nger himself!"

She was thunderstruck. Never before had the name of Clayhanger been
mentioned between them! Could he, then, penetrate her thoughts? Could he
guess that in truth she was reading Cranswick solely because Edwin
Clayhanger happened to be a printer? No! It was impossible! The reason
of her interest in Cranswick, inexplicable even to herself, was too
fantastic to be divined. And yet was not his tone peculiar? Or was it
only in her fancy that his tone was peculiar? She blushed scarlet, and
her muscles grew rigid.

"I say," George Cannon continued, in a tone that now was unmistakably
peculiar, "I want you to come out with me. I want to show you something
on the front. Can you come?"

"At once?" she muttered glumly and painfully. What could be the mystery
beneath this most singular behaviour?

"Yes."

"Florrie will be arriving at five," said Hilda, after artificially
coughing. "I ought to be here then, oughtn't I?"

"Oh!" he cried. "We shall be back long before five."

"Very well," she agreed.

"I'll be ready in three minutes," he said, going gaily towards the door.
From the door he gave her a glance. She met it, courageously exposing
her troubled features and nodded.

III

Hilda went into the bedroom behind the parlour, to get her hat and
gloves. A consequence of the success of the boarding-house was that she
was temporarily sharing this chamber with Sarah Gailey. She had insisted
on making the sacrifice, and she enjoyed the personal discomfort which
it involved. When she cautiously lay down on the narrow and lumpy
truckle-bed that had been insinuated against an unoccupied wall, and
when she turned over restlessly in the night and the rickety ironwork
creaked and Sarah Gailey moaned, and when she searched vainly for a
particular garment lost among garments that were hung pell-mell on
insecure hooks and jutting corners of furniture,--she was proud and glad
because her own comfortable room was steadily adding thirty shillings or
more per week to the gross receipts of the enterprise. The benefit was
in no way hers, and yet she gloated on it, thinking pleasurably of
George Cannon's great japanned cash-box, which seemed to be an
exhaustless store of gold sovereigns and large silver, and of his
mysterious--almost furtive--visits to the Bank. Her own capital,
invested by George Cannon in railway stock, was bringing in four times
as much as she disbursed; and she gloated also on her savings. The more
mon