“There’s trouble everywhere. It attaches itself more or less to all people as they journey through life. Yes, I quite agree with what you say, Squire: that I, a man at my ease in the world and possessing no close ties of my own, ought to be tolerably exempt from care. But I am not so. You have heard of the skeleton in the closet, Johnny Ludlow. Few families are without one. I have mine.”

Mr. Brandon nodded to me, as he spoke, over the silver coffee-pot. I had gone to the Tavistock Hotel from Miss Deveen’s to breakfast with him and the Squire—who had come up for a week. You have heard of this visit of ours to London before, and there’s no need to say more about it here.

The present skeleton in Mr. Brandon’s family closet was his nephew, Roger Bevere. The young fellow, now aged twenty-three, had been for some years in London pursuing his medical studies, and giving perpetual trouble to his people in the country. During this present visit Mr. Brandon had been unable to hear of him. Searching here, inquiring there, nothing came of it: Roger seemed to have vanished into air. This morning the post had brought Mr. Brandon a brief note:

The name was spelt Bevery in the note, you observe. Strangers, deceived by the pronunciation, were apt to write it so.

“Well, this is nice news!” had been Mr. Brandon’s comment upon the short note.

“Any way, you will be more at your ease now you have found him,” remarked the Squire.

“I don’t know that, Todhetley. I have found, it seems, the address of the place where he is lying, but I have not found him. Roger has been going to the bad this many a day; I expect by this time he must be nearing the journey’s end.”

“It is only a broken arm that he has, sir,” I put in, thinking what a gloomy view he was taking of it all. “That is soon cured.”

“Don’t you speak so confidently, Johnny Ludlow,” reproved Mr. Brandon. “We shall find more the matter with Roger than a broken arm; take my word for that. He has been on the wrong tack this long while. A broken arm would not cause him to hide himself—and that’s what he must have been doing.”

“Some of those hospital students are a wild lot—as I have heard,” said the Squire.

Mr. Brandon nodded in answer. “When Roger came from Hampshire to enter on his studies at St. Bartholomew’s, he was as pure-hearted, well-intentioned a young fellow as had ever been trained by an anxious mother”—and Mr. Brandon poured a drop more weak tea out of his own tea-pot to cover his emotion. “Fit for heaven, one might have thought: any way, had been put in the road that leads to it. Loose, reckless companions got hold of him, and dragged him down to their evil ways.”

Breakfast over, little time was lost in starting to find out Gibraltar Terrace. The cab soon took us to it. Roger had been lying there more than a week. Hastening up that way one evening, on leaving the hospital, to call upon a fellow-student, he was knocked down by a fleet hansom rounding the corner of Gibraltar Terrace. Pitt the doctor happened to be passing at the time, and had him carried into the nearest house: one he had attended patients in before. The landlady, Mrs. Mapping, showed us upstairs.

(And she, poor faded woman, turned out to have been known to the Squire in the days long gone by, when she was pretty little Dorothy Grape. But I have told her story already, and there’s no need to allude to it again.)

Roger lay in bed, in a small back-room on the first-floor; a mild, fair, pleasant-looking young man with a white bandage round his head. Mr. Pitt explained that the arm was not absolutely broken, but so much contused and inflamed as to be a worse hurt. This would not have kept him in bed, however, but the head had also been damaged, and fever set in.

“So this is where he has lain, hiding, while I have been ransacking London for him!” remarked Mr. Brandon, who was greatly put out by the whole affair; and perhaps the word “hiding” might have more truth in it than even he suspected.

“When young Scott called last night—a fellow-student of your nephew’s who comes to see him and bring him changes of clothes from his lodgings—he said you were making inquiries at the hospital and had left your address,” explained Pitt. “So I thought I ought to write to you, sir.”

“And I am much obliged to you for doing it, and for your care of him also,” said Mr. Brandon.

And presently, when Pitt was leaving, he followed him downstairs to Mrs. Mapping’s parlour, to ask whether Roger was in danger.

“I do not apprehend any, now that the fever is subsiding,” answered Pitt. “I can say almost surely that none will arise if we can only keep him quiet. That has been the difficulty throughout—his restlessness. It is just as though he had something on his mind.”

“What should he have on his mind?” retorted Mr. Brandon, in contention. “Except his sins. And I expect they don’t trouble him much.”

Pitt laughed a little. “Well, sir, he is not in any danger at present. But if the fever were to come back again—and increase—why, I can’t foresee what the result might be.”

“Then I shall send for Lady Bevere.”

Pitt opened his eyes. “Lady Bevere!” he repeated. “Who is she?”

“Lady Bevere, sir, is Roger’s mother and my sister. I shall write to-day.”

Mr. Brandon had an appointment with his lawyers that morning and went out with the Squire to keep it, leaving me with the patient. “And take care you don’t let him talk, Johnny,” was his parting injunction to me. “Keep him perfectly quiet.”

That was all very well, and I did my best to obey orders; but Roger would not be kept quiet. He was for ever sighing and starting, now turning to this side, now to that, and throwing his undamaged arm up like a ball at play.

“Is it pain that makes you so restless?” I asked.

“Pain, no,” he groaned. “It’s the bother. The pain is nothing now to what it was.”

“Bother of what?”

“Oh—altogether. I say, what on earth brought Uncle John to London just now?”

“A matter connected with my property. He is my guardian and trustee, you know.” To which answer Bevere only groaned again.

After taking a great jorum of beef-tea, which Mrs. Mapping brought up at mid-day, he was lying still and tranquil, when there came a loud knock at the street-door. Steps clattered up the stairs, and a tall, dark-haired young man put his head into the room.

“Bevere, old fellow, how are you? We’ve been so sorry to hear of your mishap!”

There was nothing alarming in the words and they were spoken gently; or in the visitor either, for he was good-looking; but in a moment Bevere was sitting bolt upright in bed, gazing out in fright as though he saw an apparition.

“What the deuce has brought you here, Lightfoot?” he cried, angrily.

“Came to see how you were getting on, friend,” was the light and soothing answer, as the stranger drew near the bed. “Head and arm damaged, I hear.”

“Who told you where to find me?”

“Scott. At least, he——”

“Scott’s a false knave then! He promised me faithfully not to tell a soul.” And Bevere’s inflamed face and passionate voice presented a contrast to his usual mild countenance and gentle tones.

“There’s no need to excite yourself,” said the tall young man, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking the patient’s hand. “Dick Scott let fall a word unawares—that Pitt was attending you. So I came up to Pitt’s just now and got the address out of his surgery-boy.”

“Who else heard the chance word?”

“No one else. And I’m sure you know that you may trust me. I wanted to ask if I could do anything for you. How frightened you look, old fellow!”

Bevere lay down again, painfully uneasy yet, as was plain to be seen.

“I didn’t want any one to find me out here,” he said. “If some—some people came, there might be the dickens to pay. And Uncle John is up now, worse luck! He does not understand London ways, and he is the strictest old guy that ever wore silver shoe-buckles—you should see him on state occasions. Ask Johnny Ludlow there whether he is strait-laced or not; he knows. Johnny, this is Charley Lightfoot: one of us at Bart’s.”

Charley turned to shake hands, saying he had heard of me. He then set himself to soothe Bevere, assuring him he would not tell any one where he was lying, or that he had been to see him.

“Don’t mind my temper, old friend,” whispered Bevere, repentantly, his blue eyes going out to the other’s in sad yearning. “I am a bit tried—as you’d admit, if all were known.”

Lightfoot departed. By-and-by the Squire and Mr. Brandon returned, and Mrs. Mapping gave us some lunch in her parlour. When the Squire was ready to leave, I ran up to say good-bye to Roger. He gazed at me questioningly, eyes and cheeks glistening with fever. “Is it true?” he whispered.

“Is what true?”

“That Uncle John has written for my mother?”

“Oh yes, that’s true.”

“Good Heavens!” murmured Bevere.

“Would you not like to see her?”

“It’s not that. She’s the best mother living. It is—for fear—I didn’t want to be found out lying here,” he broke off, “and it seems that all the world is coming. If it gets to certain ears, I’m done for.”

Scarlet and more scarlet grew his cheeks. His pulse must have been running up to about a hundred-and-fifty.

“As sure as you are alive, Roger, you’ll bring the fever on again!”

“So much the better. I do—save for what I might say in my ravings,” he retorted. “So much the better if it carries me off! There’d be an end to it all, then.”

“One might think you had a desperate secret on your conscience,” I said to him in my surprise. “Had set a house on fire, or something as good.”

“And I have a secret; and it’s something far more dreadful than setting a house on fire,” he avowed, recklessly, in his distress. “And if it should get to the knowledge of Uncle John and the mother—well, I tell you, Johnny Ludlow, I’d rather die than face the shame.”

Was he raving now?—as he had been on the verge of it, in the fever, a day or two ago. No, not by the wildest stretch of the fancy could I think so. That he had fallen into some desperate trouble which must be kept secret, if it could be, was all too evident. I thought of fifty things as I went home and could not fix on one of them as likely. Had he robbed the hospital till?—or forged a cheque upon its house-surgeon? The Squire wanted to know why I was so silent.

When I next went to Gibraltar Terrace Lady Bevere was there. Such a nice little woman! Her face was mild, like Roger’s, her eyes were blue and kind as his, her tones as genial. As Mary Brandon she had been very pretty, and she was pleasing still.

