pitied." At a quarter before eleven next morning Mr. Solomon Madgin, Lady Pollexfen's agent and general man-of-business, arrived by appointment at Dupley Walls. Mr. Madgin was indispensable to her ladyship, who had a considerable quantity of house property in and around Tydsbury, consisting chiefly of small tenements, the rents of which had to be collected weekly. Then Mr. Madgin was bailiff for the Dupley Walls estate, in connexion with which were several small farms or "holdings" which required to be well looked after in many ways. Besides all this, her ladyship, having a few spare thousands, had taken of late years to dabbling in scrip and shares in a small way, and under the skilful pilotage of Mr. Madgin had hitherto contrived to steer clear of those rocks and shoals of speculation on which so many gallant argosies are wrecked. In short, everything except the law-business of the estate filtered through Mr. Madgin's hands, and as he did his work cheaply and well, and put up with her ladyship's ill temper without a murmur, the mistress of Dupley Walls could hardly have found any one who would have suited her better. Mr. Solomon Madgin was a little dried-up man, about sixty years old. His tail-coat and vest of rusty black were of the fashion of twenty years ago. He wore drab trowsers, and shoes tied with bows of black ribbon. His head, bald on the crown, had an ample fringe of white hair at the back and sides, and was covered, when he went abroad, with a beaver hat, very fluffy and much too tall for him, and which, once upon a time, had probably been nearly as white as his hair, but was now time-worn and weather-stained to one uniform and consistent drab. Round his neck he always wore a voluminous cravat of unstarched muslin fastened in front with an old-fashioned pearl brooch, above which protruded the two spiked points of a very stiff and pugnacious-looking collar. A strong alpaca umbrella, unfashionably corpulent, was his constant companion. Mr. Madgin's whiskers were shaved off in an exact line with the end of his nose. His eyebrows were very white and bushy, and could serve on occasion as a screen to the greenish crafty-looking eyes below them, which never liked to be peered into too closely. The ordinary expression of his thin dried-up face was one of hard worldly shrewdness; but there was a lurking _bonhommie_ in his smile which seemed to imply that, away from business, he might possibly mellow into a boon companion. Mr. Madgin had to wait a few minutes this morning before Lady Pollexfen could receive him. When he was ushered into her sitting-room he was surprised to find that she and Miss Holme were not alone; that a plainly-dressed man, who looked almost as old as Mr. Madgin himself, was seated at the table. After one suspicious glance at the stranger, Mr. Madgin made his bow to the ladies and walked up to the table with his bag of papers.