eleanor was little more than a mere child. At the risk of his own life, Jacob Lloyd had succeeded in stopping her ladyship's ponies one day when they were running away with her, and making in a straight line for a very deep gravel-pit that may still be seen close by the edge of Dingley Common. Jacob having been considerably bruised and knocked about in his struggle with the ponies, Lady Dudgeon could do no less than call several times at Bridgeley to inquire after his health. There it was that she first saw Eleanor, at that time a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed child of eight, in short frocks and pinafores. She drew the child to her, looked her fixedly in the face for a moment or two, and then stooped and kissed her. Impulsive Nelly at once flung her arms round Lady Dudgeon's neck. "You are pretty, and I do love you!" she cried; and from that moment her ladyship's heart was won. She would insist upon taking Nelly back to Stammars, and that first visit was but the precursor of several others.

Lady Dudgeon was generally looked upon as a cold-mannered, unimpressionable sort of person, and her strange partiality for Mr. Lloyd's daughter was a surprise to all who knew her--to her husband as much as anyone. But Sir Thomas was eminently good-natured, and he yielded to his wife's whim in this respect as in everything else. Before long, indeed, he grew almost as fond of his Bonnybell, as he called her, as Lady Dudgeon herself. Having no children of his own at this time, he liked very well to have Eleanor about him--he liked to have her tugging at his coat-tails, or banging on his arm, or sitting in front of him on his pony as he rode about the fields looking at his crops or watching his labourers at work.

Even as a child there was about Eleanor Lloyd a native distinction of manner that few people failed to observe. Combined with this was a sweet, fearless freedom--like the fearlessness of a fawn--that sprung from a total unconsciousness of self, and that charmed without being aware of its own existence. At ten years of age Eleanor felt as much at home in Lady Dudgeon's drawing-room, among Lady Dudgeon's fine company, as she did when helping Biddy to make a custard in the kitchen.

Lady Dudgeon's liking for Eleanor did not lessen with years. The child was a frequent visitor at Stammars up to the time that she was sent to Germany to finish her education. And when her two years of absence were over, and she was back again at home, the intercourse was at once resumed, although by this time Lady Dudgeon had two young daughters of her own. After the sudden death of Jacob Lloyd, and the announcement that Eleanor had come into a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, there seemed all the more reason why the bond of intimacy should be drawn still closer: and no one was surprised when it was given out that Miss Lloyd had, for the present, accepted Lady Dudgeon's invitation to live with her at Stammars.

A day or two before the departure of the family for Harley Street, Lady Dudgeon called Eleanor into her bedroom. "My dear," she said, "I am going to show you something that you have never seen before--something that no eyes but my own have seen for years. To you they may, perhaps, seem hardly worth keeping, but they are very precious to me."

She opened a drawer as she spoke, the contents of which were covered with several layers of tissue-paper. When the paper had been carefully removed, there were displayed to Eleanor's view several articles that had evidently belonged to a child. There was a little crimson frock and a sash, a pair of tiny shoes, a broken doll, and part of a necklace of coral beads. Eleanor looked up wonderingly. For the first time in her life she saw tears in the eyes of Lady Dudgeon. "They belonged to my little daughter, whom I lost before I ever saw you. She died when she was four years old. She would just have been your age had she lived. Like you, she was fair and had blue eyes. That first day when I saw you at your father's, it almost seemed to me as if my own lost darling had come back again. I could not help loving you then, dear, and I have loved you ever since."

From the first moment that Gerald Warburton set eyes on Eleanor Lloyd, he made up his mind that, if it were in the possibility of things to do so, he would make her his wife, and from that determination he had never wavered. The more he saw of her the more settled became his conviction that he had never really loved till now. Flirtations he had had, and little love-smarts in plenty. Many a pleasant face had haunted his dreams for a night or two, but never for longer. In his writing-desk were two or three crumpled gloves, a ribbon or two, and at least half a dozen cartes-de-visite: tokens all, as he sometimes said to himself, of how hard he had tried to love, of how often he had fancied himself to be in love, and of the very short space of time it had taken him to discover either what an ass he had made of himself, or what an ass some girl had made of him. Such mementoes are not without a certain amount of instructiveness. Gerald looked upon them in the light of warnings. "How terrible and strange it is to think," he said to himself one day, "that each one of these gages d'amour represents a most foolish moment in my life, a moment that might have been the turning-point of my existence: such a moment as has been the turning-point of many a man's existence! How well one knows the history of such relics A pair of bright eyes, a waltz, a glass of champagne, a glove or a ribbon dropped by accident or design; or else a moonlight ramble capped with some poet's soft nonsense, and a little hand nestling timidly under your arm. Then comes a pressure of the tiny hand, an appealing glance into the bright eyes, a whispered word, and unless your enslaver does not really care for you--in which case nothing but your vanity suffers--your fate is sealed, and the chances are that you wake up next morning to find that, for the sake of an hour's foolish romance, you have bound yourself for life to a person for whom in your heart, you don't care the price of a box of cigars."

