Rodie Buchanan plunged into the partial darkness of his father’s house, with a heart still more hot and flaming than that of Frank. He could not have told anyone why he took this so much to heart. It was not that he was unusually tender of his neighbours, or charitable beyond the ordinary rule of kindness, which was current in St. Rule’s. He was one of those who would never have refused a penny to a beggar, or a bawbee to a weeping child, provided he had either the penny or the bawbee in his ill-furnished pockets, which sometimes was not the case; but, having done that by habit and natural impulse, there was no necessity in Rodie’s mind to do more, or to make himself the champion of the poor, so that he really was not aware what the reason was which made him turn so hotly against Frank, in his equally natural determination to get back what was his own. The hall and staircase of Mr. Buchanan’s house lay almost completely in the dark. There was one candle burning on a little table at the foot of the stair, which made the darkness visible, but above there was no light at all. Gas was not general in those days, nor were there lamps in common use, such as those which illuminate every part of our dwellings now. The dark passages and dreadful black corners of stair or corridor, which are so familiar in the stories of the period, those dreadful passages, through which the children flew with their hearts beating, not knowing what hand might grip them in the dark, or terrible thing come after them, must perplex the children of to-day, who know nothing about them, and never have any dark passages to go through. But, in those days, to get from the nursery to the drawing-room by night, unless you were preceded by the nursery-maid with a candle, was more alarming than anything a child’s imagination could grasp nowadays. You thought of it for a minute or two before you undertook it; and then, with a rush, you dared the perils of the darkness, flinging yourself against the door to which you were bound, all breathless and trembling, like one escaped from nameless dangers. Rodie, nearly twenty, big and strong, and fearing nothing, had got over all those tremors. He strode up the dark stairs, three at a time, and flung open the drawing-room door, groping for it in the wall. He knew what, at that hour, he would be likely to find there. It was the hour when Mrs. Buchanan invariably went to the study “to see what papa was doing,” to make sure that his fire was mended, if he meant to sit up over his sermon, or that things were comfortable for him in other ways when fires were not necessary. The summer was not far advanced, and fires were still thought necessary in the evenings at St. Rule’s. Between the fire and the table was seated Elsie, with a large piece of “whiteseam,” that is, plain sewing, on her knee, and two candles burning beside her. Another pair of candlesticks was on the mantelpiece, repeated in the low