‘Yes,’ answered the Rector in his despondent way, ‘I wrote to Harwood—you remember my old friend Harwood, the solicitor?—and set him to work, not telling him the whole story, as you may suppose. But it resulted in nothing. I put an advertisement into the _Times_, too, imploring your sister—’ with a little husky noise before the word, as if he would fain have uttered his missing girl’s name but could not, ‘imploring her to come back, offering forgiveness, affection, silence, so worded that none but she could understand. I think she must have left England, Lucius. I do not believe she would have left that appeal unanswered.’ ‘Vandeleur!’ said Lucius quietly; ‘an assumed name, no doubt. Some scoundrel she met at the Castle, or at Lady Baker’s. Vandeleur, I pray God I may come across him before I’m many years older.’ This was all he said, and from this time forth he never pronounced his sister’s name. He saw how far this grief had gone towards shortening his father’s life, how dark a cloud it had spread over his mother’s declining years. A twelvemonth later, and both were gone; the father dying suddenly one bright spring morning of heart-disease, organic disorder of long standing, but who shall say how accelerated by that bitter trouble? The faithful wife drooped from the day of her husband’s death, and only four months afterwards sank quietly to her rest, thankful that her journey was ended, placidly happy in the secure hope of a swift and easy passage to the better land, where she would find the partner of her life waiting for her, the little daughter who died years ago greeting her with loving welcome. And thus Lucius Davoren had been left quite alone in the world in the first year of his university life, two years before he came up to London to walk the hospitals, and just five years before he started for America with Geoffrey Hossack. CHAPTER II. HOMER SIVEWRIGHT.