"Be content, Robert," he said; "I have never failed you yet, and I will not fail you now. All that I know, and all that I can guess you wish to have said to your wife, I will say to her; and as surely as I am talking to you now I will bring her home to you,--I never felt more certain of any thing. Good-bye, my dear fellow; you have nothing to do but trust me, keep quiet, and get well." "Yes, I will keep very quiet--as quiet as I can. God bless you! Good-bye." They wrung each other's hands, and Yeldham went away, speaking gravely to Alice in the hall, and reflecting with a queer sense of wonder, when he gained the road, upon the oddity of the fate that made him a messenger, in this supreme crisis, to Katharine Streightley, the only woman who had ever made him think regretfully of his loneliness, the only woman who had ever realised his early dreams of love and beauty. Robert had kept his face towards the door until the sound told him Yeldham had shut the little garden-gate, and was gone; then he turned his head away, buried his face in the sofa-cushion, and closed his eyes. Thus old Alice found him, when she came to see if he required any thing, an hour later; and the old woman said downstairs that she wished Master Robert would let her send for the doctor, for he was looking "desperate white and weary, to be sure." When Charles Yeldham reached Paris in the evening after his interview with Robert, he found the fair city looking beautiful, under the combined influence of clear starlight, sharp frost, and the glow of the best-arranged gaslight in Europe. The scene, striking as it always must be, made but little impression upon him, as he drove from the railway-station to his hotel, revolving in his mind all the circumstances of the painful and difficult business which lay before him, and haunted by the remembrance of Robert's white, grieved face. He was tired, depressed, and more doubtful of the success of his undertaking than when he had spoken so confidently to Robert; but he tried to rouse himself, to shake off the foreboding which beset him, and to arrange some definite plan for the interview with Katharine, which he felt sure would be accorded him. It was no part of his intention to take her by surprise. He knew that she would resent such a _ruse_ as an unpardonable liberty, and did not doubt that it would defeat its own purpose, and lead to her immediate departure from Paris. He made his calculations in this way: "When she receives my request for an interview, she will conclude that no further effort at concealment will avail; she will remember that no coercion of her is possible; and she will consider it more in accordance with her own dignity to grant me the interview--a concession winch does not commit her to any thing. After all, too, she is a woman; and she _must_ want to know something about the world she has turned her back on; she _must_, after all this time." So Charles Yeldham felt no apprehension