love which filled his heart with restlessness, and all a young man’s passionate fears and hopes. Thank heaven! his father slept always as sound as a top, and could not hear. Poor Mrs Mitford! how bitter it would have been to her could she have realised that Kate was lying awake also, and heard him come in, and knew what he was thinking of better than his mother did! “Poor boy!” Kate murmured to herself, between asleep and awake, as she heard his step; “I must speak to him _seriously_ to-morrow.” There was a certain self-importance in the thought; for it is pleasant to be the depositary of such confidences, and to know you have been chosen out of all the world to have the secret of a life confided to you. The difference was that Kate, after this little speech to herself, fell very fast asleep, and remembered very little about it when she woke in the morning. But Mrs Mitford’s mind was so full that she could neither give up the subject nor go to sleep. As for the Doctor, good man, he heard nothing and thought of nothing, and had never awakened to the fact that John was likely to bring any disturbance whatever into his life. Why should anything happen to him more than to other people? Dr Mitford would have said; and even the love-story would not have excited him. Thus the son of the house stole in, in the darkness, with his candle in his hand, through the shut-up silent dwelling, passing softly by his mother’s door not to wake her, with the fresh air still blowing in his face, and the whirl of feeling within, uncalmed even by fatigue and the exertion he had been making. And the two women waked and listened, opening their eyes in the dark that they might hear the better:--a very, very usual domestic scene; but the men who are thus watched and listened for are seldom such innocent men as John. CHAPTER IX.