“Dash you!” cried Joscelyn, “you are finely taken up with your mother. I never saw the like before; you have been easy enough about your mother and all her whining and complaining. What makes you set up this dashed nonsense, enough to make a man sick, now?” “I never minded before,” said Joan, “maybe more shame to me. I’m very anxious about Harry myself, and that makes me understand the trouble mother’s in, poor dear!” “Dash you and her too! It’s all the blanked nonsense he’s got from her, the young idiot!” “That’s true: he has a deal of mother in him, poor lad!” Joan said, drying her eyes. Joscelyn lifted his hand, and clenched his fist as if he would have given her a blow. “You’re all a set of ---- ----s!” he cried, launching furiously forth into the kind of eloquence which was habitual to him; but furious as he was, and brutal, there was a keen arrow of pain in his heart too; he was angry with himself. He could have beaten himself with that big fist. What a fool he had been to expose himself, to put it in the power of any lad to expose him! There was nothing he could not have done to himself in the rage of self-reproach and shame which had come upon him. It was a little for Harry--he was not unnatural, and he had a feeling for his offspring--but it was much more that he had laid himself open to the remarks of the county, and every friend and every enemy who might like to gossip about him and say the worst that there was to say. Perhaps there was a little satisfaction in Joan’s bosom at the sight of the disturbance in her father’s. He deserved to be disturbed. She was glad that he should suffer, that he should get in some degree the recompense of his ill-doings. But this was only a transitory diversion to the painful strain of her thoughts. The waiting was hard to bear. How their hearts beat when they saw the postman approaching along the dusty road, and there was a terrible moment of doubt as to whether or not he would turn up the path to the White House! And when he came there was a still hotter excitement as Joan, with fingers which never had trembled before, turned over the letters. She could not trust herself to speak, but only shook her head, looking at her mother at the window. How many days? It seemed to have been going on for years, not days, this intolerable suspense, which, though it was unbearable, had to be borne. Only about a fortnight had elapsed, however, when there came a packet with the Liverpool postmark. It was a large one, and seemed to contain so much that for the first moment Joan scarcely noticed that the address was not written in her brother’s hand. She took it into the parlour, her heart beating loudly, and broke open the envelope, while her mother, trembling, hurried to her side full of eager joy. There tumbled out upon the table, however, four or five closed letters, all addressed to Harry--and nothing more. Then it was that Joan turned the envelope and