He turned down a by-lane which ran at right angles to the avenue, pursuing which he came upon a low park paling enclosing the shrubbery. Carefully looking round him, and finding no one within sight, he climbed the paling, and dropped noiselessly upon the primrose-decked bank on the other side. All quiet; nothing moving but the birds darting in and out among the bright green trees, and the grasshoppers in myriads round his feet. The walk had tired him, and he lay down on the mossy turf and awaited his mother's coming. Mossy turf, soft and sweet-smelling, the loud carol of the birds, the pleasant, soothing, slumberous sound of the trees bending gently towards each other as the mild air rustled in the leaves. It was long since he had experienced these influences, but he was now under their spell. What did they recall? Boyhood's days; the Bishop's Wood, where they went birds'-nesting; Duke Primus, who wore "stick-ups," and was the cock of the school, and Charley Cope, who used to tell such good stories in bed, and Bergemann, a German boy, who was drowned in a pond in just such a part of the wood as this, and--twelve o'clock rings sharply out from the turret clock in Poynings stables, and at its sound away fly the ghosts of the past. Twelve o'clock, the time appointed in his mother's letter for him to meet her in that very spot. He rose up from the turf, and sheltering himself behind the broad trunk of an old tree, looked anxiously in the direction of the house. No human being was to be seen; a few rabbits whisked noiselessly about, their little white tails gleaming as they disappeared in the brushwood, but they and the birds and the grasshoppers comprised all the life about the place. He looked on the big trees and the chequered shade between them, and the glimpses of blue skylight between their topmost boughs; he left his vantage ground and strode listlessly to and fro; the quarter chime rung out from the turret, then the half hour, and still no one came. Some one coming at last! George's quick eyes make out a female figure in the far distance, not his mother, though. This woman's back is bowed, her step slow and hesitating, unlike Mrs. Carruthers, on whose matronly beauty Time has as yet laid his gentlest touch. He must stand aside, he thought, amongst the trees until the new comer had passed by; but as the woman approached, her gait and figure seemed familiar to him, and when she raised her head and looked round her as though expecting some one, he recognized Nurse Brooks. The old woman gave a suppressed scream as George Dallas stepped out from among the trees and stood before her. "I could not help it, George," said she; "I could not help it, though I was looking for and expecting you at that moment, and that's more than you were doing for me, isn't it? You were expecting some one else, my boy?" "Is anything the matter? Is she ill? Has her husband found out?" "Nothing! She's--well, as well as may be, poor dear, and--"