He rushed to the door and called for help. Presently the terrified servants came running up. When the lights were procured, the squire gasped out his story. A glance round the room showed that the burglars had left by the window. They had not left empty-handed. When the squire looked towards the place where he had left the deed-box, with his late wife’s letters, jewels, and valuables, it was gone. CHAPTER XXX. HOW FATHER AND SON MET AGAIN. As the dusk set in, George Heritage and his young wife drew nearer and nearer to the home they had both quitted under such different circumstances. For the last half hour of their walk George had been almost silent; but Bess, who was picturing in her mind the meeting with her father, hardly noticed it. The determination he had made to throw himself upon his father’s generosity, to return like the prodigal and crave forgiveness, was becoming weaker and weaker as the time came for it to be carried into effect. But for Bess, he would have turned back now at the eleventh hour; yet the thought of the misery which his penniless condition would entail upon her forced him to go on. He waited a little way off while Bess went on first and saw her father. He fancied there might be a scene, and he didn’t like scenes. He was no longer George Smith, the unknown clerk. Here he was George Heritage, Marks’s young master; and he felt that the position, till explained, would be awkward. Had Bess risen from the dead, her father would not have been more astonished than he was when she crept into the little lodge and fell at his feet. ‘Father!’ she cried, ‘don’t you know me?’ For a moment the old lodge-keeper struggled for breath. Then his voice came, and with a big sob, he cried, ‘Bess—my own darling! Thank God! Thank God!’ He flung his arms about her, raised her, and clasped her to his breast, the hot tears pouring down his wrinkled cheeks into the flushed, upturned face of his daughter. Bess cried a little, laughed a little, and then cried again, and at last, when she could speak without doing either, she told her story in a few words. The old lodge-keeper listened in silence. ‘Ay, I knew it, my darling,’ he said, when she had finished. ‘I got your letters, and I trusted you. I guessed it was for the young master’s sake you were silent.’ ‘Yes, father; I would never have kept it secret from you but for George.’ ‘No, my lass, I know that. I said to myself many a night, when I sat here alone, looking up at the bright stars, and thinking that might be up in the great city you were looking at them too—I said, “My little lass is an honest lass; she wouldn’t shame her old father for the best gentleman in the land.” I _knew_ you were married to the young master, Bess, my darling. If I hadn’t believed that, I don’t think you would have found me here now.’