CHAPTER LIV.
JACK DE BARON'S VIRTUE 352

CHAPTER LV.
HOW COULD HE HELP IT? 357

CHAPTER LVI.
SIR HENRY SAID IT WAS THE ONLY THING 365

CHAPTER LVII.
MR. KNOX HEARS AGAIN FROM THE MARQUIS 372

CHAPTER LVIII.
MRS. JONES' LETTER 378

CHAPTER LIX.
BACK IN LONDON 384

CHAPTER LX.
THE LAST OF THE BARONESS 391

CHAPTER LXI.
THE NEWS COMES HOME 397

CHAPTER LXII.
THE WILL 405

CHAPTER LXIII.
POPENJOY IS BORN AND CHRISTENED 410

CHAPTER LXIV.
CONCLUSION 418

IS HE POPENJOY?

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.--NUMBER ONE.

I would that it were possible so to tell a story that a reader should
beforehand know every detail of it up to a certain point, or be so
circumstanced that he might be supposed to know. In telling the little
novelettes of our life, we commence our narrations with the presumption
that these details are borne in mind, and though they be all forgotten,
the stories come out intelligible at last. "You remember Mary Walker.
Oh yes, you do;--that pretty girl, but such a queer temper! And how she
was engaged to marry Harry Jones, and said she wouldn't at the
church-door, till her father threatened her with bread and water; and
how they have been living ever since as happy as two turtle-doves down
in Devonshire,--till that scoundrel, Lieutenant Smith, went to
Bideford! Smith has been found dead at the bottom of a saw-pit.
Nobody's sorry for him. She's in a madhouse at Exeter; and Jones has
disappeared, and couldn't have had more than thirty shillings in his
pocket." This is quite as much as anybody ought to want to know
previous to the unravelling of the tragedy of the Jones's. But such
stories as those I have to tell cannot be written after that fashion.
We novelists are constantly twitted with being long; and to the
gentlemen who condescend to review us, and who take up our volumes with
a view to business rather than pleasure, we must be infinite in length
and tedium. But the story must be made intelligible from the beginning,
or the real novel readers will not like it. The plan of jumping at once
into the middle has been often tried, and sometimes seductively enough
for a chapter or two; but the writer still has to hark