m the letters." Granny Marrable was
going on to say something, but Gwen stopped her, saying:--"First let me
read this." Then the Granny was silent, while the young lady read, half
aloud and half to herself, this following letter:--

"MOTHER--You will be surprised to get this letter from me. Are you
sorry I am not dead? Can't say I'm glad. I have been His Majesty's
guest for one long spell, and Her Majesty's for another, since you
saw the last of me. I'm none so sure I wasn't better off then, but
I couldn't trust H.M.'s hospitality again. It might run to a rope's
end. Dodging blood-hounds is my lay now, and I lead the life of a
cat in hell. But I'm proud--proud I am. You read the newspaper
scrap I send along with this, and you'll be proud of your son. I'm
a chip of the old block, and when my Newgate-frisk comes, I'll die
game. Do you long to see your loving son? If you don't, send him a
quid or two--or put it at a fiver. Just for to enable him to lead
an honest life, which is my ambition. You can come to a fiver. Or
would you rather have your loving son come and ask for it? How
would you like it, if you were an honest man without a mag in his
pocket, and screwpulls of conscience? You send on a flimsy to
M'riar. She'll see I get it. I'll come for more when I want it--you
be easy. So no more at present from your dutiful son:--

RALPH THORNTON DAVERILL, _alias_ RIX."

"P.S.--You can do it--or _ask a kind friend_ to help."

"What a perfectly intolerable letter!" said Gwen. "What does he mean by
a newspaper scrap?... Oh, is that it?" She took from the old lady a
printed cutting, and read it aloud. "Fancy his being _that_ man," said
she. "It made quite a talk last winter--was in all the papers." It was
the paragraph Uncle Mo had come upon in the _Star_.

"I have seen that man," said Granny Marrable. And so sharp was Gwen in
linking up clues, that she exclaimed at once:--"What--the madman? Dr.
Nash told me of _him_. Didn't he come to hunt her up?"

"That was it, my lady. And he was all but caught. But I have never
spoken of my meeting him, and she has barely spoken of him, till this
letter came yesterday. And then we could speak of him together. But not
Ruth. She was to know nothing. She was not here, by good luck, just the
moment that it came."

"And my dear old Mrs. Picture? Oh, Granny--what a letter for her to
get!"

"Indeed, my l