at perched aloft on his seat, apparently asleep. Thorpe hailed
him, with a peremptory tone, and gave the brusque order, "Strand!" as he
clambered into the hansom.

CHAPTER II

"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe, half an hour
later: "you never did believe in me, as a sister should do."

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather
dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering
gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a fireplace, where only
the laid materials for a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate.
Above the mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals to this
portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon him of responsibility
for the cheerlessness of the room. There were other pictures on the
walls of which he was dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about
Dido and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back to him out
of the mists of his childhood.

Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood strayed with
quaint inconsequence across the field of his preoccupied mind. The
peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop on the floor below remained like
snuff in his nostrils. Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at
the side, he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it the same
rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used to keep him awake nights,
in one of the rooms next to this, with that same foolish noise, when he
was a boy?

"I know you always say that," replied Louisa, impassively.

She was years older than her brother, but, without a trace of artifice
or intention, contrived to look the younger of the two. Her thick hair,
drawn simply from her temples into a knot behind, was of that palest
brown which assimilates grey. Her face, long, plain, masculine in
contour and spirit, conveyed no message as to years. Long and spare of
figure, she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, with her large,
capable hands on her knees.

"I believed in you as much as you'd let me," she went on, indifferently,
almost wearily. "But I don't see that it mattered to you whether I did
or didn't. You went your own way: you did what you wanted to do. What
had I to do with it? I don't suppose I even knew what part of the world
you were in more than once in two or three years. How should I know
whether you were going to succeed, when I didn't even kn