"Are you not coming with us?" she bent forward to whisper, seeing he was about to close the door. "Not tonight. I have some work to do." "Sulky as usual, Bede?" His lips parted to retort, but he closed them, and endured meekly. Sulky to her he had never been, and she knew it. The carriage moved away with her: and Bede lifted his hat; a smile, meant to deceive the world, making his face one of careless gaiety. Whether he had work to do, or not, he did not get to it. Sauntering away from the door, away and away, hardly knowing and not heeding whither, he found himself presently in the Strand, and thence at the river-side. There he paced backwards and forwards with unequal steps, his mind lost in many things, but more especially in the communication made that day by Henry Ollivera. The fragmentary letter connected with that long-past history, and the appointment spoken of by Mr. Kene, that John Ollivera went out of court to keep, had been as much of a puzzle to Bede Greatorex as it was to other people. Upon reflection, he came now to think that the present solution of the affair was the true one. Would it lead to further discovery? Very fervently he hoped that it would not. There were grave reasons, as none knew better than Bede, for keeping all further discovery back; for, if it came, it would hurl down confusion, dismay, and misery, upon innocent heads as well as guilty ones. The river, flowing on in its course, was silent and dull in the summer's night. A line of light illumined the sky in the west where the sultry sun had gone down in heat: and as Bede looked towards it and thought of the All-seeing Eye that lay beyond that light, he felt how fruitless it was for him to plot and plan, and to say this shall be or this shall not be. The course of the future rested in the hands of one Divine Ruler, and his own poor, short-sighted, impotent will was worse than nothing. CHAPTER XXIII. LAID WITH HIS FOREFATHERS. So great a man as Sir Richard Yorke must of course be honoured with a great funeral. He had died on a Thursday; the interment was fixed for the next Friday week: which, taking the heat of the weather and sundry other trifles into consideration, was a little longer than it need have been. Sir Vincent, his new dignity as head of the Yorke family lying upon him with a due and weighty self-importance, was determined (like Jonas Chuzzlewit of wide memory) that the public should see he did not grudge to his late father any honour in the shape of plumes and mutes and coaches and show, that it was in his power to accord to him. There were three costly coffins, one of them of lead, and at the very least three and sixty sets of towering feathers. So that Portland Place was as a gala that day, and windows and pavements were alike filled with sight-gazers.