"That I'm sure you will, Johnston," carelessly assented Eustace, fully alive to the irony and veiled vow of vengeance in this speech, and hardly able to contain his mirth, so comic was the expression of baffled malice which the man strove to conceal. "Well, good-day, again!" "Eusty," said his sister, when they were out of earshot. "You'd better look out. I'm sure that horrid man will have his revenge, somehow." "Pooh! A couple of mean-spirited cads. For two pins I'd have chucked the pair of 'em into the fish-pond. The impudence of the dogs! The very sight of them evoked in me what old Medlicott defined in his sermon the other night as `a surging of the worst passions of our fallen human nature.'" All the same he was destined to learn--and that before very long--that the Scotchman's significant promise might not prove so harmless as he imagined. While Eustace was making merry over his friend's letter, the rector was cogitating over a very different style of communication, though from the same source. In it the writer set forth briefly and circumstantially the completeness of his own ruin, adding, that as a beggar and penniless, he had now no alternative but to take as final the answer which the rector had given on the occasion of their last meeting. There was one thing more--an enclosure directed to Olive, and this the writer ventured to hope might be handed to her. He had purposely left the envelope open in case Dr Ingelow should prefer to peruse its contents, but in any event he trusted it might be delivered, as it was the last communication that would pass between them. It was characteristic of the old priest's honourable and generous nature, that his first act was to fasten down the flap of the envelope then and there. Now the letter was curt, stiff and constrained in wording, but its recipient could "read between the lines." He knew the world thoroughly, and his insight into that most complex of machinery, the human heart, was all but exhaustive, and now, as he sat with the open letter before him, he could gauge with wonderful exactitude the state of mind of its unfortunate writer. Its very curtness was the outcome of a studied expression of feeling, as of one who should nerve himself to the numbing consciousness of sudden and overwhelming ruin. This man had lost all which made life valuable to him. It had fallen from him, one might say, in a single day. How would he bear it? "Poor fellow--poor fellow! He is ruined, indeed?" broke from the old priest's lips, as he turned over the whole situation in his mind. "What will become of him?"