'I trust to you to prepare Mary for well-nigh incredible joy, but do not agitate her too soon. I cannot come till Friday afternoon. 'Yours gratefully, 'NORTHMOOR.' Having sent this off, his next search was for a time-table. He would fain have gone by the mail train that very night, but Mr. Deyncourt and Mrs. Morton united in persuading him that his strength was not yet equal to such a pull upon it, and he yielded. They hardly knew the man, usually so equable and quiet as to be almost stolid. He smiled, and declared he could neither eat nor sleep, but he actually did both, sleeping, indeed, better and longer than he had done since his illness, and coming down in the morning a new man, as he called himself, but the old one still in his kindness to Mrs. Morton. He promised to telegraph to her as soon as he knew all was well, assured her that he would do his best to keep the scandal out of the papers, that he would never forget his obligations to Herbert's generosity, and that if she made up her mind to leave Westhaven he would facilitate her so doing. Ida was not up. She had had a very bad night, and indeed she had confessed that she had been miserable under dreams worse than waking, ever since the child was carried off. Her mother had observed her restlessness and nervousness, but had set a good deal down to love, and perhaps had not been entirely wrong. At any rate, she was now really ill, and could not bear the thought of seeing her uncle, though he sent a message to her that now he did not find it nearly so hard to forgive her, and that he felt for her with all his heart. It was this gentleness that touched Mrs. Morton above all. Years had softened her; perhaps, too, his patience, and the higher tone of Mr. Deyncourt's ministry, and she was, in many respects, a different woman from her who had so loudly protested against his marrying Mary Marshall. CHAPTER XXXIX THE HONOURABLE PAUPER Lord Northmoor's card was given to the porter with an urgent request for an interview with the Master of the workhouse. He steadied his voice with difficulty when, on entering the office, he said that he had come to make inquiry after his son, a child of three and a half years old, who had been supposed to be drowned, but he had now discovered had been stolen by a former nurse, and left at the gate of the workhouse, and as the Master paused with an interrogative 'Yes, my Lord?' he added--'On the night between the Wednesday and Thursday of Whitsun week, May the--' 'Children are so often left,' said the Master. 'I will ascertain from the books as to the date.' After an interval really of scarcely a minute, but which might have been hours to the father's feeling, he read-- 'May 18th.--Boy, of apparently four years old, left on the steps, asleep, apparently drugged.' 'Ah!'