had been so many baits to
amuse him while the valuable present was slipping away. What could he
do now to repair the past? His only course was to wait for the morrow
and see whether the senior partner would appear at the offices.
If he did so, the young man was determined that he should have an
understanding with him.

So downcast was Tom that, on arriving at Phillimore Gardens, he would
have slipped off to his room at once had he not met his burly father
upon the stairs. "Bed!" roared the old man upon hearing his son's
proposition. "Nothing of the sort, sir. Come down into the parlour and
smoke a pipe with me. Your mother has been waiting for you all the
evening."

"I am sorry to be late, mother," the lad said, kissing the old lady.
"I have been down at the docks all day and have been busy and worried."

Mrs. Dimsdale was sitting in her chair beside the fire, knitting, when
her son came in. At the sound of his voice she glanced anxiously up at
his face, with all her motherly instincts on the alert.

"What is it, my boy?" she said. "You don't look yourself.
Something has gone wrong with you. Surely you're not keeping anything
secret from your old mother?"

"Don't be so foolish as that, my boy," said the doctor earnestly.
"If you have anything on your mind, out with it. There's nothing so far
wrong but that it can't be set right, I'll be bound."

Thus pressed, their son told them all that had happened, the rumour
which he had heard from Von Baumser at the _Cock and Cowslip_, and the
subsequent visit to Eccleston Square. "I can hardly realize it all
yet," he said in conclusion. "My head seems to be in a whirl, and I
can't reason about it."

The old couple listened very attentively to his narrative, and were
silent some little time after he had finished. His mother first broke
the silence. "I was always sure," she said, "that we were wrong to stop
our correspondence at the request of Mr. Girdlestone."

"It's easy enough to say that now," said Tom ruefully. "At the time it
seemed as if we had no alternative."

"There's no use crying over spilt milk," remarked the old physician, who
had been very grave during his son's narrative. "We must set to work
and get things right again. There is one thing very certain, Tom, and
that is that Kate Harston is a girl who never did or could do a
dishonourable thing. If she said that she would wait for you, my boy,
you may feel perfectly safe; and if you doubt