"What does this mean?" said Walter Joyce, when he reached his own room and was dressing for dinner. "These people have been more civil than I could have expected them to be to a man in my position, and Lord Hetherington especially has been kindness itself; but they have always treated me as what I am--'his lordship's secretary.' Whence this new recognition? One comfort is that, thanks to old Jack Byrne's generosity, I can make a decent appearance at their table. I laughed when he insisted on providing me with dress-clothes, but he knew better. 'They can't do you any harm, my boy,' I recollect his saying, 'and they may do you some good;' and now I see how right he was. Fancy my going into society, and beginning at this phase of it I wonder whether Marian would be pleased? I wonder----" And he sat down on the edge of his bed and fell into a dreamy abstracted state; the effect caused by Marian's last long letter was upon him yet. He had answered it strongly--far more strongly than he had ever written to her before--pointing out that, at the outset, they had never imagined that life's path was to be made smooth and easy to them; they had always known that they would have to struggle; and that it was specially unlike her to fold her hands and beg for the unattainable, simply because she saw it in the possession of other people. "She dared not tell him how little hope for the future she had." That was a bad sign indeed. In their last parting walk round the garden of the old schoolhouse at Helmingham she had hinted something of this, and he thought he had silenced her on the point; but her want of hope, her abnegation of interest, was now much more pronounced; and against such a feeling he inveighed with all the strength and power of his honest soul. If she gave in, what was to become of him, whose present discomforts were only made bearable by anticipation of the time when he would have her to share his lot?