So moralized Gerald, as he took his relics out of their resting-place for the last time and dropped them quietly, one by one, into the fire. Without a single pang he saw them flare and shrivel into ashes. Let the dead past bury its dead.

No doubt ever clouded his mind as to the strength and reality of that passion which in these latter days had taken possession of his heart. It was no mere will-o'-the-wisp, to be followed with passionate footsteps through brake and morass, but the Planet of Love itself, serene and beautiful: the lodestar of his life and fortune shining down on him at last with a light that nothing but death could ever again eclipse.

Since that first meeting with Eleanor he had made it his business to see as much of her as the exigencies of his position would allow of his doing. Except when they had company, he generally dined with Sir Thomas and Lady Dudgeon. He had the happy knack of being able to select topics of conversation that had an interest for both of them. He did his best to please them, and he succeeded, simply that he might be able thereby to see more of Miss Lloyd than he could otherwise have hoped to do. The peculiar circumstances under which Eleanor and he had first met had done more to break the ice between them than a month of ordinary intercourse would have done; besides which, it had supplied them with a subject for conversation that Eleanor seemed never to grow tired of, and one in which our artful Gerald feigned a far deeper interest than he really felt.

Days and weeks had come and gone, and he was still as undecided as ever what steps to take in the matter of the sealed packet. Kelvin still maintained his mysterious silence. Gerald had said to himself that, after having been at Stammars for a little while, after having seen and made the acquaintance of Eleanor, should Kelvin not then have spoken, he would write to him in his real name, and demand some explanation of his unaccountable silence. This would at once force matters to a climax, and he, Gerald, would then be able, in the natural course of events, to assume his proper name and position. But day by day was flitting away, and he still neglected to take this very obvious course. As matters had turned out, he shrank from doing so. He loved this girl with all the strength of his ardent temperament. Should he declare himself, such a declaration would take from her all that she had hitherto deemed her own, all that was most dear to her in life: name, wealth, position--everything. Should his be the hand to knowingly strike her such a blow? The more he thought of it, the more hateful such a proceeding seemed to him. He could never hope to see Love's sweet light dawn in those beautiful eyes were he to smite her thus. And then how much more precious to him would it be to win her love for his own sake, to win it as a poor man, to fight for her against the host of other suitors who would surely come when they should discover what a golden prize was there for the winning; to say no word to her of this thing, but to let her rest in blissful ignorance till their wedding day was come. After that, she might, perchance, learn to love him all the more for his long silence. Thus it was that Gerald argued with himself, and thus it was that to the world at large he was still known as John Pomeroy, secretary to Sir Thomas Dudgeon, at an honorarium of one hundred and fifty guineas per annum.

As Gerald was strolling quietly through Kensington Gardens one day between luncheon and dinner, he was met by Eleanor, who was coming from an opposite direction. They shook hands, and Gerald turned and walked back with her.

"What are you meditating this morning?" asked Eleanor. "A sonnet, or another speech on the Sugar Duties?" She had seen and heard enough to know from what fount it was that Sir Thomas derived the stream of his Parliamentary eloquence.

"Neither anything so sentimental on the one hand, nor anything so prosaic on the other," answered Gerald. "I was better employed in listening to the birds, and in marking how the brown buds were here and there beginning to open themselves to the sun."

"You are easily satisfied. I should have thought that the Ride would have had more attractions for you."

"Not at all. In London, humanity is so plentiful that trees and birds seem sometimes the best of company. In the country, where trees and birds are so common, a fresh face is sometimes a godsend."

"But you, who have been so accustomed to change--to seeing fresh faces and visiting strange places--must surely find it both dull and tedious to spend your days among blue-books and parliamentary reports, wading through columns of dreary statistics, and concocting speeches which another than yourself will deliver?"

