Bram was disgusted, sickened. He scented through this new turn of Mr. Biron’s thoughts that feeling for the main chance which was such a prominent feature of that gentleman’s character. And quite unexpectedly he stopped short, and said bluntly-- “That may comfort you, Mr. Biron, but it will never do aught for her! If--if,” he had to clear his throat to make himself heard at all, “if she--comes back, she’ll never touch their money! Poor, poor child!” “You think she’ll come back?” asked Theodore almost wistfully. But Bram could not answer. He did not know what to think, what to wish. He shrugged his shoulders without speaking, and with a gesture of abrupt farewell turned from his companion, who had now nearly reached his own door, and walked rapidly back in the direction of his lodging. He could not bear to come near the farm, the place which had been hallowed in his eyes by thoughts of her who had been his idol. Theodore called out to him. “You’ll give me a look in to-night, won’t you, when you come back from the office? Think how lonely I shall be.” Bram, without turning round, made a gesture of assent. He felt with surprise to himself that he was half-drawn to this contemptible creature by the fact that, underneath all his theatrical demonstrations of regret and grief, there was some very strong and genuine feeling. It was chiefly a selfish feeling, as Bram knew; indeed, a resentful feeling, that Claire had treated him shabbily and ungratefully in leaving him to shift for himself without any warning, after so many years of patient slavery, of tender care for him. But still Bram felt that he had at last some emotion in common with this man, whom he had so far only despised. Theodore even felt the disgrace, the moral shame of this awful disaster to his daughter more keenly than any one would have given him credit for. As for Bram himself, he went home, he ate his breakfast, he started for the town almost in his usual manner. No one who passed him detected any sign in his look or in his manner of the blow which had fallen upon him. But, for all that, he was suffering so keenly, so bitterly, that the very intensity of his pain had a numbing effect, reducing him to the level of a brute which can see, and hear, and taste, and smell, but in which all sense of anything higher is dead and cold. It was not until he had nearly passed the garden of the farm, keeping his eyes carefully turned in the opposite direction, that a bend in the road caught his eye, where not many evenings before he had seen Claire standing with a letter in her hand, waiting for some one to pass who would take it to the post for her.