She had married a lieutenant in the navy, Edmund Bevere. Her people did not like it: navy lieutenants were so poor, they said. He got on better, however, than the Brandons had thought for; got up to be rear-admiral and to be knighted. Then he died; and Lady Bevere was left with a lot of children and not much to bring them up on. I expect it was her brother, Mr. Brandon, who helped to start them all in life. She lived in Hampshire, somewhere near Southsea.

In a day or two, when Roger was better and sat up in blankets in an easy-chair, Mr. Brandon and the Squire began about his shortcomings—deeming him well enough now to be tackled. Mr. Brandon demanded where his lodgings were, for their locality seemed to be a mystery; evidently with a view of calling and putting a few personal questions to the landlady; and Roger had to confess that he had had no particular lodgings lately; he had shared Dick Scott’s. This took Mr. Brandon aback. No lodgings of his own!—sharing young Scott’s! What was the meaning of it? What did he do with all the money allowed him, if he could not pay for rooms of his own? And to the stern questioning Roger only answered that he and Scott liked to be together. Pitt laughed a little to me when he heard of this, saying Bevere was too clever for the old mentors.

“Why! don’t you believe he does live with Scott?” I asked.

“Oh, he may do that; it’s likely enough,” said Pitt. “But medical students, running their fast career in London, are queer subjects, let me tell you, Johnny Ludlow; they don’t care to have their private affairs supervised.”

“All of them are not queer—as you call it, Pitt.”

“No, indeed,” he answered, warmly: “or I don’t know what would become of the profession. Many of them are worthy, earnest fellows always, steady as old time. Others pull up when they have had their fling, and make good men: and a few go to the bad altogether.”

“In which class do you put Roger Bevere?”

Pitt took a minute to answer. “In the second, I hope,” he said. “To speak the truth, Bevere somewhat puzzles me. He seems well-intentioned, anxious, and can’t have gone so far but he might pull-up if he could. But——”

“If he could! How do you mean?”

“He has got, I take it, into the toils of a fast, bad set; and he finds their habits too strong to break through. Any way without great difficulty.”

“Do you think he—drinks?” I questioned, reluctantly.

“No mistake about that,” said Pitt. “Not so sharply as some of them do, but more than is good for him.”

I’m sure if Roger’s pulling-up depended upon his mother, it would have been done. She was so gentle and loving with him; never finding fault, or speaking a harsh word. Night and morning she sat by the bed, holding his hands in hers, and reading the Psalms to him—or a prayer—or a chapter in the Bible. I can see her now, in her soft black gown and simple little white lace cap, under which her hair was smoothly braided.

Whatever doubts some of us might be entertaining of Roger, nothing unpleasant in regard to him transpired. Dreaded enemies did not find him out, or come to besiege the house; though he never quite lost his undercurrent of uneasiness. He soon began to mend rapidly. Scott visited him every second or third day; he seemed to be fully in his confidence, and they had whisperings together. He was a good-natured, off-hand kind of young man, short and thick-set. I can’t say I much cared for him.

The Squire had left London. I remained on with Miss Deveen, and went down to Gibraltar Terrace most days. Lady Bevere was now going home and Mr. Brandon with her. Some trouble had arisen about the lease of her house in Hampshire, which threatened to end in a lawsuit, and she wanted him to see into it. They fixed upon some eligible lodgings for Roger near Russell Square, into which he would move when they left. He was sufficiently well now to go about; and would keep well, Pitt said, if he took care of himself. Lady Bevere held a confidential interview with the landlady, about taking care of her son Roger.

And she gave a last charge to Bevere himself, when taking leave of him the morning of her departure. The cab was at the door to convey her and Mr. Brandon to Waterloo Station, and I was there also, having gone betimes to Gibraltar Terrace to see the last of them.

“For my sake, my dear,” pleaded Lady Bevere, holding Roger to her, as the tears ran down her cheeks: “you will do your best to keep straight for my sake!”

“I will, I will, mother,” he whispered back in agitation, his own eyes wet; “I will keep as straight as I can.” But in his voice there lay, to my ear, a ring of hopeless despair. I don’t know whether she detected it.

She turned and took my hands. She and Mr. Brandon had already exacted a promise from me that once a-week at least, so long as I remained in London, I would write to each of them to give news of Roger’s welfare.

“You will be sure not to forget it, Johnny? I am very anxious about him—his health—and—and all,” she added in a lowered voice. “I am always fearing lest I did not do my duty by my boys. Not but that I ever tried to do it; but somehow I feel that perhaps I might have done it better. Altogether I am full of anxiety for Roger.”

“I will be sure to write to you regularly as long as I am near him, dear Lady Bevere.”

It was on a Tuesday morning that Lady Bevere and Mr. Brandon left London. In the afternoon Roger was installed in his new lodgings by Mr. Pitt, who had undertaken to see him into them. He had the parlour and the bed-chamber behind it. Very nice rooms they were, the locality and street open and airy; and the landlady, Mrs. Long, was a comfortable, motherly woman. Where his old lodgings had been situated, he had never said even to me: the Squire’s opinion was (communicated in confidence to Mr. Brandon), that he had played up “Old Gooseberry” in them, and was afraid to say.

I had meant to go to him on the Wednesday, to see that the bustle of removal had done him no harm; but Miss Deveen wanted me, so I could not. On the Thursday I got a letter from the Squire, telling me to do some business for him at Westminster. It took me the whole of the day: that is, the actual business took about a quarter-of-an-hour, and waiting to see the people (lawyers) took the rest. This brought it, you perceive, to Friday.

On that morning I mounted to the roof of a city omnibus, which set me down not far off the house. Passing the parlour-windows to knock at the door, I saw in one of them a card: “Apartments to let.” It was odd, I thought, they should put it in a room that was occupied.

“Can I see Mr. Bevere?” I asked of the servant.

“Mr. Bevere’s gone, sir.”

“Gone where? Not to the hospital?” For he was not to attempt to go there until the following week.

“He is gone for good, sir,” she answered. “He went away in a cab yesterday evening.”

Not knowing what to make of this strange news, hardly believing it, I went into the parlour and asked to see the landlady—who came at once. It was quite true: Bevere had left. Mrs. Long, who, though elderly, was plump and kindly, sat down to relate the particulars.

“Mr. Bevere went out yesterday morning, sir, after ordering his dinner—a roast fowl—for the same hour as the day before; two o’clock. It was past three, though, before he came in: and when the girl brought the dinner-tray down, she said Mr. Bevere wanted to speak to me. I came up, and then he told me he was unexpectedly obliged to leave—that he might have to go into the country that night; he didn’t yet know. Well, sir, I was a little put out: but what could I say? He paid me what was due and the rent up to the week’s end, and began to collect his things together: Sarah saw him cramming them into his new portmanteau when she brought his tea up. And at the close of the evening, between the lights, he had a cab called and went away in it.”

“Alone?”

“Quite alone, sir. On the Wednesday afternoon Dr. Pitt came to see him, and that same evening a young man called, who stayed some time; Scott, I think the name was; but nobody at all came yesterday.”

“And you do not know where Mr. Bevere is?—where he went to?”

“Why no, sir; he didn’t say. The cab might have taken him to one of the railway-stations, for all I can tell. I did not ask questions. Of course it is not pleasant for a lodger to leave you in that sudden manner, before he has well been three days in the house,” added Mrs. Long, feelingly, “especially with the neighbours staring out on all sides, and I might have asked him for another week’s rent in lieu of proper notice; but I couldn’t be hard with a well-mannered, pleasant young gentleman like Mr. Bevere—and with his connections, too. I’m sure when her ladyship came here to fix on the rooms, she was that kind and affable with me I shall never forget it—and talked to me so lovingly about him—and put half-a-crown into Sarah’s hand when she left! No, sir, I couldn’t be hard upon young Mr. Bevere.”

Mrs. Long had told all she knew, and I wished her good-day. Where to now? I deliberated, as I stood on the doorstep. This sudden flight looked as though Roger wanted to avoid people. If any one was in the secret of it, it would be Richard Scott, I thought; and I turned my steps to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.

I suppose I interrupted Scott at some critical performance, for he came to me with his coat-cuffs turned up and no wristbands on.

“Glad to see you, I’m sure,” cried he; “thought it might be an out-patient. Bevere?—oh, do you want him?” he ran on, not giving himself time to understand me perfectly, or pretending at it. “Bevere is at his new lodgings near Russell Square. He will not be back here until next week.”

“But he is not at his new lodgings,” I said. “He has left them.”

“Left!” cried Scott, staring.

“Left for good, bag and baggage. Gone altogether.”

“Gone where?” asked Scott.

“That’s what I have come to ask you. I expect you know.”

Scott’s face presented a puzzle. I wondered whether he was as innocent as he looked.

“Let us understand one another,” said he. “Do you tell me that Bevere has left his new lodgings?”

“He has. He left them last night. Ran away from them, as one may say.”

“Why, he had only just got into them! Were the people sharks? I was with him on Wednesday night: he did not complain of anything then.”

“He must have left, I fancy, for some private reason of his own. Don’t you know where he is gone, Scott? You are generally in his confidence.”

“Don’t know any more than the dead.”

To dispute the declaration was not in my power. Scott seemed utterly surprised, and said he should go to Mrs. Long’s the first leisure moment he had, to see if any note or message had been left for him. But I had already put that question to the landlady, and she answered that neither note nor message of any kind had been left for anybody. So there we were, nonplussed, Scott standing with his hands in his pockets. Make the best of it we would, it resolved itself into nothing more than this: Bevere had vanished, leaving no clue.

From thence I made my way to Mr. Pitt’s little surgery near Gibraltar Terrace. The doctor was alone in it, and stood compounding pills behind the counter.

