h the villain of the case I've
been reading up to-day. So you really needn't worry about anybody's
susceptibilities. Lay on the local colour inches deep! You won't make
the place as red as the old gentleman painted it in blood and wine!"

"Really, Mr. Delavoye!" cried Miss Julia, jocosely shocked. "You mustn't
forget that my story would only appear in our _Parish Magazine_--unless
the R.T.S. took it afterwards."

"My rude forefather in a Religious Tract!"

"Of course I should quite reform him in the end."

"You'd have your work cut out, Miss Brabazon."

"I ought to begin with _you_, you know!" said Miss Julia, shaking a
facetious finger in Uvo's face. "I'm afraid you're rather an irreverent
young man, and I don't know what the Vicar would say if he heard us."
She threw another deliciously guilty glance towards the house. "But if
you really mean what you say, and you're sure Mrs. Delavoye and your
sister won't mind either----"

"Mind!" he interrupted. "Forgive me, Miss Brabazon, but how _could_ they
be sensitive about the last head but five of a branch of the family
which doesn't even recognise our existence?"

"Very well, then! I'll take you at your word, and the--the blood and
thunder," whispered Miss Julia, as though they were bad words, "be on
your own head, Mr. Delavoye!"

Thereafter, in a quivering silence, Uvo took me home with him, and
straight up into his own room, where he first shut door and window
without a word. Never since have I heard man laugh quite so loud and
long as he did then.

"But you don't see the point!" he arrogated through his tears, because I
made rather less noise.

"What is it, then?"

"I told you I'd opened up a new sink to-day?"

"You said something of the sort."

"It was a sink of fresh iniquity. I came across it in an old collection
of trials; it isn't as much as mentioned in any memoir of the old
reprobate, nor yet in the many annals of Witching Hill. Yet he once
figured in one of the most disgraceful cases on record."

The case was all that, as Delavoye summed it up for my benefit. The
arch-villain of the piece was of course his scandalous progenitor, aided
and abetted by a quite unspeakable crew. There was a sorely distressed
heroine in humble life--a poor little milliner from Shoreditch--but
because it was all too true, there had been no humble hero to wreak
poetic vengeance on the miscreant.

"Not a nursery story, I grant you! But there were some good touches in