"It's rather early, but never mind about breakfast. A cup of tea and a piece of barley bonnag--that will do." Late that night, when Mrs. Collister, going to bed with a heavy heart, looked in to say good-night, Bessie asked to be called in good time in the morning. "Don't forget to waken me. I used to be the first up, you know, but now I'm a sleepy-head." And then she kissed her mother (never having kissed her since she was a child) and the old woman's eyes overflowed. Left alone, in the dark, she began to think how good God had been to her after all. Only those who had sinned and suffered knew how good He could be. She remembered the text about the friend who, when all earthly friends forsake you, sticketh closer than a brother. Also, with a certain shame, she recalled the hymn the Primitives had sung on Sunday morning, and, covering her head in the bedclothes, she sang two lines of it-- "_But now I love my Father's voice, I love my Father's home._" How happy she was! At that time to-morrow she would be in bed at Derby Haven, having seen Alick and arranged everything. Next morning, when she awoke, she was startled to find the sun pouring into the room. She knew by the line it made on the wall that the first train must have gone. The chickens, too, were clucking at the kitchen door, and they never came round before breakfast. She had risen on her elbow intending to call, when she heard the roll of a van-like vehicle drawing up in front of the house, and immediately afterwards, a man's husky, asthmatical voice in the kitchen, mingling with her mother's shrill treble. "Go upstairs and tell her to make ready, ma'am." "No, no; the girl's not fit for it, I tell thee." "She's fit enough for the prison hospital, anyway." "She has never been out of my door since she came into it." "We'll lave that to the High Bailiff and the Dempster, if you plaze." Bessie, supporting herself on her trembling arm, could scarcely restrain herself from screaming. One moment she sat and gasped, and then, grasping her head with both hands, she turned about and fell forward and buried her face in her pillow. At the next moment she was conscious of somebody coming into her room, and at the next, from somewhere at the foot of the bed, she heard her mother say, in a strange voice she had never known before--throbbing, choking, scarcely audible-- "They have come for thee, Bessie." CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE STOWELL IN LONDON Victor Stowell had been more than a week in London. Fortune had favoured him from the first. The Home Secretary (a tall, spare, elderly man, with a clean-shaven face of rather severe expression) rose when Stowell entered his room as if a spirit had appeared before him. "My youth again," the young man thought, but it was a different matter this time. "Has anybody ever told you that you resemble your father, Mr. Stowell?"