“Bevere run away!” he exclaimed at my first words. “Why, what’s the meaning of that? I don’t know anything about it. I was going to see him this afternoon.”

With my arms on the counter, my head bending towards him, I recounted to Pitt the particulars Mrs. Long had given me, and Scott’s denial of having any finger in the pie. The doctor gave his head a twist.

“Says he knows no more than the dead, does he! That may be the case; or it may not. Master Richard Scott’s assertions go for what they are worth with me where Bevere’s concerned: the two are as thick as thieves. I’ll find him, if I can. What do you say?—that Bevere would not conceal himself from me? Look here, Johnny Ludlow,” continued Pitt rapidly, bringing forward his face till it nearly touched mine, and dropping his voice to a low tone, “that young man must have got into some dangerous trouble, and has to hide himself from the light of day.”

Leaving Pitt to make his patients’ physic, I went out into the world, not knowing whether to seek for Bevere in this quarter or in that. But, unless I found him, how could I carry out my promise of writing to Lady Bevere?

I told Miss Deveen of my dilemma. She could not help me. No one could help, that I was able to see. There was nothing for it but to wait until the next week, when Bevere might perhaps make his appearance at the hospital. I dropped a note to Scott, asking him to let me know of it if he did.

But of course the chances were that Bevere would not appear at the hospital: with need to keep his head en cachette, he would be no more safe there than in Mrs. Long’s rooms: and I might have been hunting for him yet, for aught I can tell, but for coming across Charley Lightfoot.

It was on the following Monday. He was turning out of the railway-station near Miss Deveen’s, his uncle, Dr. Lightfoot, being in practice close by. Telling him of Roger Bevere’s flight, which he appeared not to have heard of, I asked if he could form any idea where he was likely to have got to.

“Oh, back to the old neighbourhood that he lived in before his accident, most likely,” carelessly surmised Lightfoot, who did not seem to think much of the matter.

“And where is that?”

“A goodish distance from here. It is near the Bell-and-Clapper Station on the underground line.”

“The Bell-and-Clapper Station!”

Lightfoot laughed. “Ironically called so,” he said, “from a bell at the new church close by, that claps away pretty well all day and all night in the public ears.”

“Not one of our churches?”

“Calls itself so, I believe. I wouldn’t answer for it that its clergy have been licensed by a bishop. Bevere lived somewhere about there; I never was at his place; but you’ll easily find it out.”

“How? By knocking at people’s doors and inquiring for him?”

Lightfoot put on his considering-cap. “If you go to the refreshment-room of the Bell-and-Clapper Station and ask his address of the girls there,” said he, “I dare say they can give it you. Bevere used to be uncommonly fond of frequenting their company, I believe.”

Running down to the train at once I took a ticket for the Bell-and-Clapper Station, and soon reached it. It was well named: the bell was clanging away with a loud and furious tongue, enough to drive a sick man mad. What a dreadful infliction for the houses near it!

Behind the counter in the refreshment-room stood two damsels, exchanging amenities with a young man who sat smoking a cigar, his legs stretched out at ease. Before I had time to speak, the sound of an up-train was heard; he drank up the contents of a glass that stood at his elbow, and went swiftly out.

It was a pretty looking place: with coloured decanters on its shelves and an array of sparkling glass. The young women wore neat black gowns, and might have looked neat enough altogether but for their monstrous heads of hair. That of one in particular was a sight to be seen, and must have been copied from some extravagant fashion plate. She was dark and handsome, with a high colour and a loud voice, evidently a strong-minded young woman, perfectly able to take care of herself. The other girl was fair, smaller and slighter, with a somewhat delicate face, and a quiet manner.

“Can you give me the address of Mr. Roger Bevere?” I asked of this younger one.

The girl flushed scarlet, and looked at her companion, who looked back again. It was a curious sort of look, as much—I thought—as to say, what are we to do? Then they both looked at me. But neither spoke.

“I am told that Mr. Bevere often comes here, and that you can give me his address.”

“Well, sir—I don’t think we can,” said the younger one, and her speech was quite proper and modest. “We don’t know it, do we, Miss Panken?”

“Perhaps you’ll first of all tell me who it was that said we could give it you,” cried Miss Panken, in tones as strong-minded as herself, and as though she were by a very long way my superior in the world.

“It was one of his fellow-students at the hospital.”

“Oh—well—I suppose we can give it you,” she concluded. “Here, I’ll write it down. Lend me your pencil, Mabel: mine has disappeared. There,” handing me the paper, “if he is not there, we can’t tell you where he is.”

“Roger Bevary, 22, New Crescent,” was what she wrote. I thanked her and went out, encountering two or three young men who rushed in from another train and called individually for refreshment.

New Crescent was soon found, but not Bevere. The elderly woman-servant who answered me said Mr. Bevere formerly lived with them, but left about eighteen months back. He had not left the neighbourhood, she thought, as she sometimes met him in it. She saw him only the past Saturday night when she was out on an errand.

“What, this past Saturday!” I exclaimed. “Are you certain?”

“To be sure I am, sir. He was smoking a pipe and looking in at the shop windows. He saw me and said, Good-night, Ann: he was always very pleasant. I thought he looked ill.”

Back I went to the refreshment-room. Those girls knew his address well enough, but for some reason would not give it—perhaps by Bevere’s orders. Two young men were there now, sipping their beer, or whatever it was, and exchanging compliments with Miss Panken. I spoke to her civilly.

“Mr. Bevere does not live at New Crescent: he left it eighteen months ago. Did you not know that? I think you can give me his address if you will.”

She did not answer me at all. It may be bar-room politeness. Regarding me for a full minute superciliously from my head to my boots, she slowly turned her shoulders the other way, and resumed her talk with the customers.

I spoke then to the other, who was wiping glasses. “It is in Mr. Bevere’s own interest that I wish to find him; I wish it very particularly indeed. He lives in this neighbourhood; I have heard that: if you can tell me where, I shall be very much obliged to you.”

The girl’s face looked confused, timid, full of indecision, as if she knew the address but did not know whether to answer or not. By this time I had attracted attention, and silence fell on the room. Strong-minded Miss Panken came to the relief of her companion.

“Did you call for a glass of ale?” she asked me, in a tone of incipient mockery.

“Nor for soda?—nor bitters?—not even cherry-brandy?” she ran on. “No? Then as you don’t seem to want anything we supply here, perhaps you’ll take yourself off, young man, and leave space for them that do. Fancy this room being open to promiscuous inquirers, and us young ladies being obliged to answer ’em!” added Miss Panken affably to her two friends. “I’d like to see it!”

Having thus put me down and turned her back upon me, I had nothing to wait for, and walked out of the lady’s presence. The younger one’s eyes followed me with a wistful look. I’m sure she would have given the address had she dared.

After that day, I took to haunt the precincts of the Bell-and-Clapper, believing it to be my only chance of finding Bevere. Scott had a brief note from him, no address to it, stating that he was not yet well enough to resume his duties; and this note Scott forwarded to me. A letter also came to me; from Lady Bevere asking what the matter was that I did not write, and whether Roger was worse. How could I write, unless I found him?

So, all the leisure time that I could improvise I spent round about the Bell-and-Clapper. Not inside the room, amid its manifold attractions: Circe was a wily woman, remember, and pretty bottles are insidious. That particular Circe, also, Miss Panken, might have objected to my company and ordered me out of it.

Up one road, down another, before this row of houses and that, I hovered for ever like a walking ghost. But I saw nothing of Bevere.

Luck favoured me at last. One afternoon towards the end of the week, I was standing opposite the church, watching the half-dozen worshippers straggling into it, for one of its many services, listening to the irritating ding-dong of its bell, and wondering the noise was put up with, when suddenly Richard Scott came running up from the city train. Looking neither to the right nor the left, or he must inevitably have seen me, he made straight for a cross-road, then another, and presently entered one of a row of small houses whose lower rooms were on a level with the ground and the yard or two of square garden that fronted them. “Paradise Place.” I followed Scott at a cautious distance.

“Bevere lives there!” quoth I, mentally.

Should I go in at once boldly, and beard him? While deliberating—for somehow it goes against my nature to beard anybody—Scott came striding out and turned off the other way: which led to the shops. I crossed over and went in quietly at the open door.

The parlour, small and shabby as was Mrs. Mapping’s in Gibraltar Terrace, was on the left, its door likewise open. Seated at a table, taking his tea, was Roger Bevere; opposite to him, presiding over the ceremonies, sat a lady who must unquestionably have been first-cousin to those damsels at the Bell-and-Clapper, if one might judge by the hair.

“Roger!” I exclaimed. “What a dance you have led us!”

He started up with a scarlet face, his manner strangely confused, his tongue for the moment lost. And then I saw that he was without his coat, and his arm was bandaged.

“I was going to write to you,” he said—an excuse invented on the spur of the moment, “I thought to be about before now, but my arm got bad again.”

“How was that?”

“Well, I hurt it, and did not pay attention to it. It is properly inflamed now.”

I took a seat on the red stuff sofa without being invited, and Bevere dropped into his chair. The lady at the tea-tray had been regarding me with a free, friendly, unabashed gaze. She was a well-grown, attractive young woman, with a saucy face and bright complexion, fine dark eyes, and full red lips. Her abundant hair was of the peculiar and rare colour that some people call red and others gold. As to her manners, they were as assured as Miss Panken’s, but a great deal pleasanter. I wondered who she was and what she did there.

“So this is Johnny Ludlow that I’ve heard tell of!” she exclaimed, catching up my name from Bevere, and sending me a gracious nod. “Shall I give you a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you,” was my answer, though all the while as thirsty as a fish, for the afternoon was hot.

