And thus deliverance, utterly unlocked for, came to Ben Renton in his downfall. Such a tiny, little deliverance out of such a paltry ruin as Mrs. Barton’s bill might have brought him to! But if the bill had been thousands, and this treasure a million, it could not have been more emphatically a deliverance. He would have avoided the club altogether could he have supposed his uncle to be there; indeed, nothing but sheer weariness could have carried him into it at such a moment. And yet the chance had saved him. Saved him! Only a ten and a five-pound note; but at this moment to Ben it was salvation, neither less nor more. How curiously words differ in their meaning from one day to another in a man’s life! He sat there a long time after in one of those lulls which follow great excitement, sipping his sherry, which, though he had eaten no dinner, gave a certain soothing to his outward man, and looking as if he were in very deep thought. But naturally, poor fellow! he was not thinking, nor capable of thinking. Heaps of things were flitting before him in a kind of fantastic procession. The home, which seemed so far away; the mother whom he had almost forgotten; the life,--had it ever been, or had he but dreamed it?--which he had lived a year ago. Was it he, Ben Renton, whom Captain Ormerod’s fifteen pounds had just saved from bankruptcy, who lived in the Albany once, and was the heir of Renton Manor, and one of the most popular men in society? or was it but a tale he had read somewhere in a book? His weariness lent another shade of confusion to the picture. And now and then these dim thoughts were traversed by one so sharp, so clear, so acute, that it chased all the mists away. She was going to-morrow. He had said his farewell to her. Her hand had been in those hands of his, on which he looked down with a sudden thrill. Her lips had consented, or at least assented, with that passive softness of the unimpassioned woman, which drove him wild, yet held him fast, to wait for him. Was it to wait for him? or was it only to let him come when his fortune was made to try his chance again? What did it matter which? One form of folly or the other would have been much the same to Millicent, in her strange, compassionate, worldly-minded conviction that he would never make his fortune, or, if he did, would change his mind;--and in the confidence of his love and passion would have been the same to Ben.