As he drew near the public-house that chiefly poisoned the neighbourhood, it opened its hell-jaws, and cast out a woman in frowzy black, wiping her mouth under her veil with a dirty pocket-handkerchief. She had a swollen red face, betokening the presence of much drink, walked erect, and went perfectly straight, but looked as if, were she to relax the least of her state, she would stagger. As she passed Richard, he recognized her. It was Mrs. Manson. Without a thought he stopped to speak to her. The same moment he saw that, although not dead drunk, she could by no tropical contortion be said to be sober. She started, and gave a snort of indignation. “You here!” she cried. “What the big devil do you want--coming here to insult your betters! You the son of the bookbinder! You're no more John Tuke's son than I am. You're the son of that precious rascal, my husband! Go to sir Wilton; don't come to me! You're a base-born wretch,--Oh yes, run to your mother! Tell her what I say! Tell her she was lucky to get hold of her tradesman.” She had told her son and daughter that Richard was the missing heir; and in what she now said she may have meant only to reflect on the humble birth of his mother and abuse his aunt, but it does not matter much what a drunkard means. At the same time the poison of asps may come from the lips of a drunkard as from those of a sober liar. As the woman staggered away, Richard gave a stagger too, and seemed to himself to go reeling along the street. He sat down on a doorstep to recover himself, but for a long way after resuming his walk went like one half stunned. His brain, nevertheless, seemed to go on working of itself. The wretched woman's statement glowed in him with a lurid light. It seemed to explain so much! He had often felt that his father, though always just, did not greatly care for him. Then there was his mother's strangeness--the hardness of her religion, the gloom that at times took possession of her whole being, her bursts of tenderness, and her occasional irritability! His mother! That his mother should--should have made him an outcast! The thought was sickening! It was horrible! Perhaps the woman lied! But no; something questionable in the background of his life had been unrecognizably showing from the first of his memory! All was clear now! His mother's cruel breach with Alice, and her determination that there should be no intercourse between the families, was explained: had Alice and he fallen in love with each other, she would have had to tell the truth to part them! He _must_ know the truth! He would ask his mother straight out, the moment he got home! But how _could_ he ask her! How could any son go to his mother with such a question! Whatever the answer to it, he dared not! There was but one alternative left him--either to kill himself, or to smother his suffering, and let the miserable world go on! Why should he add to its misery by making his own mother more