“Oh, you had better: don’t stand on ceremony,” she said, laughing. “There’s nothing like a good cup of tea when the throat’s dry and the weather’s baking. Come! make yourself at home.”

“Be quiet, Lizzie,” struck in Bevere, his tone ringing with annoyance and pain. “Let Mr. Ludlow do as he pleases.” And it struck me that he did not want me to take the tea.

Scott came in then, and looked surprised to see me: he had been out to get something for Bevere’s arm. I felt by intuition that he had known where Bevere was all along, that his assumption of ignorance was a pretence. He and the young lady seemed to be upon excellent terms, as though they had been acquainted for ages.

The arm looked very bad: worse than it had at Gibraltar Terrace. I stood by when Scott took off the bandages. He touched it here and there.

“I tell you what, Bevere,” he said: “you had better let Pitt see to this again. He got it right before; and—I don’t much like the look of it.”

“Nonsense!” returned Bevere. “I don’t want Pitt here.”

“I say nonsense to that,” rejoined Scott. “Who’s Pitt?—he won’t hurt you. No good to think you can shut yourself up in a nutshell—with such an arm as this, and—and—” he glanced at me, as if he would say, “and now Ludlow has found you out.”

“You can do as much for the arm as Pitt can,” said Bevere, fractiously.

“Perhaps I could: but I don’t mean to try. I tell you, Bevere, I do not like the look of it,” repeated Scott. “What’s more, I, not being a qualified practitioner yet, would not take the responsibility.”

“Well, I will go to Pitt to-morrow if I’m no better and can get my coat on,” conceded Bevere. “Lizzie, where’s the other bandage?”

“Oh, I left it in my room,” said Lizzie; and she ran up the stairs in search of it.

So she lived there! Was it her home, I wondered; or Bevere’s; or their home conjointly? The two might have vowed eternal friendship and set up housekeeping together on a platonic footing. Curious problems do come into fashion in the great cities of this go-ahead age; perhaps that one had.

Scott finished dressing the arm, giving the patient sundry cautions meanwhile; and I got up to leave. Lizzie had stepped outside and was leaning over the little wooden entrance-gate, chanting a song to herself and gazing up and down the quiet road.

“What am I to say to your mother?” I said to Bevere in a low tone. “You knew I had to write to her.”

“Oh, say I am all right,” he answered. “I have written to her myself now, and had two letters from her.”

“How do the letters come to you? Here?”

“Scott gets them from Mrs. Long’s. Johnny”—with a sharp pressure of the hand, and a beseeching look from his troubled blue eyes—“be a good fellow and don’t talk. Anywhere.”

Giving his hand a reassuring shake, and lifting my hat to the lady at the gate as I passed her, I went away, thinking of this complication and of that. In a minute, Scott overtook me.

“I think you knew where he was, all along,” I said to him; “that your ignorance was put on.”

“Of course it was,” answered Scott, as coolly as you please. “What would you? When a fellow-chum entrusts confidential matters to you and puts you upon your honour, you can’t betray him.”

“Oh, well, I suppose not. That damsel over there, Scott—is she his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt?”

“You can call her which you like,” replied Scott, affably. “Are you very busy this afternoon, Ludlow?”

“I am not busy at all.”

“Then I wish you would go to Pitt. I can’t spare the time. I’ve a heap of work on my shoulders to-day: it was only the pressing note I got from Bevere about his arm that brought me out of it. He is getting a bit doubtful himself, you see; and Pitt had better come to it without loss of time.”

“Bevere won’t thank me for sending Pitt to him. You heard what he said.”

“Nonsense as to Bevere’s thanks. The arm is worse than he thinks for. In my opinion, he stands a good chance of losing it.”

“No!” I exclaimed in dismay. “Lose his arm!”

“Stands a chance of it,” repeated Scott. “It will be his own fault. A week yesterday he damaged it again, the evening he came back here, and he has neglected it ever since. You tell Pitt what I say.”

“Very well, I will. I suppose the account Bevere gave to his mother and Mr. Brandon—that he had been living lately with you—was all a fable?”

Scott nodded complaisantly, striding along at the pace of a steam-engine. “Just so. He couldn’t bring them down upon him here, you know.”

I did not exactly know. And thoughts, as the saying runs, are free.

“So he hit upon the fable, as you call it, of saying he had shared my lodgings,” continued Scott. “Necessity is a rare incentive to invention.”

We had gained the Bell-and-Clapper Station as he spoke: two minutes yet before the train for the city would be in. Scott utilized the minutes by dashing to the bar for a glass of ale, chattering to Miss Panken and the other one while he drank it. Then we both took the train; Scott going back to the hospital—where he fulfilled some official duty beyond that of ordinary student—and I to see after Pitt.

II.

Roger Bevere’s arm proved obstinate. Swollen and inflamed as I had never seen any arm yet, it induced fever, and he had to take to his bed. Scott, who had his wits about him in most ways, had not spoken a minute too soon, or been mistaken as to the probable danger; while Mr. Pitt told Roger every time he came to dress it, beginning with the first evening, that he deserved all he got for being so foolhardy as to neglect it: as a medical man in embryo, he ought to have foreseen the hazard.

It seemed to me that Roger was just as ill as he was at Gibraltar Terrace, when they sent for his mother: if not worse. Most days I got down to Paradise Place to snatch a look at him. It was not far, taking the underground-railway from Miss Deveen’s.

I made the best report I could to Lady Bevere, telling nothing—excepting that the arm was giving a little trouble. If she got to learn the truth about certain things, she would think the letters deceitful. But what else could I do?—I wished with all my heart some one else had to write them. As Scott had said to me about the flitting from Mrs. Long’s (the reason for which or necessity, I was not enlightened upon yet), I could not betray Bevere. Pitt assured me that if any unmanageable complications arose with the arm, both Lady Bevere and Mr. Brandon should be at once telegraphed for. A fine complication it would be, of another sort, if they did come! How about Miss Lizzie?

Of all the free-and-easy young women I had ever met with, that same Lizzie was the freest and easiest. Many a time have I wondered Bevere did not order her out of the room when she said audacious things to him or to me—not to say out of the house. He did nothing of the kind; he lay passive as a bird that has had its wings clipped, all spirit gone out of him, and groaning with bodily pain. Why on earth did he allow her to make his house her abode, disturbing it with her noise and her clatter? Why on earth—to go on further—did he rent a house at all, small or large? No one else lived in it, that I saw, except a little maid, in her early teens, to do the work. Later I found I was mistaken: they were only lodgers: an old landlady, lame and quiet, was in the kitchen.

“Looks fearfully bad, don’t he?” whispered Lizzie to me on one occasion when he lay asleep, and she came bursting into the room for her bonnet and shawl.

“Yes. Don’t you think you could be rather more quiet?”

“As quiet as a lamb, if you like,” laughed Lizzie, and crept out on tiptoe. She was always good-humoured.

One afternoon when I went in, Lizzie had a visitor in the parlour. Miss Panken! The two, evidently on terms of close friendship, were laughing and joking frantically; Lizzie’s head, with its clouds of red-gold hair, was drawn close to the other head and the mass of black braids adorning it. Miss Panken sat sipping a cup of tea; Lizzie a tumbler of hot water that gave forth a suspicious odour.

“I’ve got a headache, Mr. Johnny,” said she: and I marvelled that she did not, in her impudence, leave the “Mr.” out. “Hot gin-and-water is the very best remedy you can take for it.”

Shrieks of laughter from both the girls followed me upstairs to Roger’s bedside: Miss Panken was relating some joke about her companion, Mabel. Roger said his arm was a trifle better. It always felt so when Pitt had been to it.

“Who is it that’s downstairs now?” he asked, fretfully, as the bursts of merriment sounded through the floor. “Sit down, Johnny.”

“It’s a girl from the Bell-and-Clapper refreshment-room. Miss Panken they call her.”

Roger frowned. “I have told Lizzie over and over again that I wouldn’t have those girls encouraged here. What can possess her to do it?” And, after saying that, he passed into one of those fits of restlessness that used to attack him at Gibraltar Terrace.

“Look here, Roger,” I said, presently, “couldn’t you—pull up a bit? Couldn’t you put all this nonsense away?”

“Which nonsense?” he retorted.

“What would Mr. Brandon say if he knew it? I’ll not speak of your mother. It is not nice, you know; it is not, indeed.”

“Can’t you speak out?” he returned, with intense irritation. “Put what away?”

“Lizzie.”

I spoke the name under my breath, not liking to say it, though I had wanted to for some time. All the anger seemed to go out of Roger. He lay still as death.

“Can’t you, Roger?”

“Too late, Johnny,” came back the answer in a whisper of pain.

“Why?”

“She is my wife.”

I leaped from my chair in a sort of terror. “No, no, Roger, don’t say that! It cannot be.”

“But it is,” he groaned. “These eighteen months past.”

I stood dazed; all my senses in a whirl. Roger kept silence, his face turned to the pillow. And the laughter from below came surging up.

I had no heart affection that I was aware of, but I had to press my hand to still its thumping as I leaned over Roger.

“Really married? Surely married?”

“As fast and sure as the registrar could marry us,” came the smothered answer. “We did not go to church.”

“Oh, Roger! How came you to do it?”

“Because I was a fool.”

