sir!" said the landlady, lifting bewildered eyes, while the
click of the needles ceased. "My Paul weren't there. Cummerland,
sir--and you heard him yourself what he said of me." A corner of her
house-wife's apron went up to her face. "Me as had brought him up that
tender! Well," recovering composure, "I've lost heart, and serve him
right. I just lets the house and things go, I do. I trusts to
Providence; and that Jabez, he's no better nor a babby in the public
line."

When Hugh Ritson left the inn, the old body's agitation increased. She
had set down the knitting, and was fidgeting, first with her cap and
then her apron.

"Listen to me," said Hugh. "To-day is Friday. On Monday you must go to
the convent where you saw the mother of Paul. Ask for Sister Grace. Will
you remember--Sister Grace? She will tell you all."

It was hard on eleven o'clock when Hugh Ritson returned to town. The
streets were thronged, and he walked for a long hour amid the crowds
that passed through the Strand. In all that multitudinous sea of faces,
there was not a countenance on which the mark of suffering was more
indelibly fixed than on his own.

His sensibilities were wrought up to an unwonted pitch. He was like a
waif adrift in unknown waters, a cloud without anchor in a tempestuous
sky; yet he felt that night as he had never felt before, that he had
suddenly become possessed of another and most painful sense. Not a face
in that sea of faces but he seemed to know its secret fear, its joy and
sorrow, the watchful dread that seared the hidden heart, the fluttering
hope that buoyed it up.

It was an awful thing to be turned adrift in a world of sin and
suffering with this agonizing sense. He could look, whether he would or
not, beneath the smiling and rubicund countenance of the
hail-fellow-well-met to that corrosive spot within where the trust of
the widow and fatherless had been betrayed; or see beyond the stolid and
heavy appearance proper to the ox the quivering features of the man who
had stood long years ago above the dead body of the woman who had thrown
her death at his door as sole reward for the life he had wrecked.

Nay, not only did the past write its manual there, but the future wrote
its sign. He knew that the young girl in pink ribbons who was hurrying
along with a smile on her lips, from the shop in the west to that
unknown home in the east where the child of her shame had laughed and
crowed and climbed up her bosom to her