"Hester," he said, "I cannot leave your mother; you must go for me to your uncle and do the best you can. If it were not for your mother I would have the rascal prosecuted; but it would break her heart." Hester wasted no words of reply: She had often heard him say there ought to be no interference with public justice for private ends. "Yes, papa," she answered. "I shall be ready in a moment. If I ride Hotspur I shall catch the evening train." "There is time to take the brougham." "Am I to say anything to Corney, papa?" she asked, her voice trembling over the name. "You have nothing to do with him," he answered sternly. "Where is the good of keeping a villain from being as much of a villain as he has got it in him to be? I will sign you a blank cheque, which your uncle can fill up with the amount he has stolen. Come for it as soon as you are ready." Hester thought as she went whether, if it had not been for the possibility of repentance, the world would ever have been made at all. On her way to her room she met the major, looking for herself, to tell him about her mother, of whose attack, as he had been out for a long walk, he had but just heard. "But what did it, Hester?" he said. "I can smell in the air something has gone wrong: what the deuce is it? There's always something getting out of gear in this best of worlds?" She would have passed him with a word in her haste, but he turned and walked with her. "The individual, any individual, all the individuals," he went on, "may come to smash, but the world is all right, notwithstanding, and a good serviceable machine!--by George, without a sound pinion in all the carcass of it, or an engineer that cares there should be!" They had met in a dark part of the corridor, and had now, at a turn in it, come opposite a window. Then first the major saw Hester's face: he had never seen her look like that! "Is your mother in danger?" he asked, his tone changing to the gentlest, for his heart was in reality a most tender one. "She is very ill," answered Hester. "The doctor has been with her now three hours. I am going up to London for papa. He can't leave her." "Going up to London--and by the night-train!" said the major to himself. "Then there has been bad news! What can they be? Money matters? No; cousin Helen is not the one to send health after money! It's something worse than that! I have it! That scoundrel Corney has been about some mischief--damn him! I shouldn't be surprised to hear anything bad of him! But what can you do, my dear?" he said aloud. "It's not fit--" He looked up. Hester was gone.