, whose face
expressed timid curiosity. Joseph James stood up, joined his hands
under his coat-tail, and examined the stranger.

'Do you know who it is?' asked Clem of her companion.

'Your husband--but I don't know his name.'

'You ought to, it seems to me,' said Clem, giggling. 'Look at him.'

Jane tried to regard the man for a moment. Her cheeks flushed with
confusion. Again she looked at him, and the colour rapidly faded. In
her eyes was a strange light of painfully struggling recollection. She
turned to Clem, and read her countenance with distress.

'Well, I'm quite sure I should never have known _you_, Janey,' said
Snowdon, advancing. 'Don't you remember your father?'

Yes; as soon as consciousness could reconcile what seemed
impossibilities Jane had remembered him. She was not seven years old
when he forsook her, and a life of anything but orderly progress had
told upon his features. Nevertheless Jane recognised the face she had
never had cause to love, recognised yet more certainly the voice which
carried her back to childhood. But what did it all mean? The shock was
making her heart throb as it was wont to do before her fits of illness.
She looked about her with dazed eyes.

'Sit down, sit down,' said her father, not without a note of genuine
feeling. 'It's been a bit too much for you--like something else was for
me just now. Put some water in that glass, Clem; a drop of this will do
her good.'

The smell of what was offered her proved sufficient to restore Jane;
she shook her head and put the glass away. After an uncomfortable
silence, during which Joseph dragged his feet about the floor, Clem
remarked:

'He wants you to take him home to see your grandfather, Jane. There's
been reasons why he couldn't go before. Hadn't you better go at once,
Jo?'

Jane rose and waited whilst her father assumed his hat and drew on a
new pair of gloves. She could not look at either husband or wife.
Presently she found herself in the street, walking without
consciousness of things in the homeward direction.

'You've grown up a very nice, modest girl, Jane,' was her father's
first observation. 'I can see your grandfather has taken good care of
you.'

He tried to speak as if the situation were perfectly simple. Jane could
find no reply.

'I thought it was better,' he continued, in the same matter-of-fact
voice, 'not to see either of you till this marriage of mine was over.
I've had a great deal of trouble in life-