‘Thank you, dear Mr. Crewe, thank you! In you I have found a real friend,--and how rarely they are met with! Of course I shall make inquiries at once. My niece must be protected. A helpless girl in that dreadful position may commit unheard-of follies. I fear you are right. He is making her his victim. With such a secret, she is absolutely at his mercy. And it explains why she has shunned me. Oh, do you think her brother knows it?’ ‘I’m quite sure he doesn’t; hasn’t the least suspicion.’ ‘Of course not. But it’s wonderful how she has escaped. Your informant--how did she find it out? You say she had the story from the girl’s own lips. But why? She must have shown that she knew something.’ Crewe imparted such details as had come to his knowledge; they were meagre, and left many obscurities, but Mrs. Damerel rewarded him with effusive gratitude, and strengthened the spell which she had cast upon this knight of Farringdon Street. CHAPTER 7 Every day Tarrant said to himself: ‘I am a free man; I was only married in a dream.’ Every night he thought of Nancy, and suffered heartache. He thought, too, of Nancy’s child, his own son. That Nancy was a tender mother, he knew from the letter she had written him after the baby’s birth,--a letter he would have liked to read again, but forbore. Must not the separation from her child be hard? If he saw the poor little mortal, how would the sight affect him? At moments he felt a longing perhaps definable as the instinct of paternity; but he was not the man to grow sentimental over babies, his own or other people’s. Irony and sarcasm--very agreeable to a certain class of newspaper readers--were just now his stock-in-trade, and he could not afford to indulge any softer mode of meditation. His acquaintances agreed that the year of absence had not improved him. He was alarmingly clever; he talked well; but his amiability, the poetry of his mind, seemed to have been lost in America. He could no longer admire or praise. For his own part, he did not clearly perceive this change. It struck him only that the old friends were less interesting than he had thought them; and he looked for reception in circles better able to appreciate his epigrams and paradoxes. A few weeks of such life broke him so completely to harness, that he forgot the seasonable miseries which had been wont to drive him from London at the approach of November. When the first fog blackened against his windows, he merely lit the lamp and wrote on, indifferent. Two years ago he had declared that a London November would fatally blight his soul; that he must flee to a land of sunshine, or perish. There was little time, now, to think about his soul. One Monday morning arrived a letter which surprised and disturbed him. It ran thus: