He took up the pen-wiper and threw it at her. But somehow Ellen was not in a mood for much jesting tonight. She put the pen-wiper--a rosette of red cloth--on the table again, and went and stood in silence with her hand on his shoulder. He turned his head. "What is it, love?" "Hamish, I would bring in your tea willingly; you know it; but I think it would do you more good to leave this work, if only for five minutes. And I have something to say to you." "Very well. I can't come for a quarter of an hour. You are a regular martinet." Ellen Channing left him and sat down in the other room to wait; and this will afford the opportunity for a word of explanation. Amidst the very very many people in all classes of life, high and low, on whom a certain recent panic had wrought its disastrous effects, was Hamish Channing. The bank, of which he had been manager in Helstonleigh, was drawn into the vortex by the failure of another bank, and went in its turn. Honourable men had to do with it; they sacrificed their own property in the emergency, and not a creditor suffered; every one was paid in full. It could not be reorganized, and it left Hamish without employment. His wife's father, Mr. Huntley, had been one of the principal shareholders, and on him had fallen the greater weight of the heavy loss. It fell, too, at a time when Mr. Huntley could not afford to sustain it. He possessed a large property in Canada, but it had latterly begun to yield him little or no return. Whether in consequence of local depreciation, or of mismanagement (or perhaps something worse) on the part of his agents there, he knew not, and he sent his son out to see. The young man (he was three or four years younger than Mrs. Channing, and quite inexperienced) seemed not to be able to grapple with the business; he wrote home most confused and perplexing accounts, of which Mr. Huntley could make nothing. At length that gentleman resolved to go out himself; and the letter we have heard Mrs. Channing alluding to today was from him. It was the second news they had received, the first having merely announced his safe arrival: and the accounts this last contained were so gloomy that Ellen Channing would fain have kept them from her husband.