He would have liked to answer: "Because your presence here has made my work glad. Because I could count no work as slavery if through it I were brought into contact with you. Because, since I have learned to love you, life has assumed for me an altogether different complexion from that which it wore before--is imbued with altogether different purposes and ambitions." But the time was not yet ripe for him to say all this, or even part of it. Some more commonplace answer must be found to her question.

"I think," said he, "it must be because human motives and human purposes are so intimately mingled with the dry bones of politics, that politics exercise such a strange fascination over nearly everyone who is brought into close contact with them. Certainly to me, and that no very long time ago, they seemed the dryest and most uninteresting study to which a man could devote his time."

"I have," said Gerald, emphatically. "From the moment I leapt into the arena--from the moment that I ceased to be a looker-on and became a gladiator myself--in the very humblest of positions though it was--my blood seemed to warm to the struggle. I buckled my armour round me with gladness at the thought that I was about to contend with shapes of bone and sinew; that my life need no longer have to content itself with pottering about among the petty dilettanteisms of Art, while never quite certain in my own mind whether it was Nature's intention that I should develop into a man of genius or degenerate into a blockhead."

Eleanor laughed. "Then you think you have found your right groove at last," she said.

"As to the right groove, I don't know that this particular one is better for me than any other in which there would be earnest work to do in which I could take a hearty interest. Certainly I have come to find a degree of interest in what I am now doing that could surprise no one more than it does myself."

"You ought to be in Parliament yourself, Mr. Pomeroy, instead of filling the anomalous position you do now."

"But some people never get beyond creeping.----If I were a man, I should certainly strive to get into Parliament," added Eleanor, a minute or two later. "How easy it is for a man to have a noble ambition!"

"I am afraid that you aim your arrow too high for these commonplace days. There are many kinds of ambition that a man may occupy himself with, and yet none of them may be really ignoble: Sir Thomas Dudgeon's, for instance. It is his ambition to breed superior sheep and oxen--and it is decidedly for our benefit that he should do so. I have a friend in Paris who has a crippled sister, and the object of his ambition is the invention of an invalid's chair that shall be superior to any other. These are not large ambitions, but they are certainly very laudable ones."

"If you know the object of a man's ambition, cannot you from that gauge, to a certain extent at least, the quality of his mind?"

"Undoubtedly you can, to a certain extent, as you say. But there are many men who keep their ambitious dreams to themselves as closely as they do their bankbook. When such a man dies, the general verdict is that he might have succeeded very much better in life if he had only had a little more ambition, whereas the probability is that he succeeded so ill because he had too much ambition."

"Let us say that such a man's ambition was to stand on the topmost pinnacle of the Jungfrau; and because he felt that he had neither the strength nor the skill requisite to carve his way step by step to the summit, rather than content himself with any lesser altitude, he preferred to sit quietly down, dumb and disappointed, among the ignoble crowd at the bottom."

They walked on for a little while in silence. Gerald kept feasting himself with little side glances at Eleanor's face. And it was a face well worth looking at. A delicate, slightly aquiline nose; two eyes of the deepest and tenderest blue, that put you in mind of an April sky when the clouds have divided after a shower; and massive coils of rich flaxen hair that seemed full of stolen sunshine. Her upper lip had a chiselled fineness of curve and outline rarely found among English women, and this feature it was that gave a special distinction to the character of her face. But far before everything else was a prevailing sweetness of expression--a sweetness that was without insipidity, that only served to heighten that delicate verve--the outcome of an ardent and generous nature--which shone through everything she said and did. She had a small basket on her arm this morning, for she had her pensioners already, and was returning from visiting two of them: a poor old orange woman who had broken her arm through slipping on the ice; and a young mother whose husband lay ill of a fever in the hospital. Gerald, glancing now and again into the beautiful face beside him, felt his heart thrill strangely. He would have dearly liked to fling his arms about her and print a thousand kisses on her lips.

"What is the latest news of the little waif?" asked Gerald suddenly, after a pause.

"I hope with all my heart that they won't. Those to whom she belonged left her to be found by a stranger, or to perish; and after such an act as that they can hardly want to reclaim her."

"The law would surely punish a deed so detestable. But I have little fear of anyone coming forward. I feel that the child belongs to me, and to me alone."

"I may at least be allowed to feel a little interest in the child's future fortunes?"

