. Will you decide for us? Will you say how it shall be?"

"It shall be as you wish. If you come back in a month, you will find me
here."

"Will it cause you no sacrifice of your own comfort and your own plans?"

"It will cause me nothing," he replied, "but a journey back to the
City." He rose and took his hat. "I must go there at once," he added,
"or I shall not be in time."

"It is a promise between us?" she said, and held out her hand.

"Yes," he answered, a little sadly; "it is a promise."

Slight as it was, the shade of melancholy in his manner pained her.
Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently
pressed the hand he gave her. "If _that_ won't tell him the truth," she
thought, "nothing will."

It failed to tell him the truth; but it forced a question on his mind
which he had not ventured to ask himself before. "Is it her gratitude,
or her love; that is speaking to me?" he wondered. "If I was only a
younger man, I might almost hope it was her love." That terrible sum in
subtraction which had first presented itself on the day when she told
him her age began to trouble him again as he left the house. He
took twenty from forty-one, at intervals, all the way back to the
ship-owners' office in Cornhill.

Left by herself, Magdalen approached the table to write the line of
answer which Miss Garth requested, and gratefully to accept the proposal
that had been made to her.

The second letter which she had laid aside and forgotten was the
first object that caught her eye on changing her place. She opened
it immediately, and, not recognizing the handwriting, looked at the
signature. To her unutterable astonishment, her correspondent proved to
be no less a person than--old Mr. Clare!

The philosopher's letter dispensed with all the ordinary forms of
address, and entered on the subject without prefatory phrases of any
kind, in these uncompromising terms:

"I have more news for you of that contemptible cur, my son. Here it is
in the fewest possible words.

"I always told you, if you remember, that Frank was a Sneak. The very
first trace recovered of him, after his running away from his employers
in China, presents him in that character. Where do you think he turns up
next? He turns up, hidden behind a couple of flour barrels, on board an
English vessel bound homeward from Hong-Kong to London.

"The name of the ship was the _Deliverance_, and the commander was one
Captain Kirke. Inst