“No hope—_here_” said Hugh. “Now, you will be good, be worthy of him? You will come away with me, _me_ (he trusted me, you know, dear), for a little while? We will come back very, very soon!” Like a child she held out her arms, and allowed him to assist her from the bed, and to half-support, half-carry her from the room and downstairs to the drawing-room, where, like a tired child, she sobbed herself into calm, then sleep. When she was soundly asleep upon the sofa, Hugh fetched Mrs. Mervyn. “It is best as it is, is it not?” she asked him, somewhat timidly, by which Hugh gathered that the proposed death-bed marriage was no secret. “I hope so,” he said, ambiguously. Then, outwardly calm, inwardly racked with mingled emotions, he turned to face his life under the new conditions. CHAPTER VI. THE LOCKET. “Where is Mr. Pym?” asked Hugh, meeting James in the hall. “Captain Pym is gone, sir. Rode off in a hurry about half-an-hour since. If you mean the old gentleman, he’s in the library with Mr. Mervyn.” Sir Roderick’s brother was evidently unknown to and of little account in Sir Roderick’s household. Hugh felt that his first duty was to show every deference to a man who had been, whether justifiably or not, cruelly insulted by the dying man. He knocked at the library door. It was Mr. Mervyn who called out, “Come in.” The fitful sunshine and the leaping flames on the old-fashioned hearth were brightening the room. Mr. Pym had unwittingly seated himself in Sir Roderick’s own particular arm-chair. Mr. Mervyn stood on the hearthrug. “That’s right, Paull,” he said, evidently relieved. “She is better? Had a good cry? She’ll do, then. Mr. Pym and I have had a talk, and I am glad you should understand each other before he returns home. I have assured him, in your behalf, that Sir Roderick’s wishes on the subject of yourself and Lilia were more of a surprise to you than to myself.” “I am not a thief, Mr. Mervyn,” said Hugh, warmly. “If coming here as Sir Roderick’s medical attendant I had even thought of Miss Pym as a possible future wife, I should have been as much a thief as a common burglar—aye, more so.” Mr. Pym’s long upper lip curved a little with more a sneer than a smile. “These young men now-a-days are so strangely romantic,” he said, turning to Mr. Mervyn. “It has, I assure you, been a great difficulty in my way in the matter of my clerks. My partner, Mr. Clithero, invariably defers to me in the affair of our staff. This tendency has been a great stumbling-block to me. I will not have a person in my employ who uses tall talk.” Hugh bit his lip, but remembered that this man who wished to show him that he classed him with his bank clerks, with the despised majority, the bread-winning non-capitalists, was not only Lilia’s uncle, but possibly his sister Daisy’s father-in-law.