"Oh!" ejaculated Claud, seizing the hand violently, and dropping it the next instant as if it were red-hot. For Leigh's face contracted, and he turned faint from the agony caused by the jar. "What a thoughtless brute I am! Here, have another glass of that beast's wine." "No, no, I'm better now. There, quick! It must be very late, and I don't want my sister to have gone to bed. I dare say she would sit up for me some time, though." "Yes, I'm off," cried Claud, excitedly; "but let me say--no, no, I can't say it now; you must mean it, though, or you wouldn't have spoken like that." He had reached the door, when Leigh stopped him. "I'll go in first and see how your cousin is; Jenny would like the last report." "Better, certainly," he said on his return; and Claud hurried out of the house. "He said `Jenny,'" he muttered, as he ran towards Leigh's new home. "`Jenny,' not `my sister,' or `Miss Leigh.' Oh, what a lucky brute I am! But I do wish I wasn't such a cad!" CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT. Before morning Kate was sufficiently recovered to be removed to Leigh's house; but it was days before her senses had fully returned, and her brain was thoroughly awake to the present and the past, to find herself lovingly attended by her aunt and Jenny Leigh, who was her companion down to Northwood, while Claud kept the doctor company in town and accompanied him as assistant every time he visited Great Ormond Street. For Leigh, in spite of his own injuries, continued to attend Garstang till he was thoroughly out of danger, though it was months before he was able to go to his office. It was time he went there, for the place, and his country house in Kent, were in charge of his creditors' representatives, it having come like a crash on the monetary world that Garstang, the money-lender and speculator, had failed for a very heavy sum. Poetic justice or not, John Garstang found himself bankrupt in health and pocket; his bold attempt to save his position by making Kate his wife being the gambler's last stroke. As a matter of course, James Wilton was involved; led on by Garstang, he had mortgaged his property deeply, and the money was now called in, and ruin stared him in the face just at a time when he was prostrate with illness. "It's jolly hard on the old man," said Claud one day when he had come up to town and called on Leigh, "for the guv'nor has lorded it down at Northwood all these years, and could have been doing it fine now if it hadn't been for old Garstang. He gammoned the guv'nor into speculating, and then gammoned him when he lost to go on with the double or quits game, and a nice thing Johnny must have made out of it. If it had been sheep or turnips, of course the old man would have been all there; but it was a fat turkey playing cards with a fox, and I suppose everything comes to the hammer." "Very bad for your mother," said Leigh. "Oh, I don't know. I say, may I light my pipe?" "Oh, yes; smoke away while you have any brains left."