debt? There might be many between him
and the doctor. And Tom's heart beat fast, as Jane put a letter into his
hand.

"No answer, sir, the clerk says."

Tom opened it, and turned over the contents more than once ere he could
believe his own eyes.

It was neither more nor less than a cheque on Mark's London banker for
just five hundred pounds.

A half-sheet was wrapped round it, on which were written these words:--

"To Thomas Thurnall, Esq., for behaving like a gentleman. The cheque
will be duly honoured at Messrs. Smith, Brown, and Jones, Lombard
Street. No acknowledgment is to be sent. Don't tell your father. MARK
ARMSWORTH."

"Queer old world it is!" said Tom, when the first burst of childish
delight was over. "And jolly old flirt, Dame Fortune, after all! If I
had written this in a book now, who'd have believed it?"

"Father," said he, as he kissed the old man farewell, "I've a little
money come in. I'll send you fifty from London in a day or two, and
lodge a hundred and fifty more with Smith and Co. So you'll be quite in
clover while I am poisoning the Turkeys, or at some better work."

The old man thanked God for his good son, and only hoped that he was not
straitening himself to buy luxuries for a useless old fellow.

Another sacred kiss on that white head, and Tom was away for London,
with a fuller purse, and a more self-contented heart too, than he had
known for many a year.

And Elsley was left behind, under the grey church spire, sleeping with
his fathers, and vexing his soul with poetry no more. Mark has covered
him now with a fair Portland slab. He took Claude Mellot to it this
winter before church time, and stood over it long with a puzzled look,
as if dimly discovering that there were more things in heaven and earth
than were dreamed of in his philosophy.

"Wonderful fellow he was, after all! Mary shall read us out some of his
verses to-night. But, I say, why should people be born clever, only to
make them all the more miserable?"

"Perhaps they learn the more, papa, by their sorrows," said quiet little
Mary; "and so they are the gainers after all."

And none of them having any better answer to give, they all three went
into the church, to see if one could be found there.

And so Tom Thurnall, too, went Eastward-Ho, to take, like all the rest,
what God might send.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TOO LATE.

And how was poor Grace Harvey prospering the while? While comfortable
folks were pra