"It's a lie!"

The word flew through Harry's teeth as in another century his sword might have flown from its sheath; and so blind was he with rage and horror that he scarcely appreciated its effect on Gordon Lowndes. Never was gross insult more mildly taken. The elder man did certainly change colour for an instant; in another he had turned away with a shrug, and in yet another he was round again with a sad half-smile. Harry glared at him in a growing terror. He saw that he was forgiven; a blow had disconcerted him less.

"I expected you to jump down my throat," observed Lowndes, with a certain twitching of the sharp nose which came and went with the intermittent twinkle in his eyes.

"It is lucky you are not a younger man, or you would have got even more than you expected!"

"For telling you the truth? Well, well, I admire your spirit, Ringrose."

"It is not the truth," said Harry doggedly, his chest heaving, and a cold sweat starting from his skin.

"I wish to God it were not!"

"You mean to tell me my father absconded?"

"That is the word I should have used."

"With ten thousand pounds that did not belong to him?"

"Not exactly that; the money was lent to him, but for another purpose. He has misapplied rather than misappropriated it."

Harry felt his head swimming. Disaster he might bear—but disaster rooted in disgrace! He gazed in mute misery upon the stripped but still familiar room; he breathed hard, and the stale odour of his father's cheroots became a sudden agony in his dilated nostrils. Something told him that what he had heard was true. That did not make it easier to believe—on the bare word of a perfect stranger.

"Proofs!" he gasped. "What proofs have you? Have you any?"

Lowndes produced a pocket-book and extracted a number of newspaper cuttings.

"Yes," sighed he, "I have almost everything that has appeared about it in the papers. It will be cruel reading for you, Ringrose; but you may take it better so than from anybody's lips. The accounts in the local press—the creditors' meetings and so forth—are, however, rather long. Hadn't you better wait until we're on our way back to town?"

"Wait? No, show me something now! I apologise for what I said; I made use of an unpardonable word; but—I don't believe it yet!"

"Here, then," said Lowndes, "if you insist. Here's a single short paragraph from the P.M.G. It would appear about the last day in March."

"The day I sailed!" groaned Harry. He took the cutting and read as follows:—

"Who are the chief creditors?" asked Harry, returning the cutting with an ashy face.

"Four business friends of your father's, from whom I raised the money in his name."

"Here in the neighbourhood?"

"No, in London; they advanced two thousand five hundred each."

"It was no good, you say?"

"No; the bank was not satisfied."

"So my father ran away with their money and left the works to go to blazes—and my mother to starve?"

Lowndes shrugged his shoulders.

"I apologise again for insulting you, Mr. Lowndes," said the boy, holding out his hand. "You have been a good friend to my poor father, I can see, and I know that you firmly believe what you say. But I never will! No; not if all his friends, and every newspaper in the kingdom, told me it was true!"

"Then what are you to believe?"

"That there has been foul play!"

The elder man turned away with another shrug, and it was some moments before Harry saw his face; when he did it was grave and sympathetic as before, and exhibited no trace of the irritation which it had cost an apparent effort to suppress.

"I am not surprised at that entering your head, Ringrose."

"Has it never entered yours?"

"Everything has; but one weeds out the impossibilities."

"Why is it impossible?" Harry burst out. "It is a good deal likelier than that my father would have done what it's said he did! There's an impossibility, if you like; and you would say so, too, if you had known him better."

Mr. Lowndes shook his head, and smiled sadly as he watched the boy's flaming face through his spectacles.

"You may have known your father, Ringrose, but you don't know human nature, or you wouldn't talk like that. Nothing is impossible—no crime—not even to the best of us—when the strain becomes more than we can bear. It is a pure question of strain and strength: which is the greater of the two. Every man has his breaking-point; your father was at his for years; it's a mystery to me how he held out so long. You must look at it sensibly, Ringrose. No thinking man will blame him, for the simple reason that every man who thinks knows very well that he might have done the same thing himself under the same pressure. Besides—give him a chance! With ten thousand pounds in his pocket——"

"You're sure he had it in his pocket?" interrupted Harry. These arguments only galled his wounds.

"Or else in a bag; it comes to the same thing."

"In what shape would he have the money?"

"Big notes and some gold."

"Yet foul play's an impossibility!"

