God; thank God. My
umbrella? Thanks. Good night. No cab: I will walk."

CHAPTER II

Mr. Taynton lived in a square, comfortable house in Montpellier Road, and
thus, when he left Mrs. Assheton's there was some two miles of pavement
and sea front between him and home. But the night was of wonderful
beauty, a night of mid June, warm enough to make the most cautious secure
of chill, and at the same time just made crisp with a little breeze that
blew or rather whispered landward from over the full-tide of the sleeping
sea. High up in the heavens swung a glorious moon, which cast its path of
white enchanted light over the ripples, and seemed to draw the heart even
as it drew the eyes heavenward. Mr. Taynton certainly, as he stepped out
beneath the stars, with the sea lying below him, felt, in his delicate
and sensitive nature, the charm of the hour, and being a good if not a
brisk walker, he determined to go home on foot. And he stepped westward
very contentedly.

The evening, it would appear, had much pleased him--for it was long
before his smile of retrospective pleasure faded from his pleasant mobile
face. Morris's trust and confidence in him had been extraordinarily
pleasant to him: and modest and unassuming as he was, he could not help a
secret gratification at the thought. What a handsome fellow Morris was
too, how gay, how attractive! He had his father's dark colouring, and
tall figure, but much of his mother's grace and charm had gone to the
modelling of that thin sensitive mouth and the long oval of his face. Yet
there was more of the father there, the father's intense, almost
violent, vitality was somehow more characteristic of the essential Morris
than face or feature.

What a happy thing it was too--here the smile of pleasure illuminated Mr.
Taynton's face again--that the boy whom he had dismissed two years before
for some petty pilfering in his own house, should have turned out such a
promising lad and should have found his way to so pleasant a berth as
that of factotum to Morris. Kindly and charitable all through and ever
eager to draw out the good in everybody and forgive the bad, Mr. Taynton
had often occasion to deplore the hardness and uncharity of a world which
remembers youthful errors and hangs them, like a mill-stone, round the
neck of the offender, and it warmed his heart and kindled his smile to
think of one case at any rate where a youthful misdemeanour was lived
down and forgotten. At the