He did not care so much for this, since that last scene with Margaret Windsor. What future was there for him now? Stone walls do not a prison make; he might as well be here as penned up, useless, in his four acres about the lodge at Ripon House. His friends--what friends had he? Dacre, Sydney, Featherstone--they were walled up with him. And Geoffrey, walking in the Tower yard, would look up to the scattered windows, and wonder which of them was his friend's; and if he noticed a dull red stain on the stones at the base of the wall, he thought it was some old mark, dating from Cromwell or the Roses. Still, Geoffrey was a young man, too young to have wholly learned to be a fatalist; but the more he thought of escape, the more hopeless it seemed. With a confederate, a friend outside, it might perhaps be possible. But what friend had he left in the wide world? Geoffrey racked his memory to think of one. There were some two hundred men he knew at his club in the West End--but which one of these, who had not been at Aldershot, would leave his snug rubber at whist for the Tower? There was Jawkins--if Jawkins could be brought to think it worth his while. Mr. Windsor--the shrewd American was with his daughter in America; and the daughter deemed him false, and had forgotten him. False! There was Eleanor Carey; she had loved him; would she not seek to save him? The woman whose maidenhood he had loved? He had not heard of her since the night before Aldershot; but this was rather a hopeful sign than otherwise. The more Geoffrey thought, the more he felt assured that here was the one person in the world that might be trusted to remember him. So, when Geoffrey had been in prison some three weeks, and one day the turnkey came and said that some one wished to see him, Geoffrey thought of Mrs. Carey at once. His heart beat high with hope as he followed his guide through a labyrinth of stairs and passages. He even forgot to look closely at each door, as he was used to do, to find some sign of Dacre or his friends. Eleanor! was on his lips to cry as the jailer opened the door of a distant room and bade him enter. In the centre, by a table, was standing an old man, dressed in black, with a white head bent well forward upon his shoulders. It was Reynolds, no longer dressed like a servant, but disguised in a suit of broadcloth, such as was worn until recently by the oldest gentlemen. The old man bent still lower, took Geoffrey's hand and kissed it. "Thank God!" said he, in a whisper, "dear young master, you are alive, at all events." Reynolds still used old-fashioned forms of speech. It was a strange thing to Geoffrey to be still called young. He felt as if he had seen a century at least--the twentieth. He looked at Reynolds with a slight but decided feeling of disappointment. He had hoped for Mrs. Carey.