; I can't prevent that."

"And I must tell him you definitely refuse to meet him."

"Yes. I cannot see him."

"Or tell him your address?"

"No; you know where a letter would find me."

"Well, will you call again--say this day week?"

"Yes; to see you alone."

Thus the unsatisfactory interview ended.

Mr Wilkins was a man of honour, and felt he had no right to insist on
Jeffreys opening communications with the colonel; still less had he the
right as he might easily have done, to track his footsteps and discover
his hiding-place.

Jeffreys, alive to a sense of insecurity, evidently expected the
possibility of some such friendly ruse, for he returned to his work by a
long and circuitous course which would have baffled even the cleverest
of detectives. He seriously debated with himself that night the
desirability of vacating his garret at Storr Alley and seeking lodgings
somewhere else. His old life seemed hemming him in; and like the wary
hare, he felt the inclination to double on his pursuers and give them
the slip.

For, rightly or wrongly, he had convinced himself that the one calamity
to be dreaded was his recapture by the friends in whose house his bad
name had played him so evil a revenge.

Yet how could he leave Storr Alley? Had he not ties there?

Was it not worth worlds to him to hear now and then, on his return at
night, some scrap of news of the ministering angel whose visits cheered
the place in his absence? He shrank more than ever from a chance
meeting; but was it not a pardonable self-indulgence to stay where he
could hear and even speak of her?

Nor was that his only tie now.

Mrs Pratt, in the room below, had never recovered yet from the illness
that had prostrated her at little Annie's death; and night by night
Jeffreys had carried the two babies to his own attic in order to give
her the rest she needed, and watch over them in their hours of cold and
restlessness.

He became an expert nurse. He washed and dressed those two small
brethren--the eldest of whom was barely three--as deftly and gently as
if he had been trained to the work. And he manipulated their frugal
meals, and stowed them away in his bed, with all the art of a practised
nurse. How could he desert them now? How indeed? That very night, as
he sat writing, with the little pair sleeping fitfully on the bed, a
head was put in at the door, and a voice said in a whisper, "Poor Mrs
Pratt's gone, John."

"What," he s