"I think not," replied Isaac. "We have heard nothing about it to-day." "I suppose things have gone on, then, as usual?" "Quite so. We shall hear no more of it, I dare say, in the Bank. If the bonds can't be found, the firm will have to make them good, and there'll be an end of it." "A very unsatisfactory ending, I should think, if I had to make them good," observed the Rector. "I don't like things disappearing, nobody knows how or why." He said no more. He gave no hint to Isaac of the rumour that had been whispered to him, nor questioned him upon its probable foundation. It was the best proof that Mr. Hastings assigned to it no foundation. In sober reason he did not do so. But things--- troubles, cares, annoyances--wear different aspects in the day and in the night. More than all, _suspense_ wears a different one. An undefined dread, whatever may be its nature, can be drowned in the daily bustle of life: business, pleasure, occupation. These fill up the mind, and the bugbear is lost sight of. But at night, when the head lies upon the sleepless pillow, and there is nothing to distract the thoughts; when all around is dark and silent, then, if there is an inner, secret dread, it asserts itself in guise worse than reality. Mr. Hastings was not an imaginative man. Quite the contrary. He was more given to dealing with things, whether pleasant or painful, in a practical manner by daylight, than to racking his brains with them at night. Therefore, the way in which the new doubt troubled him as he lay in bed that night, was something wonderful. Had he been a fanciful woman, he could not have experienced worse treatment from his imagination. It was running riot within him. Could it be that the money entrusted to him was gone?--lost? Had he put it into that Bank for safety, only to find that the Bank would never refund it again? How was he to make it good? He could not make it good, and the little Chisholms, the children of his dead friend, would be beggars! He thought not of his own money, lodged in the charge of Godolphin, Crosse, and Godolphin; that seemed as nothing in comparison with this. Mr. Hastings had had rather an expensive family; he had given money away in his parish--a conscientious clergyman is obliged to give, more or less--and his savings, all told, did not amount to more than two thousand pounds. It was not of that, equally at stake, that he thought, but of this other and larger sum, of which he was but the steward.