"The numbers of the notes are known. Not one of them has turned up."

"I care nothing about that," cried the boy wildly, "though it shows he hasn't spent them himself. Listen to me, Mr. Lowndes. I believe my father is dead, I believe he has been murdered: and I would rather that than what you say! But you claim to have been his friend? You raised this money for him? Very well; take my hand—here in his room—where I can see him now, all the time I'm talking to you—and swear that you will help me to clear this mystery up! We'll inspan the best detective in town, and take him with us to Dieppe, and never leave him till we get at the truth. I mean to live for nothing else. Swear that you will help me ... swear it here ... in his own room."

The wild voice had come down to a broken whisper. Next moment it had risen again: the man hesitated.

"Swear it! Swear it! Or you may have been my father's friend, but you are none from this hour to my mother and me."

Lowndes spread his hands in an indulgent gesture.

"Very well! I swear to help you to clear up this—mystery—as long as you think it is one."

"That is all I want. Now tell me when the next train starts for town. It used to be nine-twenty?"

"It is still."

"You are returning to London yourself?"

"Yes, by that train."

"Then let us meet at the station. It is now eight. I—I want to be alone here for an hour or two. No, it will do me good, it will calm me. I feel I have been very rude to you, sir, but I have hardly known what I said. I am beside myself—beside myself!" And Harry Ringrose rushed from the room, and up the bare and sounding stairs of his empty home: it was from his own old bedroom that he heard Lowndes leave the house, and saw a dejected figure climbing the sloping drive with heavy steps.

That hour of leave-taking is not to be described. How the boy harrowed himself wilfully by going into every room and thinking of something that had happened there, and seeing it all again through scalding tears, is a thing to be understood by some, but pitied rather than commended. There was, however, another and a sounder side to Harry Ringrose, and the prayers he prayed, and the vows he vowed, these were brave, and he meant them all that bitter birthday morning, that was to have been the happiest of all his life. Then his heart was broken but still heroic: there came many a brighter day he would gladly have exchanged for that black one, for the sake of its high resolves, its pure impulses, its noble and undaunted aspirations.

He had one more rencontre before he got away: in the garden he espied their old gardener. It was impossible not to go up and speak to him; and Harry left the old man crying like a child; but he himself had no tears.

"I am glad they left you your job: you will care for things," he had said, as he was going.

"Ay, ay, for the master's sake: he was the best master a man ever had, say what they will."

"But you don't believe what they say?"

The gardener looked blank.

"Do you dare to tell me," cried Harry, "that you believe what they believe?"

It was at this the man broke down; but Harry strode away with bitter resentment in his heart, and so back to the town, with a defiant face for every passer; but this time there were none he knew. At the spot where his old companion had cut him, that affront was recalled for the first time; its meaning was plain enough now; and plain the strange conduct of the railway-porter, who kept out of his way when Harry reappeared at the station.

Lowndes was there waiting for him, and had not only taken the tickets, but also telegraphed to Mrs. Ringrose; and this moved poor Harry to a shame-faced confession of his improvidence on the way down, and its awful results, in the midst of which the other burst out laughing in his face. Harry was a boy after his own heart; it was a treat to meet anybody who declined to count the odds in the day of battle; but, in any case, Mr. Lowndes claimed the rest of the day as "his funeral." As Harry listened, and thanked his new friend, he had a keen and hostile eye for any old ones; but the train left without his seeing another.

"The works look the same as ever," groaned Harry, as he gazed out on them once more. "I thought they seemed to be doing so splendidly, with all four furnaces in blast."

"They are doing better than for some years past: iron's looking up: the creditors may get their money back yet."

"Thank God for that!"

Lowndes opened his eyes, and the sharp nose twitched amusement.

"If I were in your place that would be the worst part of all. I have no sympathy with creditors as a class."

"I want to be even with them," said Harry through his teeth. "I will be, too, before I die: with every man of them. Hallo! why, this is a first-class carriage! How does that happen? I never looked where we got in; I followed you."

"And I chose that we should travel first."

"But I can't, I won't!" cried Harry, excitedly. "It was monstrous of me last night, but it would be criminal this morning. You sit where you are. I can change into a third at the next station."

"I have a first-class ticket for you," rejoined Lowndes. "You may as well make use of it."

