He turned away, stung in his hasty youthfulness by the appearance of contempt. He would condescend to ask no farther. When he was once more outside the parlour, he held up the half-sovereign, which he had kept ready in his hand, to the slovenly fellow in the striped jacket. "Twice as much if you will tell where Colonel Mildmay is gone," he said, hurriedly. The man winked and nodded and pointed outside, but before Vincent could leave the room a hasty summons came from the parlour which he had just left. Then Mr. Fordham appeared at the door. "If you will wait I will make what inquiries I can," said the stranger, with distant courtesy and seriousness. "Excuse me--I was taken by surprise: but if you have suffered injury under my name, it is my business to vindicate myself. Come in. If you will take my advice, you will rest and refresh yourself before you pursue a man with all his wits about him. Wait for me here and I will bring you what information I can. You don't suppose I mean to play you false?" he added, with prompt irritation, seeing that Vincent hesitated and did not at once return to the room. It was no relenting of heart that moved him to make this offer. It was with no softening of feeling that the young Nonconformist went back again and accepted it. They met like enemies, each on his honour. Mr. Fordham hastened out to acquit himself of that obligation. Vincent threw himself into a chair, and waited for the result. It was the first moment of rest and quiet he had known since the morning of the previous day, when he and his mother, alarmed but comparatively calm, had gone to see Mrs. Hilyard, who was now, like himself, wandering, with superior knowledge and more desperate passion, on the same track. To sit in this house in the suspicious silence, hearing the distant thrill of voices which might guide or foil him in his search; to think who it was whom he had engaged to help him in his terrible mission; to go over again in distracted gleams and snatches the brief little circle of time which had brought all this about, the group of figures into which his life had been absorbed,--rapt the young man into a maze of excited musing, which his exhausted frame at once dulled and intensified. They seemed to stand round him, with their faces so new, yet so familiar--that needle-woman with her emphatic mouth--Mildmay--Lady Western--last of all, this man, who was not Susan's lover--not Susan's destroyer--but a man to be trusted "with life--to death!" Vincent put up his hands to put away from him that wonderful circle of strangers who shut out everything else in the world--even his own life--from his eyes. What were they to him? he asked, with an unspeakable bitterness in his heart. Heaven help him! they were the real creatures for whom life and the world were made--he and his poor Susan the shadows to be absorbed into, and under them; and then, with a wild, bitter, hopeless rivalry, the mind of the poor Dissenting minister came