"You have seen your father?" she asked, interrupting him. "Not yet. I have seen nobody: I came straight to you." "He is greatly aged." There came a knock at the door, and Father Halloran stood on the threshold confounded. The priest was a tall and handsome Irishman, white-haired, with a genial laughing eye, and a touch of grave wisdom behind his geniality. "Walter, dear lad! For the love of the saints tell us--how does this happen?" Walter began his story again. The mother gazed into his face in a rapture. But the priest's brow, at first jolly, little by little contracted with a puzzled frown. "I don't altogether understand," he said. "They scarcely watched you at all, it seems?" "Thank God for their carelessness!" put in Mrs. a Cleeve fervently. "And you escaped. There was nothing to prevent? They hadn't exacted any sort of parole?" "Well, there was a sort of promise,"--the boy flushed hotly--"not what you'd call a real promise. The fellow--a sort of prefect in a tricolour sash--had us up in a room before him, and gabbled through some form of words that not one of us rightly understood. I heard afterwards some pretty stories of this gentleman. He had been a contractor to the late Republic, in horse-forage, and had swindled the Government (people said) to the tune of some millions of francs. Marengo finished him: he had been speculating against it on the sly, which lost his plunder and the most of his credit. On the remains of it he had managed to scrape into this prefecture. A nice sort of man to administer oaths!" Father Halloran turned impatiently to the window, and, leaning a hand on one of the stone mullions, gazed out upon the small garden. Daylight was failing, and the dusk out there on the few autumn flowers seemed one with the chill shadow touching his hopes and robbing them of colour. He shivered: and as with a small shiver men sometimes greet a deadly sickness, so Father Halloran's shiver presaged the doom of a life's hope. He had been Walter's tutor, and had built much on the boy: he had read warnings from time to time, and tried at once to obey them and persuade himself that they were not serious--that his anxiety magnified them. If honour could be inherited, it surely ran in Walter's blood; in honour--the priest could assert with a good conscience--he had been instructed. And yet--