mitting me to visit my nephew.'

Dr. Shrapnel made a motion of the hand, to signify freedom of access to
his house. He would have spoken the effort fetched a burst of terrible
chuckles. He covered his face.

Lord Romfrey descended. The silly old wretch had disturbed his equanimity
as a composer of fiction for the comfort and sustainment of his wife: and
no sooner had he the front door in view than the calculation of the three
strides requisite to carry him out of the house plucked at his legs, much
as young people are affected by a dancing measure; for he had, without
deigning to think of matters disagreeable to him in doing so, performed
the duty imposed upon him by his wife, and now it behoved him to ward off
the coming blow from that double life at Romfrey Castle.

He was arrested in his hasty passage by Cecilia Halkett.

She handed him a telegraphic message: Rosamund requested him to stay two
days in Bevisham. She said additionally: 'Perfectly well. Shall fear to
see you returning yet. Have sent to Tourdestelle. All his friends. Ni
espoir, ni crainte, mais point de deceptions. Lumiere. Ce sont les
tenebres qui tuent.'

Her nimble wits had spied him on the road he was choosing, and outrun
him.

He resigned himself to wait a couple of days at Bevisham. Cecilia begged
him to accept a bed at Mount Laurels. He declined, and asked her: 'How is
it you are here?'

'I called here,' said she, compressing her eyelids in anguish at a wilder
cry of the voice overhead, and forgetting to state why she had called at
the house and what services she had undertaken. A heap of letters in her
handwriting explained the nature of her task.

Lord Romfrey asked her where the colonel was.

'He drives me down in the morning and back at night, but they will give
me a bed or a sofa here to-night--I can't . . .' Cecilia stretched her
hand out, blinded, to the earl.

He squeezed her hand.

'These letters take away my strength: crying is quite useless, I know
that,' said she, glancing at a pile of letters that she had partly
replied to. 'Some are from people who can hardly write. There were people
who distrusted him! Some are from people who abused him and maltreated
him. See those poor creatures out in the rain!'

Lord Romfrey looked through the venetian blinds of the parlour window.

'It's as good as a play to them,' he remarked.

Cecilia lit a candle and applied a stick of black wax to the flame,
saying: 'Envelopes have fallen