The affairs of Mr. John Adrian having been thoroughly investigated, it was found that the tremendous call already made by the liquidators of the Great Blankshire Bank would sweep away so much of his capital that, after clearing off other outstanding liabilities, he would have an income of about £200 a year from all sources wherewith to enjoy himself for the remainder of his days, support his wife, maintain his daughter, and keep a little girl and a dog, that daughter’s protÉgÉs. Since the crash, however, one item in this catalogue had been removed. Mr. Edward Marston had very generously offered to take Ruth off her father’s hands.

Marston and Ruth were discussing the future together one morning, and naturally Gertie’s unfortunate position had to be considered.

‘Whatever shall I do about Gertie, Ned?’ said Ruth. ‘I can’t leave her a burden upon poor papa now, and I can’t turn her out and desert her, for it was really my fault that she lost her home.’

‘A pretty home!’ answered Marston. ‘But I have no cause to speak against it, for it was there I met you, Ruth. I often wonder if things would have turned out as they have but for that chance meeting.’

‘I wonder,’ said Ruth, with a far-away look in her beautiful eyes. ‘Oh, Ned, do you know I often think how strange it was that poor Gertie should be the means of bringing us together again! I never thought, when I took pity on a poor neglected little girl in the Dials, that my reward was to be so great. We owe a good deal to Gertie.’

‘Of course we do, my darling, and so we won’t be ungrateful. I tell you what, Ruth, if you wish it, Gertie and Lion shall come and live with us.’

‘Oh, you dear, good boy, do you really mean it?’

‘Of course I do. Do you think I couldn’t see that you were worried about the child?’

Ruth was delighted at Marston’s plan, for she really had been troubled about Josh Heckett’s grand-daughter. She knew that her mother and father were to make their home with them, but she had not dared to broach the subject of Girtie. It seemed like trespassing on Marston’s generosity.

John Adrian had accepted Marston’s offer very gratefully, but it had been somewhat difficult to explain matters to Mrs. Adrian, or to persuade her to consent to the arrangement.

Ruth had put it in a very nice filial way. She had pleaded that she could not bear to be separated from her parents or to leave them in their old age, and that, as Ned was agreeable, it would be so nice for them all to live together.

‘And besides, mamma,’ she added, ‘look what a saving it will be to us all to have a nice large house between us.’

‘Ah, yes, that’s all very well,’ answered Mrs. Adrian; ‘but who’s to be mistress? You know, my dear, I have my little fancies, and so have you. It won’t do for me to tell the servants one thing and you to tell them another. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, and perhaps cause words between you and your husband.’

‘Oh, nonsense, mamma!’ said Ruth, with a little laugh. ‘You shall have your own apartments, and one day I’ll be mistress and the next day you shall. There—won’t it be fun!’

‘I don’t know, my dear. I’m too old to play at keeping house.’

Ruth persisted in her attempts to make the old lady enter into her plans, and at last she succeeded.

Mrs. Adrian was secretly gratified by her daughter’s unwillingness to be separated from her, and she was flattered by Murston’s plea that she would be so useful to two young housekeepers.

A new house was to be taken, and she was asked to fix the locality. She was to help choose the furniture, and her voice was to be paramount in everything.

Their plan succeeded admirably. In about a fortnight the old lady was heard to talk about ‘my new house,’ and in three weeks it was Ruth and Marston who were to be specially favoured by being allowed to live in it.

Marston was delighted. He was positively enthusiastic over curtains and carpets, and he ran about with long lists of domestic requirements in his pockets with the glee of a child who is buying ornaments for a Christmas-tree.

He was in the first glow of a new happiness—the happiness of doing something to benefit his fellow-creatures. He was secretly delighted that the Adrians were ruined. It would be a pleasure to him to support them, to make their later days happy.

As to Ruth, he worshipped her. Never had damsel more devoted swain; and she, thinking of his many deeds of kindness to her and hers, would often lift up her eyes with thankfulness to heaven and thank God for giving her the love of so loyal and devoted a man. And to think she had once doubted him, believed him a bad, wicked man at the very time when he was nobly atoning for the follies of his neglected, over-tempted youth!

Marston saw a good deal of Gertie now, and he took a new interest in the child. Now and then she would talk of the old life in Little Queer Street, and of her grandfather, and the animals, and of the strange gentlemen who used to come there.

Seeing the child so constantly, Marston’s thoughts often reverted to her strange career and the life histories bound up in it.

What he knew of Gertie he had never breathed to Ruth. His shot at Gurth Egerton had been a chance one, but it had evidently hit home.

When he found that Gurth had gone away and left the coast clear, he felt sure that something he had said had seriously alarmed him.

As Gertie grew more and more into the young lady, Marston recognised more than ever the likeness to the man who had come to a violent end in Josh Heckett’s gambling den.

Intuitively he felt that Gertie was a thorn in Gurth’s side. For her to be living in his (Marston’s) house, his ward, as it were, would be a strange revolution of the wheel of fate. He felt, moreover, that it would be galling to Gurth. He did not forget that Gurth had once expressed a desire to do something for Gertie himself.

He determined as soon as he was married and had settled down that he would try and find out a little more than he knew at present of the child’s antecedents and of the circumstances of Ralph’s death.

Birnie undoubtedly knew a good deal more than he pretended to and Birnie was not so thick with Gurth for nothing.