"As deep an interest as you like. You are her preserver, and yours shall be the first name that she shall be taught to speak. But for all that, you must let me claim her as altogether my own."

"Oh, with all my heart. I should make a very poor guardian, I am afraid, for such a wee morsel of humanity."

"I have regular accounts from Mrs. Nixon every two or three days, and next week I am going down to Stammars to see her."

"I wish she only thought half as much of me as she does of that young customer down at Stammars!" said Gerald, rather disconsolately, to himself, when he had parted from Eleanor.

"What has come over you, child?" said Lady Dudgeon to Eleanor, two or three days afterwards. "This is the third time this morning that I have caught you in a day-dream. Anyone who did not know better, would certainly say that you were in love."

"Then they would certainly say what was not true," said Eleanor, with a blush and a smile.

"I hope so, I am sure," said her ladyship, emphatically. "I don't think your time has come yet, dear."

No; she certainly was not in love, she said to herself. But it was rather strange how often Mr. Pomeroy had been in her thoughts of late. She had caught herself thinking about him several times: daydreaming, Lady Dudgeon called it. And why should she not think about him? she asked herself. He interested her. There was about him something different from anyone she had ever met before. If only she could have assisted him to get into Parliament, how happy that would have made her! Despite his careless, easy way of talking, she felt sure that he was ambitious. But with only a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and no friends to push him forward, a man's ambitious dreams must perforce be buried in his heart. If only she could endow him with some portion of her wealth!---- But here she broke off with a blush, and made up her mind that for the future she would not think quite so much about Mr. Pomeroy. "I must remember that I am not to think quite so much about him," she said to herself. But the very fact of having to remember this had only the effect of bringing his image more frequently to her mind.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FACE IN THE GLASS.

From Harley Street, Cavendish Square, to Ormond Square, Bayswater, is but a short distance as the crow flies, but it was enough to transform the John Pomeroy of one place into the Gerald Warburton of the other. And such transformations were very frequent with Gerald just at this time. Now that he had learned to love Ambrose Murray's daughter, Ambrose Murray himself had acquired a fresh interest in his eyes, and he very rarely let more than two days pass over without finding himself in Miss Bellamy's sitting-room. From Miss Bellamy he had but one secret--his love for Eleanor. Everything else he told her: but to Ambrose Murray nothing was told. Murray had not the slightest idea that his daughter was in London; and so incurious was he respecting her, that he never even asked the name of the friends with whom she was living; and yet it was impossible to doubt that in his strangely constituted heart he loved her passionately. He still adhered to his first determination--not to see her, nor even to let her become aware of his existence, till he could stand before her, a man whose innocence the world was now as eager to proclaim as it had been before to swear that he was guilty.

Miss Bellamy felt it as a great deprivation that she could not go to see Eleanor, whom she had known and loved from infancy. But had she done so, Eleanor would have certainly been seen in Ormond Square before many hours were over--and then, what a meeting might there not have been! It was requisite that Eleanor should believe that Miss Bellamy had gone abroad for a short time, and the latter lady went out less frequently than she would otherwise have done, so great was her dread of unexpectedly encountering Miss Lloyd in the street.

"What are we to do now that we have found Jacoby?" said Gerald to Murray the day after their expedition into the City.

"That is just what I want you to tell me," was Murray's complacent rejoinder, as he took one of Gerald's hands between his thin palms and patted it gently. "Your knowledge of the world will enable you to say what the next step ought to be."

"I am afraid that my knowledge of the world, as you call it, is altogether at fault in this instance," said Gerald, with a dubious shake of the head. "To find a man, even in the great wilderness of London, is an altogether different thing from working up a chain of evidence strong enough to convict him of a crime committed twenty years ago.

"But don't you see, Gerald," argued Murray, in his quietly earnest way, "that the very fact of our having found this man constitutes the first link in the chain? All the proofs in the world would have availed us nothing had we not been able to find him. But now that we have got the first link complete, you may depend upon it that the forging of the second will follow in due course."

He spoke with an air of such thorough conviction, that for a moment or two Gerald hardly knew how to answer him.

"I am certainly at a nonplus," he said at last. "I was never more in the dark in my life. Have you any objection to my consulting Byrne?"

"No objection in the world. Consult anybody and everybody, as may seem best to you."

"Should I find it necessary to do so, have I your permission to tell him everything?"

"Mind you, I don't build any hopes on my interview with Byrne. I don't see how he can possibly help us; but still I will consult him."