"But when shall I pay you back?"

"Never, my boy! I tell you this is my funeral till I deliver you over to your mother, so don't you begin counting the odds; you've nothing to do with them. Besides, you came up like a rocket, and I won't have you go down altogether like the stick!"

Nor did he; and Harry soon saw that his companion was not to be judged by his shabby top-hat and his shiny frock-coat; he was evidently a very rich man. Where the boy had flung half-crowns overnight—where half-a-crown was more than ample—his elder now scattered half-sovereigns, and they had an engaged carriage the whole way. At Preston an extravagant luncheon-basket was taken in, with a bottle of champagne and some of the best obtainable cigars, for the quality of both of which Gordon Lowndes made profuse apologies. But Harry felt a new being after his meal, for grief and excitement had been his bread all day, and the wine warmed his heart to the strange man with whom he had been thrown in such dramatic contact. Better company, in happier circumstances, it would have been difficult to imagine; and it was clear that, with quip and anecdote, he was doing his utmost to amuse Harry and to take him out of his trouble. But to no purpose: the boy was perforce a bad listener, and at last confessed it in as many words.

"My mind is so full of my father," added Harry, "that I have hardly given my dear mother a thought; but my life is hers from to-day. You said she was in Kensington; in lodgings, I suppose?"

"No, in a flat. It's very small, but there's a room for you, and it's been ready for weeks."

"What is she living on?"

"Less than half her private income by marriage settlement; that was all there was left, and five-eighths of it she would insist on making over to the men who advanced the ten thousand. She is paying them two-and-a-half per cent. on their money and attempting to live on a hundred and fifty a year!"

"I'll double it before long!"

"Then she'll pay them five."

"They shall have every farthing one day; and the other creditors, they shall have their twenty shillings in the pound if I live long enough. Now let me have the rest of those cuttings. I want to know just how we stand—and what they say."

Out came the pocket-book once more. They were an hour's run nearer town when Harry spoke again.

"May I keep them?" he said.

"Surely."

"Thank you. I take it the bank's all right—and thank God the other liabilities up there are not large. As to the flight with that ten thousand—I don't believe it yet. There has been foul play. You mark my words."

Lowndes looked out at the flying fields.

"Which of you saw him last?" continued Harry.

"Your mother, when he left for town."

"When was that?"

"The morning after Good Friday."

"When did he cross?"

"That night."

"Did he write to anybody?"

"Not that I know of."

"Not to my mother?"

Lowndes leant forward across the compartment: there was a shrewd look in the spectacled eyes.

"Not that I know of," he said again, but with a different intonation. "I have often wondered!"

"Did you ask her?"

"Yes; she said not."

"Then what do you mean?" cried Harry indignantly. "Do you think my mother would tell you a lie?"

"Your mother is the most loyal little woman in England," was the reply. "I certainly think that she would keep her end up in the day of battle."

Harry ground his teeth. He could have struck the florid able face whose every look showed a calm assumption of his father's infamy.

"You take it all for granted!" he fumed; "you, who say you were his friend. How am I to believe in such friendship? True friends are not so ready to believe the worst. Oh! it makes my blood boil to hear you talk; it makes me hate myself for accepting kindness at your hands. You have been very kind, I know," added Harry in a breaking voice; "but—but for God's sake don't let us speak about it any more!" And he flung up a newspaper to hide his quivering lips; for now he was hoping against hope and believing against belief.

Was it not in black and white in all the papers? How could it be otherwise than true? Rightly or wrongly, the world had found his father guilty; and was he to insult all and sundry who failed to repudiate the verdict of the world?

Harry was one who could not endure to be in the wrong with anybody: his weakness in every quarrel was an incongruous hankering for the good opinion of the enemy, and this was intensified in the case of one who was obviously anxious to be his friend. To appear ungracious or ungrateful was equally repugnant to Harry Ringrose, and no sooner was he master of his emotion than he lowered the paper in order to add a few words which should remove any such impression.

Gordon Lowndes sat dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief that he made haste to put away, as though it was his eyes he had been wiping, which indeed was Harry's first belief. But the gold-rimmed glasses were not displaced, and, so far from a tear, there was an expression behind them for which Harry could not then find the name; nevertheless, it made him hold his tongue after all.