Marston remembered that Gurth had confessed it was he who had paid the five hundred pounds Birnie had given him on his return from America.

‘Birnie knows something,’ he said to himself, and I’m not at all sure that Gertie s name wouldn’t figure in his secret if it were revealed. I’m not only doing the right thing in taking care of the child, but ‘believe I’m doing a very judicious thing. She may be a capital buffer one of these days if Mr. Gurth Egerton should come running on to my line in defiance of the danger signals.’

So it was finally settled that Gertie, and Lion should be figures in Ruth s new home.

Apart from all other selfish consideration, Marston comforted himself with the idea that if he had driven the child’s natural guardian out of the country, he was with poetic justice providing for her himself.

The more he thought of Gertie, the more it seemed to him that she was to be a central figure in his future.

Heckett, Gurth. Ruth—the new life and the old, both were bound up with this pretty blue-eyed girl of eleven, who had come to gentle Ruth Adrian to save Edward Marston from peril, and who was to find her future home beneath Edward Marston’s roof.

The arrangements for the wedding progressed rapidly, the new house was taken and furnished, and gradually the day approached when Ruth’s old home would be broken up and a new life would commence for them all.

Marston was happy when he was with Ruth, but at home by himself he had occasional fits of despondency. The gold robbery kept cropping up in various shapes and forms. Now and again there was a paragraph in the papers stating that the detectives were on the track, and that the deed was ascribed to a gang of accomplished swindlers who had long defied detection.

Marston never read these rumours without experiencing a feeling of terror which it took him some time to banish. It was not for his own fate he trembled—it was the idea of Ruth finding herself mated to a felon.

He banished the thought with a supreme effort. He flung the vision of the future from him with an oath.

‘I will be happy!’ he cried. ‘I can’t think what’s come to me. I never knew what fear was till now.’

Ruth wished to be married quietly, and Marston was quite agreeable. They had no friends they wished to invite. Gertie was to be the only bridesmaid. Marston was asked whom he should have for best man. That puzzled him. He hadn’t a friend in the world he would care to stand by his side when he took sweet Ruth Adrian to be his partner in the journey that lay before him.

No link should be there to connect the old life with the new.

He said he would think about it, and he did. After much cogitation he came to the conclusion that he couldn’t have one at all.

The idea worried him. He knew then that all his life long he had never made a friend whom he dare introduce into the little family circle from which he was taking the chief ornament.

‘We’ll have the wedding very quiet, my darling,’ he said. ‘I won’t have a best man. Gertie can be your bridesmaid, and with your father to give you away, and your mother to say the responses loud, that’s all the company we shall want. We shall be happy enough by ourselves.’

Ruth was quite willing. But there was one point which Marston didn’t care about, but on which Mrs. Adrian was firm. He wanted to be married by license, but Mrs. Adrian insisted that they should be asked in church, and Marston could not offer any determined opposition.

On the first Sunday that the banns were published, Ruth made Marston promise to go to church with her.

He went.

As he passed into the sacred edifice a strange chill came to his heart—a sensation of dread stole over him.

He could not account for it. Something in the quiet of the place, in the reverent attitude of the worshippers, in the sonorous and musical voice of the officiating priest, pleading to an unseen power in the poetic and soul-stirring language of the Prayer-book; indeed, the whole service impressed and pained him.

He had been a scoffer all his life. He had lived in an atmosphere not so much of unbelief as of indifference. Sitting by the side of Ruth Adrian, bowing his head mechanically with the rest, he found himself repeating the cry for mercy of the Litany, ‘Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners,’ and he felt awe-stricken as he thought of the ghastly reality of such a prayer upon his lips.

He sat dreamily and moodily through the after part of the service. He heard his name given out coupled with Ruth’s, and he almost expected some one to leap up from among the congregation and cry aloud that there was indeed just cause and impediment why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony.

He would have rushed out of the building had he dared, for he felt that he was challenging Heaven.

When the clergyman ascended the pulpit and gave out the text for the sermon, he singled out Marston by the merest accident in the world, and preached straight at him. The text was from Proverbs, ‘The way of transgressors is hard.’

The preacher was earnest and eloquent. He drew a powerful picture of the life of the evildoer here below. He showed how amid a show of outward happiness the canker-worm was always present to prey upon the heart of the evildoer. He painted in vivid colours the fate of men who transgressed in their desire for wealth and pleasure; and he concluded a powerful sermon by declaring that often, in attaining the prize for which he had steeped his soul in sin, the transgressor did but grasp the instrument of his own undoing, and find his bitterest punishment where he had looked for his greatest happiness.

Every word fell upon Edward Marston’s heart with cruel force. His eyes were riveted on the preacher, and it seemed to him as though he had been singled out and denounced—as though in this sacred edifice, on the very threshold of his new life, the voice of offended Heaven had uttered his condemnation.

He gave a deep sigh of regret when he found himself once more in the open air. Ruth took his arm, and they walked home together, for Marston was to dine with them.

He shook off the feeling of despondency and dread that had come upon him, and managed, with a great effort, to hide his low spirits from the company.

But when Ruth sat with him by the window that evening as the shadows deepened, and the holy calmness of a Sabbath eve crept over the quiet streets, and talked to him lovingly and hopefully of the future, his thoughts were far away. He was thinking of the preachers words, and wondering what punishment fate held for him in the days to come.