"And out of that consultation the forging of the second link will be accomplished," said Murray. Again Gerald shook his head. Slightly exasperating to him was Murray's air of thorough conviction, unbacked as it was by the least fragment of proof, or even the vaguest suggestions as to either how or where such proof might be forthcoming.

Two days later, having an afternoon to spare, Gerald chartered a hansom for Amelia Terrace, Battersea, and picked up Ambrose Murray by the way. He had seen enough of Byrne to make him believe that he was a man who might be thoroughly trusted, and he had made up his mind to lay the case before him in its entirety. He left the cab with his companion in it at the corner of the terrace, and three minutes later he was closeted with Mr. Byrne.

That gentleman was smoking his long-stemmed pipe with the china bowl. He squeezed Gerald's outstretched hand, and greeted him with one of his expansive smiles, which came and went as suddenly as though produced by a clock-work movement inside his head.

"That was a neat stroke of business that we did the other night, sir, though it is I who say it," remarked Mr. Byrne.

"Yes; you managed it very cleverly, and it is on that very subject that I have come to see you again."

"If I recollect rightly, when I saw you before, you gave me to understand that you were in Court on the day that Ambrose Murray took his trial for the murder of Paul Stilling?"

"I was in Court at the time, and I retain a very clear recollection of the different features of the case."

"Can you tell me what impression you formed at the time as to the guilt or innocence of the prisoner?"

"Now you put a very difficult question to me. Anyone who has seen much of criminal trials will tell you what an exceedingly unsafe thing it is to form an opinion from a prisoner's demeanour as to his guilt or otherwise."

"Never mind the prisoner's demeanour in this case. I simply want to know what your own impression was, as a result of what you saw and heard at the trial."

"Well, the weight of evidence, as no doubt you are aware, was dead against the prisoner, and that very fact will, as a rule, go a long way in the formation of a person's opinion. Still, in spite of that, at the time it was my impression that, whoever else it might have been, Murray was not the murderer."

"I am glad to hear you say that," said Gerald, heartily. "Because, after being shut up for twenty years, Murray has escaped from prison."

"Phew! That's good news, Mr. Warburton, very good news! I never could see my way to believe that man guilty."

"That man it was, and no other, who made the third in our little party the other night."

The china pipe had never been so near being broken as it was at that moment. It slipped from Byrne's nerveless fingers, and only the hearthrug saved it. This brought back his presence of mind.

"In telling you this," said Gerald, "you will understand at once the amount of confidence which I am placing in your discretion."

"Not undeservedly, Mr. Warburton--of that you may rest fully assured!" said Byrne, warmly. "I feel honoured by your confidence in this matter, sir: and if I can be of any further assistance either to you or Mr. Murray, my services are entirely at your command."

"That is just the point to which I am coming," said Gerald. "We do want your further assistance. It is for that very purpose I am here to see you to-day: it is for that very purpose Mr. Murray himself has come to see you."

Presently Ambrose Murray entered, ushered in by Gerald. Byrne regarded him with mingled feelings of respect, curiosity, and pity. It was characteristic of the man that during the few minutes of Gerald's absence he had found time to put on a better coat, and also, if the whole truth must be confessed, to impart the very slightest extra suspicion of rouge to his cheeks. The pipe was not again visible during the interview.

Gerald introduced Mr. Murray in his real name to Byrne, who had hardly spoken half a dozen words to him at their previous meeting.

"I am proud to see you, sir, under my humble roof," said Byrne, "and I should have been proud to have entertained you during my days of prosperity. But that was not to be," he added, with a melancholy shake of the head.

"And now to business," said Gerald. "Mr. Murray is firmly convinced that Max Jacoby was the murderer of Paul Stilling."

"As a matter of course, the great desire of his life is to prove his innocence of the terrible crime of which in the eye of the law he is still adjudged to be guilty. He can only do this by bringing home the guilt to the real murderer. Assuming Mr. Murray's view of the case to be the correct one, the question is, by what means is Jacoby's guilt to be brought home to him?"

"It is the very difficulty of the problem that has induced me to seek your services," said Gerald.

He was silent for a little while. Then he said, "I see no light at present--not the faintest gleam. You must let me have time to think about it--to smoke over it. My old pipe has made many a difficulty clear for me; perhaps it may help me in this one."

"Take your own time, Mr. Byrne," said Murray. "When the light you seek is ready to come to you, it will come."

