He was contemptible altogether, the lad decided, too mean for him even to despise, and yet Alick would have liked to fight this despicable individual—to put some terrible affront on him—to do him a serious bodily injury—to tell him, that although Bessie was not worth fretting after, still the man who had lured her away was worth punishing. Nothing Mr. Croft could say or do, Alick kept declaring to himself, should ever induce him to grasp his hand in friendship; and when all was over, when the body of the child who had never known of her own experience the meaning of the word “loneliness,” was left to lie solitary under the shadow of that grey church-tower till the day of judgment, Alick acted upon this decision, and drawing back from the little group which clustered around Arthur, found himself walking side by side with Lord Kemms. Heaven knows what put such a thought into the young man’s mind at the moment; but, after they had passed through the gates, Alick suddenly asked his companion: “How is Nellie?” “Stone blind, as you said she would be,” was the reply. “And I have not yet made the fortune out of which I was to repay you,” remarked Alick. “I am sorry to hear it, though not for the reason you mention,” Lord Kemms answered. “It would have been better, however, perhaps, for all of you had I never bought her. The money she fetched was the first your brother advanced into the Protector.” “Poor Arthur!” murmured the Squire’s brother; “but it was not the Protector that brought us back to Fifield to-day.” “True,” rejoined his companion; “but, perhaps, your brother’s child might have lived a little longer had she never left Berrie Down.” “You are wrong there, my Lord,” Alick replied; “nothing could have saved her; she was dying when she left here, and it was owing entirely to the care and skill of the London doctors she stayed with us so long. It is bad enough as it is, but we could scarcely have borne the loss had it been as you supposed.” Which view of the case happened to be perfectly true, although Lord Kemms imagined the speaker was mistaken. Having had a hand in damaging the Protector, his Lordship felt, naturally, anxious to prove that Company the origin of all evil. Since, in the course of a mysterious Providence, Lally was to die, he would have felt happy to demonstrate that the Protector had, directly or indirectly, been instrumental in killing her. Now, however, Alick Dudley cut the ground from under his feet. If Lally’s short existence had been prolonged, even for an hour, by the skill and kindness of the London doctors, it was impossible for Lord Kemms ever again to insinuate that residing in town had hastened her death. On that score, at all events, Arthur had no reason to reproach himself, which was fortunate, since when he returned to Berrie Down after the funeral, he felt his burden was quite as heavy as he could bear.