It was the morning following the soirée. I was in the schoolroom with the girls, but quitted it for a minute to read a letter in peace that arrived by the early post. It was written by Miss Barlieu. A very kind letter, telling me to go back to them while I looked out for a fresh situation, should I not get one before leaving Mrs. Paler. Suddenly the door opened, and Mrs. Paler came in without any ceremony of knocking, her face white, and an open letter in her hand. She looked scared, fierce; agitation impeding her free utterance. "Here's news!" she brought out at length, her voice rising to a scream; "here's news to come upon me like a thunderbolt! Does he expect me to live through it?" "Oh, Mrs. Paler, what has happened? You look ill and terrified. You have had bad tidings! Will you not tell them to me?" "What else have I come for but to tell you?" she retorted, speaking in a tone that betrayed as much anger as distress. "I went to the study after you, and frightened the girls; they were for following me here, so I locked them in. I must tell some one, or my feelings will burst bounds; they always were of a demonstrative nature. Not like _his_, the sly, quiet fox!" My fears flew to Mr. Paler. He had been in England some time now, ever since the middle of May. Though I did not understand her anger, or the last words. "You have heard from Mr. Paler, madam!" I uttered. "Some harm has happened to him!" "Harm! yes, it has. Harm to me and my children, though, more than to him. Miss Hereford, he has just gone and ruined himself." "How?" I asked, feeling grieved and puzzled. "It was always his mania, that turf-gambling, and as a young man he got out of thousands at it. I thought how it would be—I declare I did—when he became restless here in Paris, just before the Epsom Meeting, and at last went off to it. 'You'll drop some hundreds over it, if you do go,' I said to him. 'Not I,' was his retort, 'since I have had children to drop hundreds over, I don't spare them for racehorses.' A wicked, reckless man!" "And has he—dropped the hundreds, madam?" "Hundreds!" she shrieked; and then, looking covertly around the roof, as if fearful others might be listening, she sunk her voice to a whisper: "He has lost thirty thousand pounds." "Oh!" I exclaimed, in my horror. Mrs. Paler wrung her hands. "Thirty thousand pounds, every pound of it—and I hope remorse will haunt him to his dying day! Epsom, Ascot, Goodwood—I know not how many other courses he has visited this summer, and has betted frantically at all. The mania was upon him again, and he could not stop himself. He is lying ill now at Doncaster, at one of the inns there, and his brother writes; he tells me they dare not conceal the facts from me any longer." "Shall you not go over to him, madam?"