"I really don't think that you need be very anxious, Miss Thurwell," he
said hopefully. "At present things look bad enough, but I think that
when the time comes, I shall be able to throw a different light upon
them."

"Thank you," she answered, dropping her veil. "You will let me know
immediately you have definite news?"

"Immediately, Miss Thurwell. You may rely upon that. Good-morning!"

He closed the door after her, and, returning to his seat, scribbled
something on a piece of paper. Then he rang the bell.

"Is Morrison about?" he asked the boy.

"Been in and gone. Round at the Golden Sun, if wanted."

"Take him this slip of paper," ordered Benjamin, "and tell him to keep a
keen watch on the person whose name and address are there. Understand?"

The boy nodded, and withdrew. Then Mr. Benjamin looked across at his
father.

"Well, guv'nor?" he remarked laconically.

"Benjamin," his fond parent replied with enthusiasm, "you are indeed a
jewel of a son."

"I think I am," Benjamin replied modestly. "Come out and have a drink."

CHAPTER XXXVII

BERNARD A PRISONER

The arrest and committal of Bernard Maddison on a charge of murder
created the most profound sensation in every circle of English society.
His work, abstruse and scholarly though some of it was, had appealed to
a great reading public, and had made his name like a household word.
That long deep cry for a larger and sweeter culture which had been
amongst the signs of this troubled generation, had found its most
perfect and adequate expression in his works. He had been at once its
interpreter and its guide. There were thoughtful men and women, a great
mixed class, who, in their own minds, reckoned themselves as his
apostles, and acknowledged no other intellectual master. Some were of
the highest rank of society, others of the very lowest. It was a
literary republic of which he had been the unacknowledged dictator,
containing all those whose eyes had been in any way opened, who had felt
stirring even faintly within them that instinct of mind-development and
expansion to which his work seemed peculiarly fitted to minister. And
so, although his career as an apostle of culture had been but a short
one, he was already the leader of a school whose tenets it would have
been a heresy to modern taste to doubt or question.

The news of this tragical event, therefore, fell like a thunderbolt
upon society, eclipsing every other topic in the newspapers