“If anything were to happen to me, John, while I was down here,” he answered, composedly, “my wife, who put me up to coming down, would come down after me; and if once _she_ got hold of you, John, oh! wouldn’t you wish me back again, that’s all!” John Bradfield was silent. The net was closing round him. Already the fatal knowledge was in the power of more persons than he knew; he felt the strong walls of his citadel, in which he had been secure for seventeen years, crumbling. He was man enough, however, to be able to keep his feelings to himself. “All right,” said he, shortly, “you can stay if you like, of course. And when you like to go, you can take what you want with you.” But Marrable, who had a conscience, was not quite satisfied. “Thank you, John,” he answered, rather dismally. “I thought you wouldn’t mind giving a shelter to an old chum down on his luck. But, mind you,” he went on, shaking a slow, fat forefinger impressively as he spoke, “I don’t mind taking a crust from you as a friend, seeing that, after all, it’s not your money at all, but Gilbert Wryde’s, and that he’d have helped me like a prince without my asking. But you understand that I wouldn’t be so mean as to take a bribe to hold my tongue if Gilbert’s son were still alive.” Blunt as John Bradfield habitually was, his bluntness was as nothing to the terribly tactless and blundering plain-speaking of Alfred, who thought he was conducting the interview with equal amiability and cleverness, while, in reality, every speech he uttered made John Bradfield wince, and filled him with an ever-growing wish that he dared kick his meek master. And so Alfred Marrable became a permanent guest at Wyngham House. CHAPTER XXXII. A RESURRECTION. Encouraged by her condescension on his first arrival, Alfred Marrable looked forward to finding daily pleasure in the society of the beautiful Miss Abercarne. Great was his disappointment then to find that she took advantage of her position as a convalescent to remain entirely in her own rooms; so that, at the end of his first fortnight at Wyngham, he had seen no more of her than on his first day there. At the end of that time Chris, having obtained her mother’s leave to go away for a change, left for town one day by the morning express, to spend a few weeks with some friends of her mother’s in town. Her sole objects were, in the first place, to avoid for a little longer the inevitable meeting with Mr. Bradfield, and in the next to indulge a wild hope that she had formed of finding that Dick was still alive. Her first object was gained, of course; her second remained a vision for the first two months of her stay in London. Then a very strange incident recalled with great vividness all the associations which linked Wyngham House and Dick together in her memory. She was looking in the window of a picture dealer in one of the side streets of the West end when a little water-colour drawing attracted her attention.