tten three lines with some consideration for Ellinor, even when he was
in his first flush of anger against her father, and it must be confessed
of relief at his own freedom, thus brought about by the act of another,
and not of his own working out, which partly saved his conscience. The
note ran thus:

"DEAR ELLINOR,--Words have passed between your father and me which
have obliged me to leave his house, I fear, never to return to it. I
will write more fully to-morrow. But do not grieve too much, for I am
not, and never have been, good enough for you. God bless you, my
dearest Nelly, though I call you so for the last time.--R. C."

"Papa, what is it?" Ellinor cried, clasping her hands together, as her
father sat silent, vacantly gazing into the fire, after finishing the
note.

"I don't know!" said he, looking up at her piteously; "it's the world, I
think. Everything goes wrong with me and mine: it went wrong before THAT
night--so it can't be that, can it, Ellinor?"

"Oh, papa!" said she, kneeling down by him, her face hidden on his
breast.

He put one arm languidly round her. "I used to read of Orestes and the
Furies at Eton when I was a boy, and I thought it was all a heathen
fiction. Poor little motherless girl!" said he, laying his other hand on
her head, with the caressing gesture he had been accustomed to use when
she had been a little child. "Did you love him so very dearly, Nelly?"
he whispered, his cheek against her: "for somehow of late he has not
seemed to me good enough for thee. He has got an inkling that something
has gone wrong, and he was very inquisitive--I may say he questioned me
in a relentless kind of way."

"Oh, papa, it was my doing, I'm afraid. I said something long ago about
possible disgrace."

He pushed her away; he stood up, and looked at her with the eyes dilated,
half in fear, half in fierceness, of an animal at bay; he did not heed
that his abrupt movement had almost thrown her prostrate on the ground.

"You, Ellinor! You--you--"

"Oh, darling father, listen!" said she, creeping to his knees, and
clasping them with her hands. "I said it, as if it were a possible case,
of some one else--last August--but he immediately applied it, and asked
me if it was over me the disgrace, or shame--I forget the words we
used--hung; and what could I say?"

"Anything--anything to put him off the scent. God help me, I am a lost
man, betrayed by my child!"

Ellinor let g