It was nearly two hours after this when Jack Brownlow met Powys at the gate. It was a moonlight night, and the white illumination which fell upon the departing visitor perhaps increased the look of excitement and desperation which might have been apparent even to the most indifferent passer-by. He had been walking very quickly down the avenue; his boots and his dress gleamed in the moonlight as if he had been burying himself among the wet grass and bushes in the park. His hat was over his brows, his face haggard and ghastly. No doubt it was partly the effect of the wan and ghostly moonlight, but still there must have been something more in it, or Jack, who loved him little, would not have stopped as he did to see what was the matter. Jack was all the more bent upon stopping that he could see Powys did not wish it, and all sorts of hopes and suspicions sprang up in his mind. His father had dismissed the intruder, or he had so far forgotten himself as to betray his feelings to Sara, and she had dismissed him. Once more curiosity came in Powys’s way. Jack was so resolute to find out what it was, that, for the first time in his life, he was friendly to his father’s clerk. “Are you walking?” he said; “I’ll go with you a little way. It is a lovely night.” “Yes,” said Powys; and he restrained his headlong course a little. It was all he could do--that, and to resist the impulse to knock Jack down and be rid of him. It might not have been so very easy, for the two were tolerably well matched; but poor Powys was trembling with the force of passion, and would have been glad of any opportunity to relieve himself either in the way of love or hatred. Nothing of this description, however, seemed practicable to him. The two young men walked down the road together, keeping a little apart, young, strong, tall, full of vigor, and with a certain likeness in right of their youth and strength. There should even have been the sympathy between them which draws like to like. And yet how unlike they were! Jack had taken his fate in his hand, and was contemplating with a cheerful daring, which was half ignorance, a descent to the position in which his companion stood. It would be sweetened in his case by all the ameliorations possible, or so at least he thought; and, after all, what did it matter? Whereas Powys was smarting under the miserable sense of having been placed in a false position in addition to all the pangs of unhappy love, and of having betrayed himself and the confidence put in him, and sacrificed his honor, and cut himself off forever from the delight which still might have been his. All these pains and troubles were struggling together within him. He would have felt more keenly still the betrayal of the trust his employer had placed in him, had he not felt bitterly that Mr. Brownlow had subjected him to temptations which it was not in flesh and blood to bear. Thus every kind of smart was accumulated within the poor