She reached home. In her room lay the parcels and the packages. She opened them all. She put on the bonnet, she stroked the soft stuff with a caressing palm, she gazed upon the gloves, she held up the boots to the light. "Am I a dreadful humbug?" she said. "I must be--I must be. What would Dick say? But one cannot---- No, one cannot refuse. I am not a stick or a stone. And Cousin Alice actually enjoyed the giving! But no money. Molly, you must not take their money." CHAPTER X. COUSIN ALFRED'S SECRET. It was a few days later, in the forenoon. John Haveril was gone into the City on the business of keeping together what he had got--a business which seems to take up the whole of a rich man's time and more, so that he really has no chance of looking for the way to the kingdom of heaven. His wife sat at the window of her room in the hotel, contemplating the full tide of life below. She was not in the least a philosopher--the sight of the people, and the carriages, and the omnibuses, did not move her to meditate on the brevity of life as it moves some thinkers. It pleased her; she thought of places where she had lived in Western America, and the contrast pleased her. Nor was she moved, as a poet, to find something to say about this tide of life. The poet, you know, looks not only for the phrase appropriate, but for the phrase distinctive. Mrs. Haveril had never heard of such a thing. She only thought that there was nothing like it in the Western States, and that she remembered nothing like it in the village of Hackney. Molly was lying on the sofa, reading a novel. One of the hotel pages disturbed her dreamery, which was close upon dropping off, by bringing up in a silver salver a dirty slip of paper, on which was written in pencil-- "Mr. Alfred Pennefather. For Mrs. Haveril. Bearer waits." "Is it a man in rags? Is he a disgrace to the hotel?" "Well, ma'am, he _is_ in rags. As for his being a disgrace--he says he's your cousin." Here he laughed, holding the silver salver before his mouth. "I wouldn't laugh at a poor man, if I were you. Why," said Mrs. Haveril, drawing a bow at a venture, "you've got cousins of your own in the workhouse. Send him up, right away," she added. The man came in. The page shut the door quickly behind him, to conceal the figure of rags not often seen in that palatial place. It was Alfred the Broken; strange to say, though it was less than a week since he had received that gift of golden sovereigns, the appearance of the man was as seedy as ever; his hat--a ridiculously tall silk hat with a limp brim--can anything look more forlorn?--his coat with ragged wrists; his boots parting from the soles; a ragged and decayed person, more ragged, more decayed, than before. "Well?" the lady's voice was not encouraging. "You came here last week with the rest of them." "I did, Alice--I did."