time in the open air; they breakfasted under a spreading
chestnut, and often dined in foreign fashion on the terrace facing the
sunset.

When Malcolm went down to the Manor House in August before he started
for Norway, he walked across to Sandy Hollow with Mrs. Godfrey. They
found Mrs. Richardson sitting in a shady retreat, with all her various
pets round her. Leah was gathering flowers in the lower garden, she
said. She received Malcolm very kindly, for he was one of her
favourites, and talked to him a great deal about the girl--of her sweet
temper, her docility, and her patience.

"She has heard nothing of that wretched brother of hers," she
continued. Then Malcolm shrugged his shoulders; he could give her
information on that subject, he said drily--at least a score of begging
letters had reached him and Cedric from New York, and had been
consigned to the flames. Saul Jacobi was evidently playing his old
tricks and living on his wits; he was utterly irredeemable. Hugh
Rossiter always prophesied that he would never die in his bed; and this
prediction was unfortunately verified some three years later, when, in
a drunken brawl, a tipsy sailor lurched up against him one dark night
and pushed him over the quay. No one heard his cry for help for the
oaths and curses that were filling the air; neither was his body found
until the next day. Strange to say, it was Hugh Rossiter who identified
it; and it was he who later on brought Leah a pathetic little proof
that Saul had not wholly forgotten his sister.

In the pocket of his shabby old coat--how shabby and how ragged it was
Hugh never ventured to tell her--there was a cheap little photo of
Leah, taken when she was eighteen, and in the first bloom of her young
beauty; and on the soiled envelope was written, "My little sister
Leah," and the date of her birth. For no nature is wholly evil and
irreclaimable, and perhaps, in spite of his tyranny and cruel tempers,
there was a spark of affection in the man's heart for the young sister
dependent on him. Leah always believed this, and she wept the saddest,
tenderest tears over the little photo. "My poor Saul," she said, "his
nature was strangely warped, and he did not know how to speak the
truth, and he could be hard and cruel--as I know to my cost--but there
were times when he was very good to me;" and so even Saul Jacobi had
one human being to mourn for him.

CHAPTER XXXIX

THE NEW CURATE-IN-CHARGE

While I?