"If there's aught in what's gone by that's for me," he said, "remember it." And with a gesture of farewell, he turned away and was gone. CHAPTER L. AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH. At dinner the next evening Mr. Ffrench had a story to tell. It was the rather exciting story of the completion of Murdoch's labor, the night attack and his sudden departure. Exciting as it was, however, Mr. Ffrench did not relate it in his most vivid manner. His nervous ailments had increased of late, and he was not in a condition to be vivacious and dramatic. The incident came from him rather tamely, upon the whole. "If it is the success he thinks it is," he terminated, "he is a made man--and he is not the fellow to deceive himself. Well," he said, rather drearily, "I have said it would be so." As Haworth had foreseen, Saint Meran appeared upon the scene again. He was present when the story was told, and was much interested in it as a dramatic incident bringing the peculiarities of the manufacturing class of Broxton into strong play. "If they had murdered him," he remarked with critical niceness, "it would have been the most tragic of tragedies. On the very eve of his life's success. A tragedy indeed! And it is not bad either that it should have been his master who saved him." "Why do you say master?" said Miss Ffrench, coldly. "Pardon me. I thought----" Mr. Ffrench interposed in some hurry. "Oh, he has always been such an uncommon young fellow that we have scarcely thought of him as a servant. He has not been exactly a servant in fact." "Ah!" replied Saint Meran. "I ask pardon again." He had been not a little bewildered at the change he found in the household. Mr. Ffrench no longer expounded his views at length with refined vigor. He frequently excused himself from the family circle on plea of severe indisposition, and at other times he sat in singular and depressing silence. He was evidently ill; there were lines upon his forehead and circles about his eyes; he had a perturbed air and started without any apparent cause. A change showed itself in Miss Ffrench also,--so subtle as not to be easily described. It was a change which was not pallor nor fragility. It was an alteration which baffled him and yet forced him to recognize its presence constantly, and to endeavor to comprehend it. Ffrench himself had seen it and pondered over it in secret. When he sat in his private room at the Bank, bewildered and terrified even by the mere effort to think and face the future, his burden was not a little increased by his remembrance of his hours at home. More than all the rest he shrank from the day of reckoning with his daughter. He had confronted Haworth and borne the worst of his wrath. The account of himself which he must render to her would be the most scathing ordeal of his life. "Some women would pity me," he said to himself, "but she will not."