I sat down again, right back in the chair. Things that had puzzled me before were clearing themselves now. This was the torment that had worried his mind and prolonged, if not induced, the fever, when he first lay ill of the accident; this was the miserable secret that had gone well-nigh to disturb the brain: partly for the incubus the marriage entailed upon him, partly lest it should be found out. It had caused him to invent fables in more ways than one. Not only had he to conceal his proper address from us all when at Gibraltar Terrace, especially from his mother and Mr. Brandon; but he had had to scheme with Scott to keep his wife in ignorance altogether—of his accident and of where he was lying, lest Lizzie should present herself at his bedside. To account for his absence from home, Scott had improvised a story to her of Roger’s having been despatched by the hospital authorities to watch a case of illness at a little distance; and Lizzie unsuspiciously supplied Scott with changes of raiment and other things Roger needed from his chest of drawers.

This did for a time. But about the period of Roger’s quitting Gibraltar Terrace, Lizzie unfortunately caught up an inkling that she was being deceived. Miss Panken’s general acquaintance was numerous, and one day one of them chanced to go into the bar-room of the Bell-and-Clapper, and to mention, incidentally, that Roger Bevere had been run over by a hansom cab, and was lying disabled in some remote doctor’s quarters—for that’s what Scott told his fellow-students. Madam Lizzie rose in rebellion, accused Scott of being no gentleman, and insisted upon her right to be enlightened. So, to stop her from making her appearance at St. Bartholomew’s with inconvenient inquiries, and possibly still more inconvenient revelations, Roger had promptly to quit the new lodgings at Mrs. Long’s, and return to the old home near the Bell-and-Clapper. But I did not learn these particulars at first.

“Who knows it, Roger?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“Not one of them but Scott,” he answered, supposing I alluded to the hospital. “I see Pitt has his doubts.”

“But they know—some of them—that Lizzie is here!”

“Well? So did you, but you did not suspect further. They think of course that—well, there’s no help for what they think. When a fellow is in such a position as mine, he has to put up with things as they come. I can’t quite ruin myself, Johnny; or let the authorities know what an idiot I’ve been. Lizzie’s aunt knows it; and that’s enough at present; and so do those girls at the Bell-and-Clapper—worse luck!”

It was impossible to talk much of it then, at that first disclosure; I wished Roger good-afternoon, and went away in a fever-dream.

My wildest surmises had not pictured this dismal climax. No, never; for all that Mistress Lizzie’s left hand displayed a plain gold ring of remarkable thickness. “She would have it thick,” Roger said to me later. Poor Roger! poor Roger!

I felt it like a blow—like a blow. No good would ever come of it—to either of them. Worse than no good to him. It was not so much the unsuitableness of the girl’s condition to his; it was the girl herself. She would bring him no credit, no comfort as long as she lived: what happiness could he ever find with her? I had grown to like Roger, with all his faults and failings, and it almost seemed to me, in my sorrow for him, as if my own life were blighted.

It might not have been quite so bad—not quite—had Lizzie been a different girl. Modest, yielding, gentle, like that little Mabel I had seen, for instance, learning to adapt her manners to the pattern of her husband’s; had she been that, why, in time, perhaps, things might have smoothed down for him. But Lizzie! with her free and loud manners, her off-hand ways, her random speech, her vulgar laughs! Well, well!

How was it possible she had been able to bring her fascinations to bear upon him—he with his refinement? One can but sit down in amazement and ask how, in the name of common-sense, such incongruities happen in the world. She must have tamed down what was objectionable in her to sugar and sweetness while setting her cap at Bevere; while he—he must have been blind, physically and mentally. But no sooner was the marriage over than he awoke to see what he had done for himself. Since then his time had been principally spent in setting up contrivances to keep the truth from becoming known. Mr. Brandon had talked of his skeleton in the closet: he had not dreamt of such a skeleton as this.

“Must have gone in largely for strong waters in those days, and been in a chronic state of imbecility, I should say,” observed Pitt, making his comments to me confidentially.

For I had spoken to him of the marriage, finding he knew as much as I did. “I shall never be able to understand it,” I said.

“That’s easy enough. When Circe and a goose sit down to play chess, no need to speculate which will win the game.”

“You speak lightly of it, Mr. Pitt.”

“Not particularly. Where’s the use of speaking gravely now the deed’s done? It is a pity for Bevere; but he is only one young man amidst many such who in one way or another spoil their lives at its threshold. Johnny Ludlow, when I look about me and see the snares spread abroad in this great metropolis by night and by day, and at the crowds of inexperienced lads—they are not much better—who have to run to and fro continually, I marvel that the number of those who lose themselves is not increased tenfold.”

He had changed his tone to one solemn enough for a judge.

“I cannot think how he came to do it,” I argued. “Or how such a one as Bevere, well-intentioned, well brought up, could have allowed himself to fall into what Mr. Brandon calls loose habits. How came he to take to drinking ways, even in a small degree?”

“The railway refreshment-bars did that for him, I take it,” answered Pitt. “He lived up here from the first, by the Bell-and-Clapper, and I suppose found the underground train more convenient than the omnibus. Up he’d rush in a morning to catch—say—the half-past eight train, and would often miss it by half-a-minute. A miss is as good as a mile. Instead of cooling his heels on the draughty and deserted platform, he would turn into the refreshment-room, and find there warmth and sociable company in the shape of pretty girls to chat with: and, if he so minded, a glass of something or other to keep out the cold on a wintry morning.”

“As if Bevere would!—at that early hour!”

“Some of them do,” affirmed Pitt. “Anyway, that’s how Bevere fell into the habit of frequenting the bar-room of the Bell-and-Clapper. It lay so handy, you see; right in his path. He would run into it again of an evening when he returned: he had no home, no friends waiting for him, only lodgings. There——”

“I thought Bevere used to board with a family,” I interrupted.

“So he did at first; and very nice people they were: Mr. Brandon took care he should be well placed. That’s why Bevere came up this way at all: it was rather far from the hospital, but Mr. Brandon knew the people. In a short time, however, the lady died, the home was broken up, and Bevere then took lodgings on his own account; and so—there was no one to help him keep out of mischief. To go on with what I was saying. He learnt to frequent the bar-room at the Bell-and-Clapper: not only to run into it in a morning, but also on his return in the evening. He had no sociable tea or dinner-table waiting for him, you see, with pleasant faces round it. All the pleasant faces he met were those behind the counter; and there he would stay, talking, laughing, chaffing with the girls, one of whom was Miss Lizzie, goodness knows how long—the places are kept open till midnight.”

“It had its attractions for him, I suppose—what with the girls and the bottles.”

Pitt nodded. “It has for many a one besides him, Johnny. Roger had to call for drink; possibly without the slightest natural inclination for anything, he had perforce to call for it; he could hardly linger there unless he did. By-and-by, I reckon, he got to like the drink; he acquired the taste for it, you see, and habit soon becomes second nature; one glass became two glasses, two glasses three. This went on for a time. The next act in the young man’s drama was, that he allowed himself to glide into an entanglement of some sort with one of the said girls, Miss Lizzie Field, and was drawn in to marry her.”

“How have you learnt these particulars?”

“Partly from Scott. They are true. Scott has a married brother living up this way, and is often running up here; indeed at one time he lived with him, and he and Bevere used to go to and fro to St. Bartholomew’s in company. Yes,” slowly added the doctor, “that refreshment-room has been the bane of Roger Bevere.”

“And not of Scott?”

“It did Scott no good; you may take a vow of that. But Scott has some plain, rough common-sense of his own, which kept him from going too far. He may make a good man yet; and a name also, for he possesses all the elements of a skilful surgeon. Bevere succumbed to the seductions of the bar-room, as other foolish young fellows, well-intentioned at heart, but weak in moral strength, have done, and will do again. Irresistible temptations they present, these places, to the young men who have to come in contact with them. If the lads had to go out of their way to seek the temptation, they might never do it; but it lies right in their path, you perceive, and they can’t pass it by. Of course I am not speaking of all young men; only of those who are deficient in moral self-control. To some, the Bell-and-Clapper bar-room presents no more attraction than the Bell-and-Clapper Church by its side; or any other of such rooms, either.”

“Is there not any remedy for this state of things?”

Pitt shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose not,” he said. “Since I pulled up from drinking, I have been unable to see what these underground railway-rooms are needed for: why a man or woman, travelling for half-an-hour, more or less, must needs be provided with places to drink in at both ends of the journey and all the middles. Biscuits and buns are there as well, you may say—serving an excuse perhaps. But for one biscuit called for, there are fifty glasses of ale, or what not. Given the necessity for the rooms,” added Pitt, with a laugh, “I should do away with the lady-servers and substitute men; which would put an end to three parts of the attraction. No chance of that reformation.”

“Because it would do away with three parts of the custom,” I said, echoing his laugh.

“Be you very sure of that, Johnny Ludlow. However, it is no business of mine to find fault with existing customs, seeing that I cannot alter them,” concluded the doctor.

What he said set me thinking. Every time I passed by one of these stations, so crowded with the traffic of young city men, and saw the bottles arrayed to charm the sight, their bright colours gleaming and glistening, and looked at the serving-damsels, with their bedecked heads, arrayed to charm also, I knew Pitt must be right. These rooms might bring in grist to their owners’ mill; but it struck me that I should not like, when I grew old, to remember that I had owned one.

Roger Bevere’s arm began to yield to treatment, but he continued very ill in himself; too ill to get up. Torment of mind and torment of body are a bad complication.

One afternoon when I was sitting with him, sundry quick knocks downstairs threatened to disturb the doze he was falling into—and Pitt had said that sleep to him just now was like gold. I crept away to stop it. In the middle of the parlour, thumping on the floor with her cotton umbrella—a huge green thing that must have been the fellow, when made, to Sairey Gamp’s—stood Mrs. Dyke, a stout, good-natured, sensible woman, whom I often saw there. Her husband was a well-to-do coachman, whose first wife had been sister to Lizzie’s mother, and this wife was their cousin.

