But Mr. Lowther had not settled the question even yet. Lying awake and feverishly restless in his lodging in Norfolk Street, Miss Hillary’s pale face was still before him, the sound of her imploring tones was perpetually in his ear. “‘If I knew all, I might forgive, I might excuse!’ There must have been some meaning in those words, some secret involved in them. Surely, if her father had forced this marriage upon her, after the manner of some tyrannical old parent in a stage-play,--surely, if that had been the case, she would have candidly told me the truth; she would have pleaded the best excuse a woman can have. There must be some secret reason for this marriage, and I must be a consummate fool if I fail in getting to the bottom of the mystery.” Mr. Lowther breakfasted early the next morning, and dressed himself with his accustomed neatness before going out. He had no body-servant now whom he could badger and worry when the world went ill with him; or that individual would most assuredly have paid the penalty of Miss Hillary’s broken faith. Harcourt Lowther, the younger son, was too poor to keep or pay a valet. He had grown weary of waiting for promotion in the army, as he had sickened of hoping for advancement at the bar, and had sold his commission. The world was all before him now, as it had been seven years ago, when he had first looked about him for a profession. The world was all before him, and his one chance of fortune, the possibility of a marriage with Maude Hillary, seemed entirely lost to him. It was scarcely strange if his spirits sank before the dismal blankness of the prospect which he contemplated that morning, as he loitered over his breakfast of London eggs and lodging-house toast and coffee. He went out a little after twelve o’clock, hailed the first prowling hansom he encountered in the Strand, and ordered the man to drive to a certain street in the City, sacred to the stockbroking and money-making interests. Here he alighted, dismissed the cab, turned into a narrow court, still more entirely sacred to stockbroking, and entered a little office, where there was a desk, two or three horsehair chairs, a great many bills hanging against the wall, all relating to the stockbroking interests, and a six-foot screen of wooden panelling, dividing the small outer office from a larger inner office. Mr. Lowther walked straight to this screen, and standing on tip-toe, looked over into the second office. A gentleman with sandy whiskers, a light overcoat, and a white hat, was standing at a desk, and jotting some pencil memoranda upon the margins of a file of documents, which he was turning over with a certain rapidity and precision of touch peculiar to a man of business. “Can you spare a quarter of an hour of your valuable time from the calculation of last year’s prices for the Fiji Island Grand Junction Stock in order to devote it to the claims of friendship?” asked Mr. Lowther.