After a little more conversation, Gerald and Mr. Murray went. It was arranged that Byrne should write and let them know when he was ready to see them again.

"If it has, it is only a tiny ray indeed," said Byrne. "Something like that of a farthing rushlight, liable to be blown out by the first puff of wind."

"In such cases as the one before us," resumed Byrne, when they were all seated, "it often happens that several abortive-attempts have to be made before the proper channel for exploration is discovered. The plan which I am about to propose to you will, in all probability, prove an abortive one, and will result in some other effort in some other direction having ultimately to be made. The plan in question is, however, the only one I can think of at present which seems to possess the least degree of feasibility. Very few words will suffice to lay it before you."

Mr. Byrne here paused to refresh himself from his daughter's smelling-bottle, which stood on the chimney-piece. Then he resumed--

"In the course of my various reconnoitrings about the house of Max Jacoby, or rather Van Duren, as we ought now to call him, I discovered a card in one of the windows, on which were the words, 'Unfurnished Apartments to let.' From what I can make out, Van Duren occupies no more of the house than the basement and ground-floor, the two upper floors being empty and to let, and having a private side-entrance of their own. Now, what I propose is, that I and my daughter shall go and take these empty apartments. Mr. Warburton here shall be my son for the time being. In that capacity he will be able to call upon me as often as he may think well to do so. By these means I shall become an inmate of Van Duren's house--he and I will be under one roof. Should there be anything to discover, I shall thus be more likely to discover it; should any clue develop itself by means of which this man's crime may be traced home to him, I shall be on the spot to follow it up. In any case, to get near the man seems the first thing to do; away from him we can do little or nothing."

"I think your idea a most admirable one," said Murray. "As you say, the first thing to do is to get near the man."

"Will it be essential that you should take your daughter into your confidence?" asked Gerald. "Will it be requisite that you should explain to her your reasons for taking up your residence in Van Duren's house?"

"I have no secrets from Miriam," answered Byrne. "But you need be under no apprehensions on that score. Miriam can keep a secret as well as I can; she is no commonplace, talkative school-girl. Besides which, her presence and co-operation are essential to the scheme I have in view. Without her, it would be impossible for me to carry it out. What this scheme is in all its details, you will excuse me from explaining to you now. I have told you what the first step is to be. With your permission, and if you can place full confidence in me, we will leave the remaining steps to develop themselves in the natural course of events."

"You have our fullest confidence, Mr. Byrne," said Murray. "We leave you to conduct the case entirely in the way that may seem best to you."

Gerald, unperceived by Mr. Murray, passed a slip of paper into Byrne's hand, on which was pencilled these words--

"Say nothing to Mr. M. about money matters. I will call to-morrow and arrange with you."

Murray and Gerald walked home together arm-in-arm. The former was in unusually high spirits.

"Did I not tell you, Gerald, that a way would be found out of the difficulty before long?"

"Certainly not; but we have got a glimpse of daylight. But I cannot hope that you will see with my eyes; I cannot hope that the faith that burns within me will more than faintly warm you."

Gerald walked with Murray as far as the corner of Ormond Square, and then stopped the first empty cab that passed him, and hurried back to Harley Street.

Murray did not go straight home, but wandered back to a favourite second-hand book-stall, where he was well known. His purchases, it is true, were never of a very extensive character, being always confined to the threepenny, or, at the most, to the sixpenny box. But he was a frequent visitor at the stall, and he always made a point of turning over the entire contents of the box before making up his mind which particular treasure he would ultimately choose for his own. On the present occasion, after half an hour's diligent search, he decided on the extravagance of a double purchase. He bought "Althazar," an Arabian romance, for which he paid sixpence; and a "Treatise on Conic Sections," for which he paid threepence. This done, he walked quietly home, hugging his treasures under his arm, and promising himself a good long read that very evening, in either one volume or the other--it did not matter in the least which.

Mr. Murray's small stock of books, all selected from the same receptacle as his present purchases, was indeed a somewhat multifarious one. Nothing modern, nothing frivolous, was to be found there. They were all books that had seen service in their time, and the authors of which were not only dead, but forgotten. "Musings in a Churchyard," and "Travels in Africa in 1755," jostled each other on the same shelf. "A Treatise on the Steam Engine" had heaped a-top of it, as though there were some danger of an explosion, "An Essay on the Measurements and Construction of the Great Pyramid," and a thin volume of elegiac verse "by Mary M.," whoever she may have been.