“Where’s Lizzie, sir?” she asked. “Out, I suppose?”

“Yes, I think so. I saw her with her bonnet on.”

“The girl’s out, too, I take it, or she’d have heard me,” remarked Mrs. Dyke, as she took her seat on the shabby red sofa, and pushed her bonnet back from her hot and comely face. “And how are we going on up there, sir?”—pointing to the ceiling.

“Very slowly. He cannot get rid of the fever.”

She lodged the elegant umbrella against the sofa’s arm and turned sideways to face me. I had sat down by the window, not caring to go back and run the risk of disturbing Roger.

“Now come, sir,” she said, “let us talk comfortable: you won’t mind giving me your opinion, I dare say. I have looked out for an opportunity to ask it: you being what you are, sir, and his good friend. Them two—they don’t hit it off well together, do they?”

Knowing she must allude to Bevere and his wife, I had no ready answer at hand. Mrs. Dyke took silence for assent.

“Ah, I see how it is. I thought I must be right; I’ve thought it for some time. But Lizzie only laughs in my face, when I ask her. There’s no happiness between ’em; just the other thing; I told Lizzie so only yesterday. But they can’t undo what they have done, and there’s nothing left for them, sir, but to make the best of it.”

“That’s true, Mrs. Dyke. And I think Lizzie might do more towards it than she does. If she would only——”

“Only try to get a bit into his ways and manners and not offend him with hers,” put in discerning Mrs. Dyke, when I hesitated, “He is as nice a young gentleman as ever lived, and I believe has the making in him of a good husband. But Lizzie is vulgar and her ways are vulgar; and instead of checking herself and remembering that he is just the opposite, and that naturally it must offend him, she lets herself grow more so day by day. I know what’s what, sir, having been used to the ways of gentry when I was a young woman, for I lived cook for some years in a good family.”

“Lizzie’s ways are so noisy.”

“Her ways are noisy and rampagious,” assented Mrs. Dyke, “more particularly when she has been at her drops; and noise puts out a sick man.”

“Her drops!” I repeated, involuntarily, the word calling up a latent doubt that lay in my mind.

“When girls that have been in busy employment all day and every day, suddenly settle down to idleness, they sometimes slip into this habit or that habit, not altogether good for themselves, which they might never else have had time to think of,” remarked Mrs. Dyke. “I’ve come in here more than once lately and seen Lizzie drinking hot spirits-and-water in the daytime: I know you must have seen the same, sir, or I’d not mention it—and beer she’ll take unlimited.”

Of course I had seen it.

“I think she must have learnt it at the counter; drinking never was in our family, and I never knew that it was in her father’s,” continued Mrs. Dyke. “But some of the young women, serving at these bars, get to like the drink through having the sight and smell of it about ’em all day long.”

That was more than likely, but I did not say so, not caring to continue that branch of the subject.

“The marriage was a misfortune, Mrs. Dyke.”

“For him I suppose you gentlemen consider it was,” she answered. “It will be one for her if he should die: she’d have to go back to work again and she has got out o’ the trick of it. Ah! she thought grand things of it at first, naturally, marrying a gentleman! But unequal marriages rarely turn out well in the long run. I knew nothing of it till it was done and over, or I should have advised her against it; my husband’s place lay in a different part of London then—Eaton Square way. Better, perhaps, for Lizzie had she gone out to service in the country, like her sister.”

“Did she always live in London?”

“Dear, no, sir, nor near it; she lived down in Essex with her father and mother. But she came up to London on a visit, and fell in love with the public life, through getting to know a young woman who was in it. Nothing could turn her, once her mind was set upon it; and being sharp and clever, quick at figures, she got taken on at some wine-vaults in the city. After staying there awhile and giving satisfaction, she changed to the refreshment-room at the Bell-and-Clapper. Miss Panken went there soon after, and they grew very intimate. The young girl left, who had been there before her; very pretty she was: I don’t know what became of her. At some of the counters they have but one girl; at others, two.”

“It is a pity girls should be at them at all—drawing on the young men! I am speaking generally, Mrs. Dyke.”

“It is a pity the young men should be so soft as to be drawn on by them—if you’ll excuse my saying it, sir,” she returned, quickly. “But there—what would you? Human nature’s the same all the world over: Jack and Jill. The young men like to talk to the girls, and the girls like very much to talk to the young men. Of course these barmaids lay themselves out to the best advantage, in the doing of their hair and their white frills, and what not, which is human nature again, sir. Look at a young lady in a drawing-room: don’t she set herself off when she is expecting the beaux to call?”

Mrs. Dyke paused for want of breath. Her tongue ran on fast, but it told of good sense.

“The barmaids are but like the young ladies, sir; and the young fellows that congregate there get to admire them, while sipping their drops at the counter; if, as I say, they are soft enough. When the girls get hold of one softer than the rest, why, perhaps one of them gets over him so far as to entrap him to give her his name—just as safe as you hook and land a fish.”

“And I suppose it has a different termination sometimes?”

Honest Mrs. Dyke shook her head. “We won’t talk about that, sir: I can’t deny that it may happen once in a way. Not often, let’s hope. The young women, as a rule, are well-conducted and respectable: they mostly know how to take care of themselves.”

“I should say Miss Panken does.”

Mrs. Dyke’s broad face shone with merriment. “Ain’t she impudent? Oh yes, sir, Polly Panken can take care of herself, never fear. But it’s not a good atmosphere for young girls to be in, you see, sir, these public bars; whether it may be only at a railway counter, or at one of them busy taverns in the town, or at the gay places of amusement, the manners and morals of the girls get to be a bit loose, as it were, and they can’t help it.”

“Or anybody else, I suppose.”

“No, sir, not as things are; and it’s just a wrong upon them that they should be exposed to it. They’d be safer and quieter in a respectable service, which is the state of life many of ’em were born to—though a few may be superior—and better behaved, too: manners is sure to get a bit corrupted in the public line. But the girls like their liberty; they like the free-and-easy public life and its idleness; they like the flirting and the chaffing and the nonsense that goes on; they like to be dressed up of a day as if they were so many young ladies, their hair done off in bows and curls and frizzes, and their hands in cuffs and lace-edgings; now and then you may see ’em with a ring on. That’s a better life, they think, than they’d lead as servants or shop-women, or any of the other callings open to this class of young women: and perhaps it is. It’s easier, at any rate. I’ve heard that some quite superior young people are in it, who might be, or were, governesses, and couldn’t find employment, poor young ladies, through the market being so overstocked. Ah, it is a hard thing, sir, for a well-brought-up young woman to find lady-like employment nowadays. One thing is certain,” concluded Mrs. Dyke, “that we shall never have a lack of barmaids in this country until a law is passed by the legislature—which, happen, never will be passed—to forbid girls serving in these places. There’d be less foolishness going on then, and a deal less drinking.”

These were Pitt’s ideas over again.

A loud laugh outside, and Lizzie came running in. “Why, Aunt Dyke, are you there!—entertaining Mr. Johnny Ludlow!” she exclaimed, as she threw herself into a chair. “Well, I never. And what do you two think I am going to do to-morrow?”

“Now just you mind your manners, young woman,” advised the aunt.

“I am minding them—don’t you begin blowing-up,” retorted Lizzie, her face brimming over with good-humour.

“You might have your things stole; you and the girl out together,” said Mrs. Dyke.

“There’s nothing to steal but chairs and tables. I’m sure I’m much obliged to you both for sitting here to take care of them. You’ll never guess what I am going to do,” broke off Lizzie, with shrieks of laughter. “I am going to take my old place again at the Bell-and-Clapper, and serve behind the counter for the day: Mabel Falkner wants a holiday. Won’t it be fun!”

“Your husband will not let you; he would not like it,” I said in my haste, while Mrs. Dyke sat in open-mouthed amazement.

“And I shall put on my old black dress; I’ve got it yet; and be a regular barmaid again. A lovely costume, that black is!” ironically ran on Lizzie. “Neat and not gaudy, as the devil said when he painted his tail pea-green. You need not look as though you thought I had made acquaintance with him and heard him say it, Mr. Johnny; I only borrowed it from one of Bulwer’s novels that I read the other day.”

If I did not think that, I thought Madam Lizzie had been making acquaintance this afternoon with something else. “Drops!” as Mrs. Dyke called it.

“There I shall be to-morrow, at the old work, and you can both come and see me at it,” said Lizzie. “I’ll treat you more civilly, Mr. Johnny, than Polly Panken did.”

“But I say that your husband will not allow you to go,” I repeated to her.

“Ah, he’s in bed,” she laughed; “he can’t get out of it to stop me.”

“You are all on the wrong tack, Lizzie girl,” spoke up the aunt, severely. “If you don’t mind, it will land you in shoals and quicksands. How dare you think of running counter to what you know your husband’s wishes would be?”

She received this with a louder laugh than ever. “He will not know anything about it, Aunt Dyke. Unless Mr. Johnny Ludlow here should tell him. It would not make any difference to me if he did,” she concluded, with candour.

And as I felt sure it would not, I held my tongue.

By degrees, as the days went on, Roger got about again, and when I left London he was back at St. Bartholomew’s. Other uncanny things had happened to me during this visit of mine, but not one of them brought with it so heavy a weight as the thought of poor Roger Bevere and his blighted life.

