“Yes; with sufficient time I could repay it.” “Then hope for the miracle, papa. Ah! you think me such a child that you are almost angry with me for telling you to hope; but the lion laughed at the mouse, I dare say.” Five minutes after this, Miss Hillary led her father to his room, and wished him good night, cheerfully enough, upon the threshold. But under that pretence of cheerfulness, cruel fears and perplexities were torturing her innocent heart. Ruin, dishonour, disgrace; the misery of many homes besides that one household on the bank of the river,--all these terrors had come very suddenly upon the girl who only that morning had been impatient of the December weather and the dull gray sky. She went to her room; but only to sit with the door open, listening for any sound in her father’s apartment, which was next her own. She sat for nearly two hours shivering with cold, and then crept softly to her father’s room and opened the door. The merchant was sleeping, peacefully enough to all appearance, for his breathing was tranquil and regular; so Maude went back to her room. It seemed the bitterest mockery to go to bed; but then Miss Hillary’s maid would have been scandalized had she come at eight o’clock and found her mistress still watching. Alas, poor Maude; for the first time in her life she had to submit to that most cruel social penance, entitled “keeping up appearances.” She went to bed; and though she seemed to hear every hour, and half-hour, and quarter of an hour chimed by the church clocks, she must have slept at some time or other in that brief remainder of the night, or else how should she have been tormented by those hideous dreams, in which she was always wading through black morasses and turgid waters, carrying in her arms a great bag of gold, which she vainly strove to convey to her father? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVI. A DRAMA THAT WAS ACTED BEHIND THE SCENES. Mr. Hillary escorted his daughter and Julia Desmond back to Twickenham upon the day following that night-scene of anguish and terror. They left Brighton rather late in the day, and arrived at the Cedars when the early winter evening had closed in upon the leafless avenues and groves about the old house. Lights were burning cheerily in the long range of lower windows, and in the vestibule and inner hall; and rare groups of stainless marble gleamed white against a background of bright hothouse flowers. Deferential servants came hurrying out as the carriage drove up; and Miss Hillary, seeing her home in all its accustomed brightness and comfort, felt a painful sense of bewilderment. It was so difficult to realize the force of that calamity which had been so lately revealed to her: it was so difficult to believe that all this splendour was so much rottenness, from which there was only one step to poverty and disgrace.