her hand to him impulsively, and Brady sheepishly extended
his own grubby paw to meet it.

"You've more than paid me back, Brady," she said warmly. "Thank you."

Turning away, she hurried up the road, leaving Brady staring alternately
at his right hand and at her receding figure.

"She's rare gentry, is Miss Tennant," he remarked with conviction, and
then slouched off to drink himself blind at "The Jolly Sailorman."
Black Brady was, after all, only an inexplicable bundle of good and bad
impulses--very much like his betters.

Arrived at the house, Sara fled breathlessly upstairs to Molly's room.
Jane Crab was standing in the middle of it, staring dazedly at all the
evidences of a hasty departure which surrounded her--an overturned chair
here, an empty hat-box there, drawers pulled out, and clothes tossed
heedlessly about in every direction. In her hand she held a chemist's
parcel, neatly sealed and labeled; she was twisting it round and round
in her trembling, gnarled old fingers.

At the sound of Sara's entrance, she turned with an exclamation of
relief.

"Oh, Miss Sara! I'm main glad you've come! Whatever's happened? Miss
Molly was here in bed not three parts of an hour ago!" Then, her
boot-button eyes still roving round the room, she made a sudden dart
towards the dressing-table. "Here, miss, 'tis a note she's left for
you!" she exclaimed, snatching it up and thrusting it into Sara's hands.

Written in Molly's big, sprawling, childish hand, the note was a
pathetic mixture of confession and apology--

"I feel a perfect pig, Sara mine, leaving you behind to face Father, but
it was my only chance of getting away, as I know Dad would have refused
to let me marry for years and years. He never _will_ realize that I'm
grown-up. And Lester and I couldn't wait all that time.

"I felt an awful fraud last night, letting you fuss over my supposed
'cold,' you dear thing. Do forgive me. And you must come and stay with
us the minute we get back from our honeymoon. We are to be married
to-morrow morning. "--MOLLY.

"P.S.--Don't worry--it's all quite proper and respectable. I'm to go
straight to the house of one of Lester's sisters in London.

"P.P.S.--I'm frantically happy."

Sara's eyes were wet when she finished the perusal of the hastily
scribbled letter. "We are to be married to-morrow morning!" The blind,
pathetic confidence of it! And if Black Brady had spoken the truth, if
Lester Kent were already a married man,