Thirty years before the date of my story, Braxton Murray and Alan Prescott were college friends. Braxton was a gentleman commoner of Christchurch; Alan, a scholar of Wadham. Braxton had four hundred a-year allowance from his father, and the direct succession to one of the richest estates in Kent. Alan had his scholarship, seventy pounds a-year exhibition from a country foundation-school, and another fifty allowed him by his uncle. The disparity between the positions of the two young men was vast, but they were thoroughly attached to each other; and when Braxton had succeeded his father, and the old vicar of Havering died, Braxton Murray sent for Alan Prescott, then doing duty as a curate and usher in a suburban school, and presented him with the vicarage of Havering. That was a happy time in both their lives; the income of the Vicar was small, certainly, but so was the parish, and the duties were light; and having only himself, his wife, and a son and daughter to provide for, and being constantly in the receipt of presents from his friend and patron, the Rev. Alan Prescott did very well indeed. Situate in the heart of Kent, no prettier spot than Havering can be found; and Brooklands, the squire's place, is the gem of the county. In the bay-window of the old dining-room, overhanging the fertile valley through which the Medway lies like a thread of silver, the two men would sit drinking their claret, discussing old university chums or topics of the day, and pausing occasionally to look at the gambols of the Vicar's son, Jim, and the Squire's only daughter, Emily, who were the merriest of little lovers. But as years went by, and the Vicar's family steadily increased,--first by twin girls, then by a bouncing boy, and finally by a little crippled girl,--and as, each year, expenses grew heavier, Alan Prescott was somewhat put to it to obtain the necessary connexion of those two ends, the means of bringing which together puzzles so many of us all our lives; and when the governors of the foundation-school where he had been usher, remembering his abilities, wrote to offer him the vacant headmastership, he was too poor to refuse it. Duff borough, a big, staring, gaunt, manufacturing town, perched on one of the bleakest of the northern hills, was a bad exchange for beaming little Havering, with its smiling orchards and glorious hop-gardens; and the society of the purse-proud, cold, stuck-up calico-men was heartbreaking after the ease and warmth of Braxton Murray's companionship. But Alan Prescott felt the spurs of need, and buckled to his work like a man. An active correspondence was kept up between him and the Squire of Havering; and occasionally,--once in the course of four or five years, perhaps,--he had spent a week at Brooklands; but it was too expensive to remove his family; and consequently, until that evening in Saxe-Coburg Square James Prescott had not seen Emily Murray since they were children together, playing out in the old