efore
the mail went out, he added the characteristic line to the one he had
written to Eustace, "All right, old chap, I wish you joy;" and to me he
wrote, that since I asked what he wished, he thought I had better take
a house by the year in, or near, Mycening, and see how things would
turn out. He hoped I should keep Dora. We need not write again, for
he should leave Sydney before our letters could arrive.

I found a little house called Mount Eaton, on the Neme Heath side of
Mycening, with a green field between it and the town, and the heath
stretching out beyond, where Harold might rush out and shake his mane
instead of feeling cribbed and confined. It wanted a great deal of
painting and papering, which I set in hand at once, but of course it
was a more lingering business than I expected. All the furniture and
books that had belonged to my own mother had been left to me, and it
had been settled by the valuation, when I knew little about it, what
these were; and all that remained was to face Eustace's disgust at
finding how many of "the best things" it comprised. Hippolyta showed
to advantage there. I believe she was rather glad to get rid of them,
and to have the opportunity of getting newer and more fashionable ones;
but, at any rate, she did it with a good grace, and made me welcome not
only to my own property, but to remain at Arghouse till my new abode
should be habitable, which I hoped would be a day or two after the
wedding.

The great grievance was, however, that I had put myself and Dora into
mourning, feeling it very sad that this last of the four exiles should
be the only one of whose death I even knew. Eustace thought the whole
connection ought to be forgotten, and that, whatever I might choose to
do, it was intolerable that his sister, the present Miss Alison of
Arghouse, should put on mourning for the wife of a disgraced fellow, a
runaway parson turned sharper!

I am afraid I was not as patient or tolerant as I ought to have been,
and it ended in the time of reprieve being put an end to, and Dora
being carried off by the Horsmans to her new schoolroom in London, her
resistance, and the home-truths she told her brother, only making him
the more inexorable. Poor little girl! I do not like to think of the
day I put her into Hippolyta's hands.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BLOODHOUND.

It was a broiling evening in early June, very beautiful, but so hot
that I dreaded the fatigue and all the adj