“His health may get all right if he will give up drinking,” were the last words Pitt said to me. “He has promised to do so.”

The weather was cold and wintry as we began our railway journey. From two to three years have gone on, you must please note, since the time told of above. Mr. Brandon was about to spend the Christmas with his sister, Lady Bevere—who had quitted Hampshire and settled not far from Brighton—and she had sent me an invitation to accompany him.

We took the train at Evesham. It was Friday, and the shortest day in the year; St. Thomas, the twenty-first of December. Some people do not care to begin a journey on a Friday, thinking it bodes ill-luck: I might have thought the same had I foreseen what was to happen before we got home again.

London reached, we met Roger Bevere at the Brighton Station, as agreed upon. He was to travel down with us. I had not seen him since the time of his illness in London, except for an hour once when I was in town upon some business for the Squire. Nothing had transpired to his friends, so far as I knew, of the fatal step he had taken; that was a secret still.

I cannot say I much liked Roger’s appearance now, as he sat opposite me in the railway-carriage, leaning against the arm of the comfortably-cushioned seat. His fair, pleasant face was gentle as ever, but the once clear blue eyes no longer looked very clear and did not meet ours freely; his hands shook, his fingers were restless. Mr. Brandon did not much like the signs either, to judge by the way he stared at him.

“Have you been well lately, Roger?”

“Oh yes, thank you, Uncle John.”

“Well, your looks don’t say much for you.”

“I am rather hard-worked,” said Roger. “London is not a place to grow rosy in.”

“Do you like your new work?” continued Mr. Brandon. For Roger had done with St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and was outdoor assistant to a surgeon in private practice, a Mr. Anderson.

“I like it better than the hospital work, Uncle John.”

“Ah! A fine idea that was of yours—wanting to set up in practice for yourself the minute you had passed. Your mother did well to send the letter to me and ask my advice. Some of you boys—boys, and no better—fresh from your hospital studies, screw a brass-plate on your door, announcing yourselves to the world as qualified surgeons. A few of you go a step further and add M.D.”

“Many of us take our degree as physician at once, Uncle John,” said Roger. “It is becoming quite the custom.”

“Just so: the custom!” retorted Mr. Brandon, cynically. “Why didn’t you do it, and modestly call yourself Dr. Bevere? In my former days, young man, when some ultra-grave ailment necessitated application to a physician, we went to him in all confidence, knowing that he was a man of steady years, of long-tried experience, whose advice was to be relied upon. Now, if you are dying and call in some Dr. So-and-so, you may find him a young fellow of three or four and twenty. As likely as not only an M.B. in reality, who has arrogated to himself the title of Doctor. For I hear some of them do it.”

“But they think they have a right to be called so, Uncle John. The question——”

“What right?” sharply demanded Mr. Brandon. “What gives it them?”

“Well—courtesy, I suppose,” hesitated Roger.

“Oh,” said Mr. Brandon.

I laughed. His tone was so quaint.

“Yes, you may laugh, Johnny Ludlow—showing your thoughtlessness! There’ll soon be no modesty left in the world,” he continued; “there’ll soon be no hard, plodding work. Formerly, men were content to labour on patiently for years, to attain success, whether in fame, fortune, or for a moderate competency. Now they must take a leap into it. Tradespeople retire before middle-age, merchants make colossal fortunes in a decade, and (to leave other anomalies alone) you random young hospital students spring into practice full-fledged M.D.’s.”

“The world is changing, Uncle John.”

“It is,” assented Mr. Brandon. “I’m not sure that we shall know it by-and-by.”

From Brighton terminus we had a drive of two or three miles across country to get to Prior’s Glebe—as Lady Bevere’s house was named. It was old-fashioned and commodious, and stood in a large square garden that was encircled by a thick belt of towering shrubs. Nothing was to be seen around it but a huge stretch of waste land; half a-mile-off, rose a little church and a few scattered cottages. “The girls must find this lively!” exclaimed Roger, taking a comprehensive look about him as we drove up in the twilight.

Lady Bevere, kind, gentle, simple-mannered as ever, received us lovingly. Mr. Brandon kissed her, and she kissed me and Roger. It was the first Christmas Roger had spent at home since rushing into that mad act of his; he had always invented some excuse for declining. The eldest son, Edmund, was in the navy; the second, George, was in the Church; Roger was the third; and the youngest, John, had a post in a merchant’s house in Calcutta. Of the four girls, only the eldest, Mary, and the youngest were at home. The little one was named Susan, but they called her Tottams. The other two were on a visit to their aunt, the late Sir Edmund Bevere’s sister.

Dinner was waiting when we got in, and I could not snatch half a word with Roger while making ready for it. He and I had two little rooms opening to each other. But when we went upstairs for the night we could talk at will; and I put my candle down on his chest of drawers.

“How are things going with you, Roger?”

“Don’t talk of it,” he cried, with quite a burst of emotion. “Things cannot be worse than they are.”

“I fancy you have not pulled up much, as Pitt used to call it, have you, old friend? Your hands and your face tell tales.”

“How can I pull up?” he retorted.

“You promised that you would.”

“Ay. Promised! When all the world’s against a fellow, he may not be able to keep his promises. Perhaps may not care to.”

“How is Lizzie?” I said then, dropping my voice.

“Don’t talk of her,” repeated Bevere, in a tone of despair; despair if I ever heard it. It shut me up.

“Johnny, I’m nearly done over; sick of it all,” he went on. “You don’t know what I have to bear.”

“Still—as regards yourself, you might pull up,” I persisted, for to give in to him, and his mood and his ways, would never do. “You might if you chose, Bevere.”

“I suppose I might, if I had any hope. But there’s none; none. People tell us that as we make our bed so we must lie upon it. I made mine in an awful fashion years ago, and I must pay the penalty.”

“I gather from this—forgive me, Bevere—that you and your wife don’t get along together.”

“Get along! Things with her are worse than you may think for. She—she—well, she has not done her best to turn out well. Heaven knows I’d have tried my best; the thing was done, and nothing else was left for us: but she has not let me. We are something like cat-and-dog now, and I am not living with her.”

“No!”

“That is, I inhabit other lodgings. She is at the old place. I am with a medical man in Bloomsbury, you know. It was necessary for me to be near him, and six months ago I went. Lizzie acquiesced in that; the matter was obvious. I sometimes go to see her; staying, perhaps, from Saturday to Monday, and come away cursing myself.”

“Don’t. Don’t, Bevere.”

“She has taken to drink,” he whispered, biting his agitated lips. “For pretty near two years now she has not been a day sober. As Heaven hears me, I believe not one day. You may judge what I’ve had to bear.”

“Could nothing be done?”

“I tried to do it, Johnny. I coaxed, persuaded, threatened her by turns, but she would not leave it off. For four months in the autumn of last year, I did not let a drop of anything come into the house; drinking water myself all the while—for her sake. It was of no use: she’d go out and get it: every public-house in the place knows her. I’d come home from the hospital in the evening and find her raving and rushing about the rooms like a mad woman, or else lying incapable on the bed. Believe me, I tried all I could to keep her straight; and Mrs. Dyke, a good, motherly woman, you remember, did her best to help me; but she was too much for both of us, the demon of drink had laid too fast hold of her.”

“Does she come bothering you at your new lodgings?”

“She doesn’t know where to come,” replied Bevere; “I should not dare to tell her. She thinks I am in the doctor’s house, and she does not know where that is. I have told her, and her Aunt Dyke has told her, that if ever she attempts to come after me there, I shall stop her allowance. Scott—you remember Richard Scott!”

“Of course.”

“Well, Scott lives now near the Bell-and-Clapper: he is with a surgeon there. Scott goes to see her for me once a-week, or so, and brings me news of her. I declare to you, Johnny Ludlow, that when I first catch sight of his face I turn to a cold shiver, dreading what he may have to say. And you talk about pulling up! With such a wife as that, one is thankful to drown care once in a way.”

“I—I suppose, Roger, nothing about her has ever come out here?”

He started up, his face on fire. “Johnny, lad, if it came out here—to my mother—to all of them—I should die. Say no more. The case is hopeless, and I am hopeless with it.”

Any way, it seemed hopeless to talk further then, and I took up my candle. “Just one more word, Roger: Does Lizzie know you have come down here? She might follow you.”

His face took a look of terror. The bare idea scared him. “I say, don’t you invent impossible horrors,” gasped he. “She couldn’t come; she has never heard of the place in connection with me. She has never heard anything about my people, or where they live, or don’t live, or whether I have any. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Roger.”

III.

People say you can never sleep well in a strange bed. I know I did not sleep well, but very badly, that first night at Lady Bevere’s. It was not the fault of the bed, or of its strangeness; it was Roger’s trouble haunting me.

He did not seem to have slept well either, to judge by his looks when I went into his room in the morning. His fair, pleasant face was pale; his lips trembled, the blue eyes had torment in their depths.

“I have had a bad dream,” he said, in answer to a remark I made. “An awful dream. It came to me in my last sleep this morning; and morning dreams, they say, come true. I’m afraid I have you to thank for it, Johnny.”

“Me!”

“You suggested last night, startling me well-nigh out of my senses by it, that Lizzie might follow me down here. Well, I dreamt she did so. I saw her in the dining-room, haranguing my mother, her red-gold hair streaming over her shoulders and her arms stretched wildly out. Uncle John stood in a corner of the room, looking on.”

I felt sorry, and told him so: of course my speaking had prompted the dream. He need not fear. If Lizzie did not know he had come down here, or that his family lived here, or anything about them, she could not follow him.

“You see shadows where no shadows are, Roger.”

