ejects a man,--
and more especially when she does so at a certain time of life. Would
she publish her triumph? Mr Broune would not like to have it known
about among brother editors, or by the world at large, that he had
offered to marry Lady Carbury and that Lady Carbury had refused him.
He had escaped; but the sweetness of his present safety was not in
proportion to the bitterness of his late fears.

He could not understand why Lady Carbury should have refused him! As
he reflected upon it, all memory of her son for the moment passed away
from him. Full ten minutes had passed, during which he had still stood
upon the rug, before he read the entire letter. '"Cut and scotched and
lopped!" I suppose she has been,' he said to himself. He had heard
much of Sir Patrick, and knew well that the old general had been no
lamb. 'I shouldn't have cut her, or scotched her, or lopped her.' When
he had read the whole letter patiently there crept upon him gradually
a feeling of admiration for her, greater than he had ever yet felt,--
and, for awhile, he almost thought that he would renew his offer to
her. '"Showers instead of sunshine; melancholy instead of mirth,"' he
repeated to himself. 'I should have done the best for her, taking the
showers and the melancholy if they were necessary.'

He went to his work in a mixed frame of mind, but certainly without
that dragging weight which had oppressed him when he entered the room.
Gradually, through the night, he realized the conviction that he had
escaped, and threw from him altogether the idea of repeating his
offer. Before he left he wrote her a line:

'Be it so. It need not break our friendship.

'N. B.'

This he sent by a special messenger, who returned with a note to his
lodgings long before he was up on the following morning.

'No;--no; certainly not. No word of this will ever pass my mouth.

'M. C.'

Mr Broune thought that he was very well out of the danger, and
resolved that Lady Carbury should never want anything that his
friendship could do for her.

CHAPTER XXXVII - THE BOARD-ROOM

On Friday, the 21st June, the Board of the South Central Pacific and
Mexican Railway sat in its own room behind the Exchange, as was the
Board's custom every Friday. On this occasion all the members were
there, as it had been understood that the chairman was to make a
special statement. There was the great chairman as a matter of course.
In the midst of his numerous and immense con