The clock struck the half hour after nine as Geoffrey left the hotel, with his friend’s letter in his pocket; assuredly a strange hour in which to visit a lady who had forbidden him to visit her at all. But a man who feels that he is taking a desperate step will hardly stop to consider the details of time or place which may render it a little more or less desperate. To approach the woman he loved armed with a letter from another man; to bring a stranger’s influence to bear upon her who had been deaf to his most passionate pleading; to say to her, ‘I myself have failed to touch your heart, but here is my bosom friend’s prayer in my behalf: will you grant to his vicarious wooing the grace you have persistently denied to me?’—what could seem madder, more utterly desperate, than such a course as this? Yet women are doubtless strange creatures—a fact which those classic poets and satirists whose opinions it had been his pleasing task to study had taken pains to impress on Mr. Hossack’s mind. He remembered Mrs. Bertram’s agitation in that brief scene with Lucius, her exalted sense of gratitude. It was just possible that she really might regard him, even at this hour, as the preserver of her child’s life—second only to Providence in that time of trouble. And if she thought of him thus, his influence might have some weight. ‘Dear old fellow!’ thought Geoffrey affectionately; ‘he wouldn’t let me see the letter. I daresay he has given me no end of a character,—like other written characters, which are generally of the florid order—praised me up to the skies. Will his eloquence move her to pity me, I wonder? I fear not. And I feel odiously caddish, going to deliver my own testimonials.’ If he could have faced Lucius with any grace, it is possible that he would have turned back, even on the very threshold of Mrs. Bertram’s tiny garden. But after bringing his friend down from London, could he be so churlish as to reject his aid, let it be offered in what manner so ever? He plucked up his courage at sight of the lamp in her window—a gentle light. The upper half of the casement was open, and he heard the dreamy arpeggios of one of Mendelssohn’s Lieder played by the hand whose touch even his untutored ear knew so well. In another minute he was admitted by a neat little servant, who opened the door of the parlour unhesitatingly, and ushered him straightway in, assured that he had come to propose a new pupil, and regarding him as the harbinger of fortune. ‘A gentleman, if you please ’m, to see you.’ Mrs. Bertram rose from the piano, the graceful figure he knew so well, in the plain black dress, just as he had seen her the first time at the morning concert in Manchester-square—a certain lofty pose of the head, the dark eyes looking at him with a grave steady look, after just one briefest flash of glad surprise, just one faint quiver of the perfect lips. ‘Mr. Hossack!’