My friend Horatio has shown himself not a little curious about my late absence from the joint domicile. I again resorted to the Dorking fiction,--my aged aunt breaking fast, and requiring much propitiation from a dutiful nephew with an eye to her testamentary arrangements. I had been compelled to endow my shadowy relative with a comfortable little bit of money, in order to account for my devotion; since the powerful mind of my Horatio would have refused to grasp the idea of disinterested affection for an ancient kinswoman. There was an ominous twinkle in the Captain's sharp gray eyes when I gave this account of my absence, and I sorely doubt his acceptance of this second volume of the Dorking romance. Ah, what a life it is we lead in the tents of Ishmael, the cast-away! through what tortuous pathways wander the nomad tribes who call Hagar, the abandoned, their mother! what lies, what evasions, what prevarications! Horatio Paget and I watch each other like two cunning fencers, with a stereotyped smile upon our lips and an eager restlessness in our eyes, and who shall say that one or other of our rapiers is not poisoned, as in the famous duel before Claudius, usurper of Denmark? My dear one's letter is all sweetness and love. She is coming home; and much as she prefers Yorkshire to Bayswater, she is pleased to return for my sake--for my sake. She leaves the pure atmosphere of that simple country home to become the central point in a network of intrigue; and I am bound to keep the secret so closely interwoven with her fate. I love her more truly, more purely than I thought myself capable of loving; yet I can only approach her as the tool of George Sheldon, a rapacious conspirator, bent on securing the hoarded thousands of old John Haygarth. Of all men upon this earth I should be the last to underrate the advantages of wealth,--I who have been reared in the gutter, which is Poverty's cradle. Yet I would fain Charlotte's fortune had come to her in any other fashion than as the result of my work in the character of a salaried private inquirer. BOOK THE SEVENTH. CHARLOTTE'S ENGAGEMENT. CHAPTER I. "IN YOUR PATIENCE YE ARE STRONG." Miss Halliday returned to the gothic villa at Bayswater with a bloom on her cheeks, and a brightness in her eyes, which surpassed her wonted bloom and brightness, fair and bright as her beauty had been from the hour in which she was created to charm mankind. She had been a creature to adore even in the first dawn of infancy, and in her christening-hood and toga of white satin had been a being to dream of. But now she seemed invested all at once with a new loveliness--more spiritual, more pensive, than the old. Might not Valentine have cried, with the rapturous pride of a lover: "Look at the woman here with the new soul!" and anon: "This new soul is mine!"