"That's my little attentive daughter! Good-bye. Mr. Ludlow, if you will stay to dinner we shall be happy." Mrs. Smith came in as he left the room. She was rather a plain likeness of Miss Chalk, not much older. But her face had a straightforward, open look, and I liked her. She made much of me and said how kind she had thought it of Mrs. Todhetley to be at the trouble of making a fichu for her, a stranger. She hoped--she did hope, she added rather anxiously, that Sophie had not asked her to do it. And it struck me that Mrs. Smith had not quite the implicit confidence in Miss Sophie's sayings and doings that she might have had. It was five o'clock when I got away. At the door of the office in the side street stood a gentleman--the same I had seen pass me the other day. I looked at him, and he at me. "Is it Roger Monk?" A startled look came over his face. He evidently did not remember me. I said who I was. "Dear me! How you have grown! Do walk in." And he spoke to me in the tones an equal would speak, not as a servant. As he was leading the way into a sort of parlour, we passed a clerk at a desk, and a man talking to him. "Here's Mr. Everty; he will tell you," said the clerk, indicating Monk. "He is asking about those samples of pale brandy, sir: whether they are to go." "Yes, of course; you ought to have taken them before this, Wilson," was Roger Monk's answer. And so I saw that _he_ was Mr. Everty. "I have resumed my true name, Everty," he said to me in low tones. "The former trouble, that sent me away a wanderer, is over. Many men, I believe, are forced into such episodes in life." "You are with Mr. Smith?" "These two years past. I came to him as head-clerk; I now have a commission on sales, and make a most excellent thing of it. I don't think the business could get on without me now." "Is it true that you are to marry Miss Chalk?" I asked, speaking on a sudden impulse. "Quite true; if she does not throw me over," he answered, and I wondered at his candour. "I suppose you have heard of it indoors?" "Yes. I wish you all success."--And didn't I wish it in my inmost heart! "Thank you. I can give her a good home now. Perhaps you will not talk about that old time if you can help it, Mr. Ludlow. You used to be good-natured, I remember. It was a dark page in my then reckless life; I am doing what I can to redeem it." I dare say he was; and I told him he need not fear. But I did not like his eyes yet, for they had the same kind of shifty look that Roger Monk's used to have. He might get on none the worse in business; for, as the Squire says, it is a shifty world. Sophie Chalk engaged to Mr. Everty, and he Roger Monk! Well, it was a complication. I went back to Miss Deveen's without, so to say, seeing daylight. XV. THE GAME FINISHED.