“Well, sir, I was going to tell you. I heard that old Styles wanted a man. Styles, perhaps you recollect him down at---- Yes, that’s him. So I told him I could recommend Brown, and so could Lichen, who had been captain of the boats in my time. Lichen of Christ’s-Church. You won’t know his name? He rowed stroke----” “Yes, yes; but let us come back to Brown.” “There is not much more,” said Val, a little disconcerted. “Styles took him on our recommendation, and hearing what an excellent character he had--and that’s where he is now. He and his mother have got Styles’ little house, and the old man’s gone into the country. I shouldn’t wonder if Brown had the business when he dies. He has got on like a house on fire,” said Val--“educated himself up from nothing, and would be a credit to any one. I’ve always thought,” said the lad, with an innocent assumption of superior insight, “that he cannot have been born a cad, as he seemed, when I first saw him; for the mother looks as if she had been a lady. You laugh, sir, but I dare swear it’s true.” “I was not laughing,” said Richard, bundling up the photographs together, and handing them over to his son; “indeed, I think you have behaved very creditably, and shown yourself capable of more than I thought. Now, my dear fellow, I’m going to work to-night. Take your pictures. They have amused me very much; and I think you should go to bed.” Val had been doing a great deal that day, and I think he was not sorry to take his father’s advice. He gathered all his treasures together, and bade him a more cordial good-night than usual, as he went away with his candle through the dim suite of rooms. As soon as he had turned his back, Richard Ross pushed away the papers he had drawn before him, and watched the young figure with its light, walking down the long vista of curtained rooms. The man was not genial enough to let that same gentle apparition come in and illuminate with love the equally dim and lonely antechambers of his heart; but some thrill of natural feeling quickened within him, some strange movement of unwonted emotion as he looked after the lad, and felt how wonderful was this story, and how unwittingly, in natural friendliness of his boyish soul, Val had done a brother’s part to his brother. The idea moved him more than the reality did. He took up the little photograph again, which he had kept without Valentine’s knowledge, and gazed at it, but not with love. “Curse of my life!”--he said to himself, murmuring the words in sonorous Tuscan, which he spoke like a native; and clenching his teeth as he gazed at the image of the woman who had ruined him, as he thought. She to look “as if she had been a lady!”--he laughed within himself secretly and bitterly at the thought--a lady! the tramp-girl who had been his curse, and whom he had never been able to teach anything to. When the first vehemence of these feelings was over, he sat down and wrote a long letter to his