Between two people so constituted there could be and was no question of sentiment. From the first it had seemed to Nell that her uncle simply tolerated her presence under his roof. He had taken her in because no other door was open to her, and because it would never have done for Squire Cortelyon's niece to have sought the shelter of the workhouse. His kindness, if kindness it could be called, had in it, or so she fancied, a certain grudging element which deprived it of whatever grace it might otherwise have had. She knew nothing of a certain strange, haunting likeness on her own part, nor how often, when her uncle's eyes seemed to be watching her every movement, it was not her he saw at all, but some one known to her only by hearsay, who had been in her grave these forty years or more. When Dick Cortelyon had been a little more than four years in his grave, the Squire, acting on his doctor's advice, went up to London for the purpose of undergoing a certain operation. It was an operation which is not usually supposed to be attended with any particular risk, and Mr. Cortelyon was quite cheerful about it; but of course in such a case, although he did not seem to think so, the question of age becomes an important factor. At this time he was within a month or so of his seventy-second birthday, but, barring his permanent lameness, the result of an accident a score years before, he avouched himself to be--and he fully believed it--as brisk and robust as when he was only half that age. So up to town, accompanied by his niece, he travelled by easy stages in the roomy and comfortable, if somewhat lumbering, family chariot, which dated from his grandfather's time; while, perched in the rumble, Tatham, his body-servant, made platonic love to Miss Baynard's elderly maid, who had not known what it was to feel a man's arm round her waist for more years than she cared to remember. Comfortable lodgings in Bloomsbury had been secured beforehand, and there the operation was presently performed by one of the most eminent surgeons of the day. Everything went well with the Squire, as he had felt sure from the first it would do, and at the end of six weeks he was back at Stanbrook thoroughly cured. But Miss Baynard, when she found herself in London, set herself a task she had hitherto had no opportunity of undertaking. This was nothing less than the hunting-up of her dead cousin's widow and child. As already stated, she had lost the address given her by Dick, and had never afterwards found it. She remembered that the name on the slip of paper, that of Dick's wife's uncle, was McManus, and that the man was a tobacconist in a small way of business in one of the many turnings off Holborn, but the name of the street itself she had clean forgotten.