in discovering what Mr. Candy wanted to say to me. If I turn
out to be mistaken in my anticipations, and if you prove unable to
help me when you are really aware of what I want, I shall trust to your
honour to keep my secret--and something tells me that I shall not trust
in vain."

"Stop, Mr. Blake. I have a word to say, which must be said before you go
any farther." I looked at him in astonishment. The grip of some terrible
emotion seemed to have seized him, and shaken him to the soul. His
gipsy complexion had altered to a livid greyish paleness; his eyes
had suddenly become wild and glittering; his voice had dropped to a
tone--low, stern, and resolute--which I now heard for the first time.
The latent resources in the man, for good or for evil--it was hard, at
that moment, to say which--leapt up in him and showed themselves to me,
with the suddenness of a flash of light.

"Before you place any confidence in me," he went on, "you ought to know,
and you MUST know, under what circumstances I have been received into
Mr. Candy's house. It won't take long. I don't profess, sir, to tell my
story (as the phrase is) to any man. My story will die with me. All I
ask, is to be permitted to tell you, what I have told Mr. Candy. If you
are still in the mind, when you have heard that, to say what you have
proposed to say, you will command my attention and command my services.
Shall we walk on?"

The suppressed misery in his face silenced me. I answered his question
by a sign. We walked on.

After advancing a few hundred yards, Ezra Jennings stopped at a gap in
the rough stone wall which shut off the moor from the road, at this part
of it.

"Do you mind resting a little, Mr. Blake?" he asked. "I am not what I
was--and some things shake me."

I agreed of course. He led the way through the gap to a patch of turf
on the heathy ground, screened by bushes and dwarf trees on the side
nearest to the road, and commanding in the opposite direction a grandly
desolate view over the broad brown wilderness of the moor. The clouds
had gathered, within the last half hour. The light was dull; the
distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still
colourless--met us without a smile.

We sat down in silence. Ezra Jennings laid aside his hat, and passed his
hand wearily over his forehead, wearily through his startling white and
black hair. He tossed his little nosegay of wild flowers away from him,
as if the remembrances which i