In other places, too, Valentine’s departure had caused far more excitement than he was at all aware of. He had seen and said good-bye to Dick with the most cordial kindness, on the day he left Oxford. But Val had not failed to remark a gravity and preoccupation about his humble friend which troubled him in no small degree. When he recounted to Dick the failure of Lady Eskside and himself on the day before, the young man had received the information with a painful attempt to seem surprised, which made Val think for a moment that Dick’s mother had avoided the visit of set purpose. But as he knew of no hidden importance in this, the idea went lightly out of his head; and a few days after he remembered it no more. Very much more serious had been the effect upon Dick. His mother’s flight and her panic were equally unintelligible to him. The thought that there must be “something wrong” involved, in order to produce such terror, was almost irresistible; and Dick’s breeding, as I have said, had been of that practical kind which makes the mind accustomed to the commoner and vulgarer sorts of wrong-doing. He did not insist upon knowing what it was that made his mother afraid of Val’s grandmother; but her abject terror, and the way in which she dragged him too, out of sight, as if he had been a partner of her shame, had the most painful effect upon the young man. In the rudimentary state of morals which existed among the class from which he sprang, and where all his primitive ideas had been formed, dishonesty was the one crime short of murder which could bring such heavy shame along with it. He who steals is shunned in all classes, except among the narrow professional circles of thieves themselves; and Dick could not banish from his thoughts a painful doubt and uncertainty about his mother’s relations with “Mr Ross’s people.” She herself was so stunned and petrified by the great danger which she seemed to herself to have escaped, that she was very little capable of giving a rational explanation of her conduct. “You knew this lady before, mother?” said Dick to her, half pitifully, half severely, as he took her back to the parlour and placed her in a chair after the visitors were gone. “Yes,” she answered, but no more. And though he asked her many other questions, nothing more than repeated Yes and No could he get in reply.