And Clarence, who had never had such a mark of her favour before, felt all on fire, and wished he dared to hold her fingers where they had so unexpectedly placed themselves. But the overwhelming reverence he felt for this small girl taught him discretion, and you might have thought, by the stiffness with which he held himself under her touch, that a wasp had settled upon him, and that he was afraid to move for fear of provoking it to sting. But they walked back together to the Hoe in a very amicable manner, Clarence feeling that luck had helped him to make a splendid move, and Ella wondering whether by the acceptance of twenty thousand pounds from a man she could be considered in any way to have compromised herself. CHAPTER XXXII. Three weeks passed very quietly for George Lauriston and his wife without any markedly apparent result of the doctor’s visit, except that George, trying to shake off the lethargy into which he had sunk since his imprisonment, had put himself into harness for a new battle with fortune by writing articles on the condition of the army for a local paper. He also took a journey to London to fulfil his long-promised revenge upon Rahas, and would probably have got himself into fresh trouble by using other than legal means of chastisement upon the Arabian, if that ingenious gentleman had not just got into a little difficulty with the excise officers over a large consignment of choice tobacco which was more than suspected of having paid no duty, and some silver goods not up to standard, the hall-mark on which had been forged, which forced him to leave the land of his adoption for shores where genius is more respected. Both George and Nouna for a long time refrained from mentioning her mother’s name, and it was with some emotion that they both recognised her handwriting one day outside a letter directed to the husband, the postmark of which was Bath. George took it away to read, and Nouna made no remark, but when he came back to her, holding it open in his hand, he found that she was trembling with intense excitement. She took it from him with a passionately anxious glance, but gathered comfort from his gravely smiling face. Nouna then read these words: “My dear Mr. Lauriston,