The day after this Richmond dinner was Sunday; but even that circumstance did not prevent Francis Tredethlyn from taking preliminary steps towards finding the missing girl whom he fancied quite within his reach now; since it seemed certain that the face he had seen on the stage of Drury Lane was the face of his uncle Oliver’s daughter, and no other. It had been his habit until very lately to accompany Maude every Sunday morning to a certain fashionable place of worship not very far from Sloane Street, where miserable sinners lamented their iniquities and their wretchedness amid the subdued rustling of silk at a guinea a yard, and in an atmosphere that was odorous with Jockey Club and Ess Bouquet. But Star-and-Garter dinners, and evenings “finished” in mysterious localities at the West-end, are by no means conducive to early rising; and now the Sabbath bells that Mr. Tredethlyn had been wont to hear ringing blithely in the morning air while he breakfasted with his wife, were apt to mingle with his feverish morning dreams, and to transform themselves into the shrill peal of an alarm-bell summoning the fireman’s succour for perishing wretches in some blazing habitation, or the bell on board a boat leaving a pier--a boat which the dreamer was--oh, so eagerly--striving to reach, but never, never could; for just as his foot was going to step upon the deck, the plank on which he trod would give way and tilt him into the waking world; with a raging headache, perhaps, and a dull ceaseless pain in his breast, which he scarcely cared to acknowledge by its ugly name of Remorse. So now Mr. Tredethlyn was apt to spend the earlier part of his Sunday morning in fitful slumbers, and the later portion of his day in the society of his devoted friends. Unhappily Mephistopheles has such a knack of making himself useful, that after once enjoying his society, Faust is apt to find life very dreary without that fatal companionship. Drifted away from the simple life that was natural to him, Francis was only a helpless creature, with all the dismal blank of existence to be filled up somehow or other. But upon this particular Sunday he had a purpose of his own, and the honest energy with which he set about the achievement of that purpose transformed him into a new being. Harcourt Lowther might have felt a little twinge of alarm had he seen his pupil, as he walked away from the stuccoed district, with the old light in his eyes, the old lightness in his firm tread. Francis forgot that he had an empty life to drag out, and an idolized wife who did _not_ love him. He forgot everything, except that he had to redeem his half-forgotten vow, to fulfil a long-neglected duty. “My uncle Oliver’s money brought _her_ peace of mind, and prosperity for the father she loves so dearly,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “Let me remember that, when I think of his disinherited daughter.”