an,
addressed to _her?_ She roused herself, and put the question to him.

"It's surely better for me," he answered, "to hear the miserable news
from you than from a servant."

"What miserable news?" she asked, still as perplexed as ever.

He could preserve his self-control no longer; the misery in him forced
its way outward at last. The convulsive struggles for breath which burst
from a man in tears shook him from head to foot.

"My poor little darling!" he gasped. "My only child!"

All that was embarrassing in her position passed from Sydney's mind in
an instant. She stepped close up to him; she laid her hand gently and
fearlessly on his arm. "Oh, Mr. Linley, what dreadful mistake is this?"

His dim eyes rested on her with a piteous expression of doubt. He heard
her--and he was afraid to believe her. She was too deeply distressed,
too full of the truest pity for him, to wait and think before she spoke.
"Yes! yes!" she cried, under the impulse of the moment. "The dear child
knew me again, the moment I spoke to her. Kitty's recovery is only a
matter of time."

He staggered back--with a livid change in his face startling to see.
The mischief done by Mrs. Presty's sense of injury had led already to
serious results. If the thought in Linley, at that moment, had shaped
itself into words, he would have said, "And Catherine never told me
of it!" How bitterly he thought of the woman who had left him in
suspense--how gratefully he felt toward the woman who had lightened his
heart of the heaviest burden ever laid on it!

Innocent of all suspicion of the feeling that she had aroused, Sydney
blamed her own want of discretion as the one cause of the change that
she perceived in him. "How thoughtless, how cruel of me," she said, "not
to have been more careful in telling you the good news! Pray forgive
me."

"You thoughtless! you cruel!" At the bare idea of her speaking in that
way of herself, his sense of what he owed to her defied all restraint.
He seized her hands and covered them with grateful kisses. "Dear Sydney!
dear, good Sydney!"

She drew back from him; not abruptly, not as if she felt offended. Her
fine perception penetrated the meaning of those harmless kisses--the
uncontrollable outburst of a sense of relief beyond the reach of
expression in words. But she changed the subject. Mrs. Linley (she told
him) had kindly ordered fresh horses to be put to the carriage, so that
she might go back to her duties if the do