It was characteristic of Mr. Murray that he seemed to like any one of these books as well as another. From each and all of them he seemed to derive either amusement or information, or perhaps both. And then he was one of those rare readers who will read the same book contentedly five or six times over. If he happened to be wakeful in the night, he would light his candle and pick up the treatise on Steam Engines, if that happened to come first to his hand, and read himself quietly to sleep again over matter that he had probably, perused attentively only some three or four days before.

He had not been at home more than five minutes to-day, when he heard a clatter of little feet on the stairs, and then came a knocking at his door, followed by a request that "Uncle Greaves" would go down into the garden and turn Alice's skipping-rope. So down he went, and turned the skipping-rope dutifully for half an hour. Then came a whisper from Frank, who was on thorns to know how the big kite was getting on, that Uncle Greaves had promised to make for him. It was getting on famously, he was told. "And will it really be as big as me?" asked Frank, eagerly. "Bigger--ever so much bigger," was the blissful answer. Then, with a troubled face, up came little Will. His waggon and horses had somehow come to grief; would Uncle Greaves try to mend them? Uncle Greaves would try to mend them, and would not only do that, but would give Dobbin a new coat of paint, and make an altogether superior animal of him.

When the afternoon grew dusk and chilly, and tea-time was at hand, the children would not let their darling uncle go till they had kissed him all round; and little blue-eyed Kitty, out of sheer love, slipped her old sawdust doll into his tail-pocket, and so made him a present of her dearest worldly possession.

"Take that card out of the window," said Mr. Van Duren, a few afternoons later, to his clerk, Pringle.

"To ancient deaf old party and young lady, I suppose," muttered Pringle to himself, as he removed the card from the window. "Make this dead-alive hole a bit more lively, maybe. It needs it bad enough."

A strange thing happened to Max Van Duren that night. It was nearly midnight when he let himself in with his latch-key. His housekeeper had gone to bed long ago, and all was dark and silent. He lighted his bed-candle, and tramped slowly upstairs to his own room. He had put his candle on the dressing-table, and was proceeding to divest himself of his cravat, when, happening to glance into the large oval glass in front of which he was standing, he was startled to see there the reflection of another face beside his own. It was peering over his shoulder, and its eyes met his in the glass. Black and full of menace, or it might be of warning, were those eyes; and but for them, the face, with its thin line of black moustache, would have looked like that of a corpse, so death-like was its pallor.

Involuntarily Van Duren wheeled quickly round; but he was alone in the room. Involuntarily his eyes travelled back to the glass; but there was only the reflection of his own white face to be seen there now. He staggered back, and sat down in the nearest chair. But he was a man of very powerful nerve, and it did not take him long to recover himself. Presently he rose and crossed the room to a little cupboard. From this he drew a bottle of some cordial, out of which he poured a few drops into some water, and then drank the mixture.

There was a writing-table near the fire--when he was restless of a night, and could not sleep, he would often get up and work for an hour or two. At this table he now sat down, and drawing from a secret drawer a book of private memoranda, he proceeded to make the following entry in it, having first written down the day, month, and year of the occurrence:--

"At five minutes before twelve to-night I saw once again, and for the fourth time in my life, the Face in the Glass. It is some years since I saw it last, and I had begun to flatter myself that I should never see it again. Never have I seen it except as an omen of ill to follow. The first time it appeared to me was a few hours before I set foot on board the cursed 'Albatross.' The second time was the night before Katrinka tried to poison me, and all but succeeded. The third time was just before I heard the news of the great smash at Amsterdam, by which I lost half my fortune. Always as a presage of quick-following misfortune has that face appeared to me. And always his face! I shall dream of this for a month to come, and wake up every night shivering with horror. But what is the misfortune that is about to overtake me now? Vain question! Never did the horizon look fairer to me than it does at the present moment. Not the faintest cloud or sign of tempest anywhere visible. And yet, that something is about to happen--that some great crisis of my life is near at hand--I feel but too well assured. If only I knew where to look--if only I knew what to expect! But I am like a man who is condemned to fight a phantom in the dark.

"To-day I let my empty rooms to a deaf old gentleman and his daughter. What a bewitching creature the daughter is! Were I only twenty years younger, I know not into what folly I might be led by the sorcery of a face like hers."

END OF VOL. I.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, SURREY.

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