It wanted a quarter to eleven when the Vicar left home, and the clock had just struck twelve when Fanny, from the window of the morning-room, saw him coming back across the lawn. Her heart sank, so grave and preoccupied did he look. She would fain have opened the long window and have run to meet him, but her mother's cold eyes were upon her, and she refrained. When the Vicar entered the room two minutes later his first act was to cross to where his daughter was sitting, and taking her head gently between his hands, to kiss her on the forehead. "Papa!" exclaimed Fanny, looking up into his face with frightened eyes, and laying her hand for a moment on his sleeve. That he was the messenger of ill news her heart portended but too surely. Mrs. Sudlow was too accustomed to reading her husband's looks not to know that something was amiss; but although her curiosity was keen to hear whatever news he might be the bearer of, she set her thin lips tight and seemed to be intent on her sewing and on nothing beyond it. The Vicar sat down in his easy-chair and proceeded to rub his spectacles with his handkerchief. "Little did I dream when I left home this morning," he began, sighing as he did so, "that I should have such a strange and distressing story to tell on my return. Dear me--dear me! Who could have believed in the possibility of such a thing?" "My dear, if you would but endeavour to be a little less prolix!" said Mrs. Sudlow. "If you cannot see that Fanny is dying of impatience, I can." The Vicar hemmed and fidgeted in his chair. "Really, my love," he murmured deprecatingly. Then turning to Fanny and addressing himself directly to her, he said: "I am afraid, my child, that what I am about to tell you will distress you greatly, but unfortunately the blow is one which there are no means of averting. The reason Philip Winslade wished to see me this morning was that he might impart to me, in strict confidence, a certain circumstance connected with his personal history which only came to his own knowledge a few days ago. It appears that when Mrs. Winslade became aware of the existence of some sort of an engagement between her son and you, and was told he was about to seek your parents' sanction thereto, she revealed to him the circumstance in question, which had hitherto been kept carefully from him. What she had to tell him was that her husband and his father was a certain notorious bank-note forger, Philip Cordery by name, who was tried and convicted upwards of twenty years ago, and who died in prison a little while afterwards." "Ah!" was the sole comment vouchsafed by Mrs. Sudlow; but although a word of two letters only, it can be made to convey a variety of meanings, and on the present occasion what it conveyed to the Vicar was, "I always felt sure that there was something discreditable in that woman's past, and now you see how right I was."