For a few moments Hermia did not answer--she could not. Her nerves had just undergone a shock which had left her as white and trembling as if she had seen a ghost. Drawing a deep breath, and speaking as steadily as she could force herself to do, she presently said: "I will myself take the parcel to London, and if it be anyhow possible, I will find your son and deliver it into his hands and into those of no one else." The dying woman thanked her and blessed her. It was evident that a great weight had been lifted off her mind. Next day when Hermia went to see her she was unconscious, and a few hours later she breathed her last. What was it that had so strangely affected Hermia; that had sent the blood surging round her heart, and had caused the room and its contents to rock before her eyes as though shaken by an earthquake? On the envelope which she had made up into a parcel with the bag of gold her eye had been caught by these words, written in pencil, "Given into my charge by my son Richard on the 6th of October." The 6th of October was the day on which Mr. Hazeldine had been found on the floor of his office, stabbed to the heart! CHAPTER XXXVI. A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY. When Hermia, in response to Mrs. Varrel's appeal, had said: "I will myself take the parcel to London," the answer had sprung to her lips of its own accord, so to speak, and as if her will had had no part in the framing of it. It was a promise which, having once been given, she felt bound to fulfil; but, indeed, after consideration showed her no reason why she should wish to do otherwise than fulfil it. She was determined, in the first place, to carry out her promise, and, in the second, if it were by any means possible to do so, to clear up the terrible suspicion which had taken root in her mind, either by proving that it had no basis of fact to rest upon, or else, by the accumulation of further evidence, to put together a case sufficiently strong to warrant her in placing it in other and more competent hands, leaving it for them to work out to whatever issue it might lead them. In pursuance of this resolution it was that, two days after Mrs. Varrel's death, and without affording the faintest hint to anyone of the real object she had in view, Hermia wrote the note, already given, to her lover; and after bidding Uncle John and Aunt Charlotte a tender farewell, set out for London on an errand which she herself felt all but convinced would prove to be nothing more than a bootless errand.