The glory of the summer had departed from the Shadrack-road. The costermongers no longer bawled their fine fresh ‘Arline’ plums, their ‘gages’ at four-pence per quart; cucumbers had grown too yellow and seedy even for the Shadrackites; green apples were exhibited on the stalls and barrows; the cracking of walnuts was heard at every street-corner; and the great bloater season—which was a kind of minor saturnalia in this district—had been inaugurated by the first triumphal cry of ‘Rale Yarmouths, two for threehalfpence!’ The pork-butchers, whose trade had somewhat slackened during the dog-days—though the Shadrackites were always pork-eaters—now began to find demand growing brisker. In a word, autumn was at hand. Not by wide plains of ripening corn, or the swift flight of the scared covey rising from their nest in the long grass, did the Shadrackites perceive the change of seasons, but by the contents of the costermongers’ barrows. At this time, also, that raven cry of cholera—generally arising out of the sufferings of those unwary citizens who had indulged too freely in such luxuries as conger-eel and cucumber—dwindled and died away; and the Shadrackites, moved by that gloomy spirit which always beheld clouds upon the horizon, prophesied that the harvest would be a bad one, and bread dear in the coming winter. Lucius went among them day after day, and ministered to them, and was patient with them, and smiled at the little children, and talked cheerily to the old people, despite that growing anxiety in his own breast. He neglected not a single duty, and spent no more of his day in Cedar House than he had done before he took up his quarters there. He ate his frugal meals in his own house, and only went to Mr. Sivewright’s dreary old mansion at a late hour in the evening. He had carried some of his medical books there, and often sat in his little bedroom reading, long after midnight. His boy had orders to run on to Cedar House should there be any call for his aid in the dead hours of the night. He brooded much over that small packet of letters which he counted among his richest treasures—those letters from the man who signed himself ‘H. G.,’ and the lady whom he wrote of as Madame Dumarques, the lady whose own delicate signature appeared in clearest characters upon the smooth foreign paper—written with ink that had paled with the lapse of years—Félicie. Lucius read these letters again and again; and the result of this repeated perusal was the conviction that the writers of those lines were the parents of Lucille. Why should they have been thus deeply interested in Ferdinand Sivewright’s child, or how should he have been able to put forward a claim for money on that child’s behalf?