“Oh no, sir! Only so grateful, so wonderfully saved, so ashamed. Oh, this little creature against my breast--must I not feel it--think of it--if I had had my foolish way I should never have been worthy to hold such a lovely, lovely little dear in my arms again.” * * * * * Sir Everard insisted on lighting Pamela to her attic chamber. She went up before him with a step so elastic, in spite of the burden of the child in her arms, that she had to wait for him on every landing; which she did with a return of her bright amiability and even a flicker of its former radiance in her smile. Each time she halted she rocked the baby, swaying from foot to foot, murmuring under her breath a crooning song which the old man thought very sweet; so sweet indeed, that, with a swing of memory’s pendulum it brought him back to his own childhood’s days and the tender face of his mother, long dead--a mother who had never been old like him. On the threshold of her poor room they parted. She spared him her right hand for a second from its motherly caressing and patting of the child which she bore with such ease on her left arm. He bowed over it as if it had been his queen’s. When he went down to the flaming hearth which justified the landlord’s boast, he sat long by it. He, who had hitherto lived apart in a world of books, found his mind obsessed by the thought of the frightful passions of humanity as they had this night played themselves out before him. The whole scene reproduced itself in his tired brain with the colours of life; Lord Sanquhar’s sardonic, pale, haughty face, the rich vividness, the unblessed allurement, the cruel beauty of the unfaithful wife; the Spaniard’s agony; the irredeemable tragedy of that picture of the father with the child; then the dead face. “Heaven strike their bad hearts!” had cried Pamela in her honest revulsion. Could God ever forgive those who had sent forth the soul of their victim so charged with fury and despair that even death could bring no peace to his brow? And then he thought of Pamela’s face as he had last seen it--pale, tear-stained, but with the old luminous innocence. And, after all, he thought, there had come good out of the evil. “The providence of God is over us all,” he thought with gratitude, as he rose stiffly to seek that feather bed, where there was small likelihood of sleep that night for him. He heard the call of a coach horn beyond, in the night, and immediately afterwards the mighty clatter of the four sets of hoofs and the rush of the wheels in the streets. He went to his window, opened it, and looked out. The up coach from Dover, pausing only to drop a single passenger. Stay, to take up a passenger, too. Sir Everard recognised the swing of the shoulders, the tall, alert frame, the indefinable swagger, even though muffled in the many-caped travelling coat. Young Bellairs was not going to Paris with a fair companion! “Thank Heaven!” said Sir Everard. CHAPTER V