"My creditors there all assured me---- Oh, Frank, how could I forget?" broke off Charley. "What an ungrateful fellow I am! Though, indeed, not really ungrateful, but it had temporarily slipped my memory. How good it was of you to settle those two bills for me! I would not write to thank you: I preferred to wait until we met. How did you raise the money?" Frank, who had finished his dinner, had nothing to do but to stare at Charles. And he did stare, "I don't know what you are talking about, Charley. What bills have I settled for you?" "The two wretched bills I had accepted and went about in fear of. You know. Was it not you who paid them?" "Are they paid?" "Yes. All paid and done with. It must have been you, Frank. There's no one else that it could have been." "My good lad, I assure you I know nothing whatever about it. Where should I get a hundred pounds from? What could induce you to think it was I?" Charles told the tale--all he knew of it. They wasted some minutes in conjectures, and then came to the conclusion that it must have been Major Raynor himself who had paid. He had become acquainted in some way with Charles's trouble and had quietly relieved it. A lame conclusion, as both felt: for setting aside the fact that the poor major was short of money himself, to pay bills for his son secretly was eminently uncharacteristic of him: he would have been far more likely to proclaim it to the whole house, and reproach Charley in its hearing. But they were fain to rest in the belief, from sheer want of any other benefactor to fix upon. Not a soul was there in the wide world, as far as Charley knew, to come forth in this manner, excepting his father. "I think it must have been so," concluded Charles. "Perhaps the dear old man got to know, through Lamb, of Huddles's visit that day." "And what of Eagles' Nest?" asked Frank, as he passed back into the surgery with Charles, and sent the boy into the kitchen to his dinner. "Has George Atkinson taken possession yet?" "We have heard nothing of Eagles' Nest, Frank; we don't care to hear anything. Possession? Of course he has. You may depend upon it he would make an indecent rush into it the very day after we came out of it, the wretch! If he did not the same night." Frank could not help a smile at the outburst of indignation. "Atkinson ought to do something for you, Charley," he said. "After turning you out of one home, the least he could do would be to find you another. I dare say he might put you into some post or other." "And do you suppose I'd take it!" fired Charles, his eyes blazing. "What queer ideas you must have, Frank! You are as bad as Edina. As if----" "Oh, please, Dr. Brown, would you come to mother," interrupted a small child, darting in at the open door. "She have fell through the back parlour window a-cleaning of it, and her arm be broke, she says." "Who is your mother, little one?" "At the corner shop, please, sir. Number eleven." "Tell her I will come directly."