not pass from him until he had done all that man could do to set the wrong right. While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was walking into Aix with the speed of a man who has urgent work before him, though that work was nothing more definite or practical than the examination over again of the hotel books to see if there he could find any clew. He turned them over and over in his abstraction, going back without knowing it to distant dates, and roaming over an endless succession of names which conveyed no idea to his mind. He came at last, on the last page, to the name of Arthur Rivers, with a dull sort of surprise. “To be sure, Rivers is here!” he said to himself aloud. “Yes, to be sure I am here. I have been waiting to see if you would find me out,” Rivers said behind him. John did not give him so cordial a welcome as he had done on the previous night. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have so much on my mind I forget everything. Were you coming out to see my sister? We can walk together. The sun is warm, but not too hot for walking. That’s an advantage of this time of the year.” “It is perhaps too early for Mrs. Lennox,” Rivers said. “Oh, no, not too early. The truth is we are in a little confusion. One of the children has been giving us a great deal of anxiety.” “Then, perhaps,” said Rivers, with desperate politeness, “it will be better for me not to go.” He felt within himself, though he was so civil, a sort of brutal indifference to their insignificant distresses, which were nothing in comparison with his own. To come so far in order to eat his breakfast under the dusty trees, and dine at the table d’hôte in a half-empty hotel at Aix, seemed to him so great an injustice and scorn in the midst of his fame and importance that even the discovery he had made, though it could not but tell in the situation, passed from his mind in the heat of offended consequence and pride. John Trevanion, for his part, noticed the feeling of the other as little as Rivers did his. “One of the children has been walking in her sleep,” he said. “I don’t want to get a fool of a doctor who thinks of nothing but rheumatism. One of them filled my good sister’s mind with folly about suppressed gout. Poor little Amy! She has a most susceptible brain, and I am afraid something has upset it. Do you believe in ghosts, Rivers?” “As much as everybody does,” said Rivers, recovering himself a little. “That is about all that any one can say. This child thinks she has seen one. She is a silent little thing. She has gone on suffering and never said a word, and the consequence is, her little head has got all wrong.” By this time Rivers, having cooled down, began to see the importance of the disclosure he had to make. He said, “Would you mind telling me what the apparition was? You will understand, Trevanion, that I don’t want to pry into your family concerns, and that I would not ask without a reason.”