sy
conscience. When I told Joshua I suspected she was gone to London I was
not telling him the truth. I knew nothing certainly about where she was
gone; but I did assuredly suspect that she had turned her steps exactly
in the contrary direction to London--that is to say, far out Bangbury
way. She had been constantly asking all sorts of questions of Ellen
Gough, who told me of it, about roads, and towns, and people in that
distant part of the country: and this was my only reason for thinking
she had taken herself away in that direction. Though it was but a matter
of bare suspicion at the best, still I deceived my brother as to my real
opinion when he asked it of me: and this was a sin which I now humbly
and truly repent of. But the thought of helping him, by so little
even as a likely guess, to bring our infamy home to our own doors, by
actually bringing his degraded daughter back with him into my presence,
in the face of the whole town--this thought, I say, was too much for me.
I believed that the day when she crossed our threshold again would be
the day of my death, as well as the day of my farewell to home; and
under that conviction I concealed from Joshua what my real opinion was.

"I deserved to suffer for this; and I did suffer for it.

"Two or three days after the lonely Christmas Day that I passed in utter
solitude at our house in Dibbledean, I received a letter from Joshua's
lawyer in London, telling me to come up and see my brother immediately,
for he was taken dangerously ill. In the course of his inquiries (which
he would pursue himself, although the lawyers, who knew better what
ought to be done, were doing their utmost to help him), he had been
misled by some false information, and had been robbed and ill-used in
some place near the river, and then turned out at night in a storm of
snow and sleet. It is useless now to write about what I suffered from
this fresh blow, or to speak of the awful time I passed by his bed-side
in London. Let it be enough to say, that he escaped out of the very jaws
of death; and that it was the end of February before he was well enough
to be taken home to Dibbledean.

"He soon got better in his own air--better as to his body, but his mind
was in a sad way. Every morning he used to ask if any news of Mary had
come? and when he heard there was none, he used to sigh, and then hardly
say another word, or so much as hold up his head, for the rest of the
day. At one time, he showed a