Lord Cheriton telegraphed to Miss Marian Gray, at 69, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth— “If your mother is with you when you receive this, I beg you to detain her till I come. “CHERITON.” His wife’s suggestion seemed to him like inspiration. Where else could that desolate woman seek for a shelter but under the roof which sheltered her only child? She was utterly friendless in London and elsewhere—unless, indeed, her old governess Sarah Newton could be counted as a friend. The Weymouth up-train steamed in, and he took his seat in the corner of a first-class compartment, where he was tolerably secure of being left to himself for the whole of the journey, guards and porters conspiring to protect his seclusion, albeit he had not taken the trouble to engage a compartment. His greatness was known all along the line. He had ample leisure for thought during that three hours’ journey, leisure to live over again that life of long ago which had been brought so vividly back to his memory by the events of to-day. He had made it his business to forget that past life, so far as forgetfulness was possible, with that living reminder for ever at his gate. Habit had even reconciled him to the presence of Mrs. Porter at the West Lodge. Her supreme quietude had argued her contentment. Never by so much as one imprudent word, or one equivocal look, had she aroused his wife’s doubts as to her past relations with her employer. She had been accepted by all the little world of Cheriton, she had behaved in the most exemplary manner; and although he had never driven in at the West Gate, and seen her standing there in her attitude of stern humility, without a pang of remorse and a stinging sense of shame, yet that sharp moment of pain being past, he was able to submit to her existence as the one last forfeit he had to pay for his sin. And now he knew that the statue-like calm of her face, as she had looked up at him in the clear light, under the branching beeches, had been only the mask of hidden fires—that through all those years in which she had seemed the image of quiet resignation, of submission to a mournful fate, she had been garnering up her vengeance to wreak it upon the offender in his most unguarded hour, piercing the breast of the father through the innocent heart of the child. He knew now that hatred had been for ever at his doors, that angry pride had watched his going in and coming out, under the guise of humility—that by day and by night hideous thoughts had been busy in that hyper-active brain, such thoughts as point the way to madness and to crime.