“My four golden sovereigns shall be the first he has,” thought Madonna, nervously taking the housemaid’s offered arm at the house-door. “I will put them in some place where he is sure to find them, and never to know who they come from. And Zack shall be rich again--rich with all the money I have got to give him.” Four sovereigns represented quite a little fortune in Madonna’s eyes. It had taken her a long, long time to save them out of her small allowance of pocket-money. When they knocked at the private door of the tobacco-shop, it was opened by the landlady, who, after hearing what their errand was from Patty, and answering some preliminary inquiries after Zack, politely invited them to walk into her back parlor. But Madonna seemed--quite incomprehensibly to the servant--to be bent on remaining in the passage till she had finished writing some lines which she had just then begun to trace on her slate. When they were completed, she showed them to Patty, who read with considerable astonishment these words: “Ask where his sitting-room is, and if I can go into it. I want to leave something for him there with my own hands, if the room is empty.” After looking at her young mistress’s eager face in great amazement for a moment or two, Patty asked the required questions; prefacing them with some words of explanation which drew from the tobacconist’s wife many voluble expressions of sympathy and admiration for Madonna. At last, there came to an end; and the desired answers to the questions on the slate were readily given enough, and duly, though rather slowly, written down by Patty, for her young lady’s benefit. The sitting-room belonging to Mr. Thorpe and the other gentleman, was the front room on the first floor. Nobody was in it now. Would the lady like to be shown-- Here Madonna arrested the servant’s further progress with the slate pencil--nodded to indicate that she understood what had been written--and then, with her little packet of money ready in her hand, lightly ran up the first flight of stairs; ascending them so quickly that she was on the landing before Patty and the landlady had settled which of the two ought to have officially preceded her. The front room was indeed empty when she entered it, but one of the folding doors leading into the back room had been left ajar; and when she looked towards the opening thus made, she also looked, from the particular point of view she then occupied, towards the head of the bed on which Zack lay, and saw his face turned towards her, hushed in deep, still, breathless sleep.