“My God!” cried Mr Goulburn. This time he got up, pale as ashes, but soon fell back, not out of carelessness but weakness. His hands resting upon the table shook it with their trembling. He dropped back again into his chair, his under lip falling, his face like that of a dead man. “He has been a sufferer, and he is very bitter. If he gets any suspicion he will not be silenced. This is what Mr Ashton said. I don’t know what it means, papa,” said Helen, with a quiver of her lip, “nor why any man who comes here, any man! should make you run away as if you were a criminal----” “It is because I am a criminal, Helen.” “Papa!” “No, no,” he said, trying to smile, “not that. God knows I never meant any harm; but I was led on from one thing to another, and nobody can understand another man’s temptations. I went farther than I should have done. Some people--that could not afford it--were brought into trouble through me; that is all, Helen. I owe a great deal of money, as I told you. This Sir John is one of the people. It is nothing but money, money. If I had killed their fathers and mothers, they would not have felt it half so much. It is money, as I tell you--nothing but money. And now I must get up and go away from here. Ill, and getting old, and tired, tired to death----” He put down his head into his hands, which trembled; his whole stooping figure shook. He was certainly thinner, weaker, and far older in appearance than when they came to Latour. Helen sat beside him, looking at him with a wretched half-sympathy. Perhaps, up to this moment, it had been herself she had been thinking of most, herself who had done no harm, who did not even know why it was that she was to be driven from the new roof where she had found refuge. Now her mind turned, but with a languid misery, to realise what her father was feeling. He was himself the cause of his own sufferings. But did that make them easier to bear? “Poor papa!” she said, involuntarily touching with her hand his trembling arm. Yes, he was ill, and getting old, and how natural if he were tired, tired to death! All Helen’s present trouble fell into a sort of dull and aching pity for him, who was the cause of it. She sat for a little while in dead silence; and then she said, “What are we to do?” It was some time before he made her any reply; he was panting for breath; there was a hectic colour on his cheeks like fever. “If you had but stayed in the house!” he said. “What did you want with these people at the _château_? They were strangers--and you should avoid strangers. It will always be like this wherever we go. You will make friends, and then you will wonder that it is so much harder to go away. What right have we to make friends? we cannot get any good out of them. We who must be like this, without any place to rest the sole of our feet, till we”--he paused a moment--“till I die.”