a been more sensible of it, must have chilled her blood. 'Who
said anything else? So there you are, both of you, and none the worse,
I'll take my davy! Lash away, Tim! Make the beggars fly!'

As he uttered the last words he sprang on the wheel, and before the
tutor could believe his good fortune, or feel assured that there was not
some cruel deceit playing on him, the carriage splashed up the mud, and
rattled away. In a trice the lights grew small and were gone, and the
two were left standing side by side in the darkness. On one hand a mass
of trees rose high above them, blotting out the grey sky; on the other
the faint outline of a low wall appeared to divide the lane in which
they stood--the mud rising rapidly about their shoes--from a flat aguish
expanse over which the night hung low.

It was a strange position, but neither of the two felt this to the fall;
Mr. Thomasson in his thankfulness that at any cost he had eluded Mr.
Dunborough's vengeance, Julia because at the moment she cared not what
became of her. Naturally, however, Mr. Thomasson, whose satisfaction
knew no drawback save that of their present condition, and who had to
congratulate himself on a risk safely run, and a good friend gained, was
the first to speak.

'My dear young lady,' he said, in an insinuating tone very different
from that in which he had called for her kerchief, 'I vow I am more
thankful than I can say, that I was able to come to your assistance! I
shudder to think what those ruffians might not have done had you been
alone, and--and unprotected! Now I trust all danger is over. We have
only to find a house in which we can pass the night, and to-morrow we
may laugh at our troubles!'

She turned her head towards him, 'Laugh?' she said, and a sob took her
in the throat.

He felt himself set back; then remembered the delusion under which she
lay, and went to dispel it--pompously. But his evil angel was at his
shoulder; again at the last moment he hesitated. Something in the
despondency of the girl's figure, in the hopelessness of her tone, in
the intensity of the grief that choked her utterance, wrought with the
remembrance of her beauty and her disorder in the coach, to set his
crafty mind working in a new direction. He saw that she was for the time
utterly hopeless; utterly heedless what became of herself. That would
not last; but his cunning told him that with returning sensibility would
come pique, resentment, the desire to be avenged