"I will get to the bottom of the secret that is troubling the girl who is like my Esther; and I have a very shrewd suspicion that Miss Brooke is mixed up in the affair." Priscilla closed her eyes after she had uttered the last words, as though she were too tired to say any more, and Mr Manchuri sat and watched her. She had very handsome, long, thick, black eyelashes, and the likeness to his Esther was even more apparent in her face when her eyes were shut than when they were open. The more the old man looked at her, the more did his heart go out to her. It had been for long years a withered heart--a heart engrossed in that most hardening of all things--money-making. To make money just for the love of making it is enough to crush the goodness and frankness out of all lives, and Mr Manchuri had twenty times too much for his own needs. Still, his excitement over a bargain or a good speculation was as keen as ever; and even now, at this very moment, was he not wearing inside his waistcoat that curious necklace which he had bought from Annie Brooke that day? He would make, after paying the hundred pounds which he had given Annie, at least one hundred and fifty pounds on the necklace. Yes; he lived for that sort of thing. He had a very handsome house, however, at the corner of Park Lane, and this house was filled with rich furniture, and he had a goodly staff of servants, and many friends as rich as himself came to see him, and he drank the most costly wines and ate the most expensive dinners, and never spent a penny on charity or did one good thing with all his gold. There was one room, however, in that house which was kept sacred from the faintest touch of worldliness. This room contained the portrait of the child who was taken away from him in her first bloom. It was a simple room, having a little white bed and the plainest furniture that a girl could possibly use. There were a few of Esther's possessions lying about--her work-box, her little writing-desk, a pile of books, most of them good and worth reading; and Mr Manchuri kept the key of that room and never allowed any one to enter it. It was the sacred shrine in that worldly house. It was, in short the heart of the house. But now Mr Manchuri discovered on this midnight journey that that withered heart of his own, which he had supposed to be dead to all the world, was suddenly alive and keenly interested in a girl of the age of his Esther--a girl who absolutely told him that she was not good, and that because she was not good she must stand alone. "I will get her secret out of the poor young thing," he said to himself; "and what is more--what is more, I will help her a little bit for the sake of my Esther."