ell?"

"He has never been heard of since. On the following day, in the
afternoon, I left London for Buston; but nothing had been then heard of
his disappearance. I neither knew of it nor suspected it. The question
is, when others were searching for him, was I bound to go to the police
and declare what I had suffered from him that night? Why should I
connect his going with the outrage which I had suffered?"

"But why not tell it all?"

"I should have been asked why he had quarrelled with me. Ought I to have
said that I did not know? Ought I to have pretended that there was no
cause? I did know, and there was a cause. It was because he thought that
I might prevail with you, now that he was a beggar, disowned by his own
father."

"I would never have given him up for that," said Florence.

"But do you not see that your name would have been brought in,--that I
should have had to speak of you as though I thought it possible that you
loved me?" Then he paused, and Florence sat silent. But another thought
struck him now. It occurred to him that under the plea put forward he
would appear to seek shelter from his silence as to her name. He was
aware how anxious he was on his own behalf not to mention the occurrence
in the street, and it seemed that he was attempting to escape under the
pretence of a fear that her name would be dragged in. "But independently
of that I do not see why I should be subjected to the annoyance of
letting it be known that I was thus attacked in the streets. And the
time has now gone by. It did not occur to me when first he was missed
that the matter would have been of such importance. Now it is too late."

"I suppose that you ought to have told his father."

"I think that I ought to have done so. But at any rate I have come to
explain it all to you. It was necessary that I should tell some one.
There seems to be no reason to suspect that the man has been killed."

"Oh, I hope not; I hope not that."

"He has been spirited away--out of the way of his creditors. For myself
I think that it has all been done with his father's connivance. Whether
his brother be in the secret or not I cannot tell, but I suspect he is.
There seems to be no doubt that Captain Scarborough himself has run so
overhead into debt as to make the payment of his creditors impossible by
anything short of the immediate surrender of the whole property. Some
month or two since they all thought that the squire was dying, and that
th