Willingly she hastened down stairs to see him, burning with impatience to hear his errand. "Is the man found?" was her first eager question. The bustling young lawyer subsided instantly. "Haw, no, not quite caught yet," he admitted, "but he's almost as good as ours now, my dear madam. I visited O'Grady this morning, and caused him to turn queen's evidence against his accomplice in this business, and--aw, I may say the prisoner, I mean the culprit--is done for." He did not explain that O'Grady had been bribed by the magnificent promises of the quick-witted Emersham to leak out a little of the truth, just enough to give the detectives a fresh clue to his probable hiding-place; and that poor O'Grady was just then imprecating the dashing young lawyer from earth to a hotter place as a cheat, a liar, and a traitor, when he found out that he had used him as a tool. Mr. Emersham also showed his client a telegram which the detectives had sent him, stating that they had got on the criminal's track, and expected to come up with him very soon now. On the whole his visit did much to heighten Margaret's feverish impatience, and filled her with some of his own sanguine hopes. When the young gentleman had gone, Margaret wandered through the wide, echoing rooms with a sense of freedom which she had never experienced before; a feeling of affection for these familiar chambers, for the sake of her who had owned them, and of him who should have now possessed them. How she had loved the tender-hearted and freakish Madam Brand, no soul save herself and that dead woman had known; and loving her as she did, could she do else than lay a like sentiment at the feet of her only kinsman, the hapless St. Udo. Pacing through these lofty rooms the lonely girl thought over her checkered past; she breathed a sigh over the pathetic memory of her fond and foolish patroness; she gave a smile of scorn to the man who had come like a curse in the noble St. Udo's stead; the hateful impostor, whose last abject depredation had been but the type of his crawling, insatiable nature, which, sleuth-hound like, held on to the prey to the very last, and made off with a miserable mouthful of it rather than nothing. But when she came to the portrait of St. Udo Brand, in the long crimson dining-room, the fierce flicker softened in her yearning eyes, and a sacred, tender smile dawned on her lips. She studied the grand, passionate-speaking countenance, whose features were cast in a mold fitted to express the noblest emotions, till the soulful eyes seemed to seek hers with a living beam of gratitude; till the fine lips seemed to thrill with a gentle smile, and the souls of St. Udo Brand and Margaret Walsingham appeared to have met face to face for the first time, and to hold sweet communion together.