“When a man spoils his life on its threshold, it is all shadow; past, present, and future.”

“Things may mend, you know.”

“Mend!” he returned: “how can they mend? They may grow worse; never mend. My existence is one long torment. Day by day I live in dread of what may come: of her bringing down upon herself some public disgrace and my name with it. No living being, man or woman, can imagine what it is to me; the remorse for my folly, the mortification, the shame. I believe honestly that but for a few things instilled into me at my mother’s knee in childhood, I should have put an end to myself.”

“It is a long lane that has no turning.”

“Lanes have different outlets: bad as well as good.”

“I think breakfast must be ready, Roger.”

“And I started with prospects so fair!” he went on. “Never a thought or wish in my heart but to fulfil honestly the duties that lay in my way to the best of my power, to God and to man. And I should have done it, but for —— Johnny Ludlow,” he broke off, with a deep breath of emotion, “when I see other young fellows travelling along the same wrong road, once earnest, well-meaning lads as I was, not turning aside of their own wilful, deliberate folly, but ensnared to it by the evil works and ways they encounter in that teeming city, my soul is wrung with pity for them. I sometimes wonder whether God will punish them for what they can hardly avoid; or whether He will not rather let His anger fall on those who throw temptations in their way.”

Poor Roger, poor Roger! Mr. Brandon used to talk of the skeleton in his closet: he little suspected how terrible was the skeleton in Roger’s.

Lady Bevere kept four servants: for she was no better off, except for a little income that belonged to herself, than is many another admiral’s widow. An upper maid, Harriet, who helped to wait, and did sewing: a housemaid and a cook; and an elderly man, Jacob, who had lived with them in the time of Sir Edmund.

During the afternoon of this day, Saturday, Roger and I set off to walk to Brighton with the two girls. Not by the high-road, but by a near way (supposed to cut off half the distance) across a huge, dreary, flat marsh, of which you could see neither the beginning nor the end. In starting, we had reached the gate at the foot of the garden, when Harriet came running down the path. She was a tall, thin, civil young woman, with something in her voice or in her manner of speaking that seemed to my ear familiar, though I knew not how or why.

“Miss Mary,” she said, “my lady asks have you taken umbrellas, if you please. She thinks it will snow when the sun goes down.”

“Yes, yes; tell mamma we have them,” replied Mary: and Harriet ran back.

“How was it the mother came to so lonely a spot as this?” questioned Roger, as we went along, the little one, Tottams, jumping around me. “You girls must find it lively?”

Mary laughed as she answered. “We do find it lively, Roger, and we often ask her why she came. But when mamma and George looked at the place, it was a bright, hot summer’s day. They liked it then: it has plenty of rooms in it, you see, though they are old-fashioned; and the rent was so very reasonable. Be quiet, Tottams.”

“So reasonable that I should have concluded the place had a ghost in it,” said Roger.

“George’s curacy was at Brighton in those days, you know, Roger: that is why we came to the neighbourhood.”

“And George had left for a better curacy before you had well settled down here! Miss Tottams, if you pull at Johnny Ludlow like that, I shall send you back by yourself.”

“True. But we like the place very well now we are used to it, and we know a few nice people. One family—the Archers—we like very much. Six daughters, Roger; one of them, Bessy, would make you a charming wife. You will have to marry, you know, when you set up in practice. They are coming to us next Wednesday evening.”

My eye caught Roger’s. I did not intend it. Caught the bitter expression in it as he turned away.

Brighton reached, we went on the pier. Then, while they did some commissions for Lady Bevere at various shops, I went to the post-office, to register two letters for Mr. Brandon. Tottams wanted to keep with me, but they took her, saying she’d be too troublesome. The letters registered, I came out of the office, and was turning away, when some one touched me on the arm.

“Mr. Ludlow, I think! How are you?”

To my surprise it was Richard Scott. He seemed equally surprised to see me. I told him I had come down with Roger Bevere to spend Christmas week at Prior’s Glebe.

“Lucky fellow!” exclaimed Scott, “I have to go back to London and drudgery this evening: came down with my governor last night for an operation to-day. Glad to say it’s all well over.”

But a thought had flashed into my mind: I ought not to have said so much. Drawing Scott out of the passing crowd, I spoke.

“Look here, Scott: you must be cautious not to say that Bevere’s down here. You must not speak of it.”

“Speak where?” asked Scott, turning his head towards me. He had put his arm within mine as we walked along. “Where?”

“Oh—well—up with you, you know—in Bevere’s old quarters. Or—or in the railway-room at the Bell-and-Clapper.”

Scott laughed. “I understand. Madam Lizzie might be coming after him to his mother’s. But—why, what an odd thing!”

Some thought seemed to have struck him suddenly. He paused in his walk as well as in his speech.

“I dare say it was nothing,” he added, going on again. “Be at ease as to Bevere, Ludlow. I should as soon think of applying to him a lighted firebrand.”

“But what is it you call odd?” I asked, feeling sure that, whatever it might be, it was connected with Bevere.

“Why, this,” said Scott. “Last night, when we got here, I left my umbrella in the carriage, having a lot of other things to see to of my own and the governor’s. I went back as soon as I found it out, but could hear nothing of it. Just now I went up again and got it”—slightly showing the green silk one he held in his hand. “A train from London came in while I stood there, bringing a heap of passengers. One of them looked like Lizzie.”

I could not speak from consternation.

“Having nothing to do while waiting for my umbrella to be brought, I was watching the crowd flock out of the station,” continued Scott. “Amidst it I saw a head of red-gold hair, just like Lizzie’s. I could not see more of her than that; some other young woman’s head was close to hers.”

“But do you think it was Lizzie?”

“No, I do not. So little did I think it that it went clean out of my mind until you spoke. It must have been some accidental resemblance; nothing more; red-gold hair is not so very uncommon. There’s nothing to bring her down to Brighton.”

“Unless she knows that he is here.”

“That’s impossible.”

“What a wretched business it is altogether!”

“You might well say that if you knew all,” returned Scott. “She drinks like a fish. Like a fish, I assure you. Twice over she has had a shaking-fit of three days’ duration—I suppose you take me, Ludlow—had to be watched in her bed; the last time was not more than a week ago. She’ll do for herself, if she goes on. It’s an awful clog on Bevere. The marriage in itself was a piece of miserable folly, but if she had been a different sort of woman and kept herself steady and cared for him——”

“The problem to me is, how Bevere could have been led away by such a woman.”

“Ah, but you must not judge of that by what she is now. She was a very attractive girl, and kept her manners within bounds. Just the kind of girl that many a silly young ape would lose his head for; and Bevere, I take it, lost his heart as well as his head.”

“Did you know of the marriage at the time?”

“Not until after it had taken place.”

“They could never have pulled well together as man and wife; two people so opposite as they are.”

“No, I fancy not,” answered Richard Scott, looking straight out before him, but as though he saw nothing. “She has not tried at it. Once his wife, safe and sure, she thought she had it all her own way—as of course in one sense she had, and could give the reins to her inclination. Nothing that Bevere wanted her to do, would she do. He wished her to give up all acquaintance with the two girls at the Bell-and-Clapper; but not she. He——”

“Is Miss Panken flourishing?”

“Quite,” laughed Scott, “The other one came to grief—Mabel Falkner.”

“Did she! I thought she seemed rather nice.”

“She was a very nice little girl indeed, as modest as Polly Panken is impudent. The one could take care of herself; the other couldn’t—or didn’t. Well, Mabel fell into trouble, and of course lost her post. Madam Lizzie immediately gave her house-room, setting Bevere, who forbade it, at defiance. What with grief and other disasters, the girl fell sick there; had an illness, and had to be kept I don’t know how long. It put Bevere out uncommonly.”

“Is this lately?”

“Oh no; last year. Lizzie—— By the way,” broke off Scott, stopping again and searching his pocket, “I’ve got a note from her for Bevere. You can give it him.”

The words nearly seared away my senses. A note from Lizzie to Bevere! “Why, then, she must know he is here!” I cried.

“You don’t understand,” quietly said Scott, giving me a note from his pocket-book. “A day or two ago, I met Lizzie near the Bell-and-Clapper. She——”

“She is well enough to be out, then!”

“Yes. At times she is as well as you are. Well, I met her, and she began to give me a message for her husband, which I could not then wait to hear. So she sent this note to me later, to be delivered to him when we next met. I had not time to go to him yesterday, and here the note is still.”

It was addressed “Mr. Bevary.” I pointed out the name to Scott.

“Does she not know better, think you?”

“Very likely not,” he answered. “A wrong letter, more or less, in a name, signifies but little to one of Lizzie’s standard of education. It is not often, I expect, she sees the name on paper, or has to write it. Fare you well, Ludlow. Remember me to Bevere.”

Scott had hardly disappeared when they met me. I said nothing of having seen him. After treating Tottams to some tarts and a box of bonbons, we set off home again; the winter afternoon was closing, and it was nearly dark when we arrived. Getting Roger into his room, I handed him the note, and told him how I came by it. He showed me the contents.

“Dear Roger,

“When you where last at home, you said you should not be able to spend Christmas with me, so I am thinking of trying a little jaunt for myself. I am well now and mean to keep so, and a few days in the country air may help me and set me up prime. I inscribe this to let you know, and also to tell you that I shall pay my journey with the quarter’s rent you left, so you must send or bring the sum again. Aunt Dyke has got the rumaticks fine, she can’t come bothering me with her lectures quite as persistent as usual. Wishing you the compliments of the season, I remain,

“Your affectionate wife,
“Lizzie.”