"Understand my question once for all. When you, Henry Grey, told me, your mother, that the Daneford Bank had been saved by money from the Pacific coast, did you lie to me?" "I did." "Then, sir, leave my presence and my house for ever!" "Mother!" "Go, sir, at once!" "Mother, for God's sake! You do not know all!" "Go, sir, at once! I do not want to see any more of you--hear any more of you. You have brought disgrace on our honourable name. You had not the courage to face ruin, but you had the courage to face crime, and you had the baseness to lie to me, sir. Go, I tell you, sir, and let me see you no more. Let me forget there is a man alive who bears your honourable father's name. Do not let me see you again. Do not let me hear of you. You will not go, sir? Then I shall leave you. Remember, we never meet again." She swept out of the room. When she had gone he stood a while holding his forehead in his hands, then shook himself, left the room, and drew the front door after him with a low laugh, muttering: "And I did not tell her all. I forgot a part." CHAPTER VIII. MAKING HOLIDAY. When Grey awoke the morning after the interview with his mother, he felt calmer than usual. He had slept better, and the air of early November was bright and crisp, and wholesome and invigorating. He arose, drew back the curtains, and raised the blind. The leaves were all off the trees, and the bright sharp fretwork of oak sprays glittered in the morning sun. The grove was silent. All its winged lodgers had long since taken flight in search of food. The glades and caverns of the grove no longer sweltered under canopies of impenetrable leaves. Aisles, which had been vaults of sultry gloom in summer, lay partly open to the sky. Here and there the eye could pierce the inter-twisted branches and catch sight of the mounds of red rotting leaves. The grove no longer desired the screen of leaves to hide it from the eyes of man, to cover up the monsters of soft rank vegetation that throve and bloated until they burst with the unclean rottenness of excess. All things perishable in the vegetable domain were now melting down into the ground, there to lie until the spring-hunger of the seed and root moved and drank them in, to thrust them once more whence they lay into the green-giving air. In the warm weather these juices, as they move about through the earth, are caught in the webs of roots and budding seeds, and are pushed upwards through the crust of earth, and by the sun dyed into a coat of many colours to keep excessive heat from the under earth. In the winter they are shorn of their beauty, and thrust down into all the crevices of earth, there standing incorruptible sentinels of ice to prevent the penetration of the cold.