as safe. He
could not forgive Mrs. Rumbold for having been absent in Switzerland
when Sister Louisa wrote to her of Jane Wood's flight, and thus being
unable to inform him of it immediately. He had an unreasonable
conviction that, if he had known at once of Janie's disappearance, he
would have succeeded in tracking her. But for this opinion he really had
no ground at all.

So days and weeks and months went on, and brought with them the
conviction that the girl was lost for ever. Nothing was heard of her
either at Winstead or at Beechfield, and Hubert Lepel was obliged at
last to acknowledge that all his efforts had been in vain. The girl
refused to be benefited any longer; the wild blood in her veins had
asserted itself; she was probably leading the outcast life from which he
thought that he had rescued her; she had gone down on the tide of
poverty and vice and crime which floods the London streets. He shuddered
sometimes when he thought of it. He haunted the doors of theatres, the
courts and alleys of East London, looking sombrely for a face which he
would not have known if he had seen it. He fancied that Andrew
Westwood's daughter would bear her history in her eyes--the great dark
eyes that he remembered as her sole beauty when she was a child.

It was a mad fancy, born of his desire to atone for a wrong that he had
done to an innocent man. The wrong seemed greater than ever when it
darkened the life of a weak young girl and tortured the heart of the
innocent man's own child.

CHAPTER X.

Eight years had passed away since the tragedy that brought the little
village of Beechfield into luckless notoriety. During those eight years
what changes had taken place! Even at quiet rustic Beechfield many
things had come to pass. Old Mr. Rumbold had been gathered to his
fathers, and Mrs. Rumbold had gone to live with friends in London. The
new Rector was young, energetic, good-looking, and unmarried. At the
Hall there were changes too. Enid Vane had grown from a delicate child
into a lovely girl of seventeen. The house was no longer chill and
desolate--brightness seemed to have come back to it with her growth--a
brightness which even the General, saddened as he had been by his
brother's death, could not resist. He had taken his own way of
contributing to the cheerfulness of the Hall. Six months after Mrs.
Sydney Vane's death he had married Florence Lepel, as Miss Vane had
predicted that he would, and a little boy of