"We are coming to London at once, and therein lies simultaneously the danger to Madeleine and my hope of rescuing her from it, principally through your aid. You will see that it is impossible to enter upon this subject at length in a letter; but I could not let you be in ignorance of what I know will possess an acute and painful interest for you. Of course I have not hinted a word of this to your father, so that you will be equally reticent in any of your communications with him. You shall hear the day we expect to arrive in town, and I hope to see you in Brookstreet on the next morning. "You will recollect all I said to you about Ramsay Caird. He will probably call on you very shortly after you receive this letter. Bear in mind the cue I gave you, when we last parted, about this young man, and act up to it: he is a little weak, a little hesitating; but I am more convinced than ever of the advisability of pursuing the course I then indicated. God bless you! "Your affectionate "M.K." CHAPTER IX. Ronald. When Ronald Kilsyth was little more than four years old his nurses said he was "so odd;" a phrase which stuck by him through life. As a child his oddity consisted in his curious gravity and preoccupation, his insensibility to amusement, his dislike of companionship, his love of solitude, his old-fashioned thoughts and manner and habits. He had a dogged honesty which prevented him from using the smallest deception in any way, which prevented him from ever prevaricating or telling those small fibs which are made so much of in the child, but to which he looks back as trivial sins indeed when compared with the duplicity of his after-life,--which rendered him obnoxious even to the children whom he met as playfellows in the square-garden, and who found it impossible to get on with young Kilsyth on account of the rigidity of his morals, displeasing to them even at their tender years. When a delicious _guetapens_, made of string stretched from tree to tree, had been, with great consumption of time and trouble, prepared for the downfall of the old gardener; and when the youthful conspirators were all laid up in ambush behind the Portugal laurels, waiting to see the old man, plodding round with rake and leaf-basket in the early dusk of the autumnal evening, fall headlong over the snare,--it was provoking to see little Ronald Kilsyth, in his gray kilt, step out and go up to the old man and show him the pitfall, and assist him in removing it. The conspirators were highly incensed at this treachery, as they called it, and would have sent Ronald then and there to Coventry,--not that that would have distressed him much,--had it not been for his magnanimity in refusing, even when under pressure, to give up the names of those in the plot. But as in this, so in everything else; and the little frequenters of the square soon found Ronald Kilsyth "too good" for them, and were by no means anxious to secure his companionship in their sports.