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Her head was bent, and it was some moments before she answered him.

“You are very good and generous, Mr. Audley,” she said, at last, “and I feel this offer too much to be able to thank you for it. But what you speak of could never be. By what right could I accept such a sacrifice?”

“By the right which makes me your bounden slave forever and ever, whether you will or no. By right of the love I bear you, Clara,” cried Mr. Audley, dropping on his knees—rather awkwardly, it must be confessed—and covering a soft little hand, that he had found half hidden among the folds of a silken dress, with passionate kisses.

“I love you, Clara,” he said, “I love you. You may call for your father, and have me turned out of the house this moment, if you like; but I shall go on loving you all the same; and I shall love you forever and ever, whether you will or no.”

The little hand was drawn away from his, but not with a sudden or angry gesture, and it rested for one moment lightly and tremulously upon his dark hair.

“Clara, Clara!” he murmured, in a low, pleading voice, “shall I go to Australia to look for your brother?”

There was no answer. I don’t know how it is, but there is scarcely anything more delicious than silence in such cases. Every moment of hesitation is a tacit avowal; every pause is a tender confession.

“Shall we both go, dearest? Shall we go as man and wife? Shall we go together, my dear love, and bring our brother back between us?”

Mr. Harcourt Talboys, coming into the lamplit room a quarter of an hour afterward, found Robert Audley alone, and had to listen to a revelation which very much surprised him. Like all self-sufficient people, he was tolerably blind to everything that happened under his nose, and he had fully believed that his own society, and the Spartan regularity of his household, had been the attractions which had made Dorsetshire delightful to his guest.

He was rather disappointed, therefore; but he bore his disappointment pretty well, and expressed a placid and rather stoical satisfaction at the turn which affairs had taken.

So Robert Audley went back to London, to surrender his chambers in Figtree Court, and to make all due inquiries about such ships as sailed from Liverpool for Sydney in the month of June.

He had lingered until after luncheon at Grange Heath, and it was in the dusky twilight that he entered the shady Temple courts and found his way to his chambers. He found Mrs. Maloney scrubbing the stairs, as was her wont upon a Saturday evening, and he had to make his way upward amidst an atmosphere of soapy steam, that made the balusters greasy under his touch.

“There’s lots of letters, yer honor,” the laundress said, as she rose from her knees and flattened herself against the wall to enable Robert to pass her, “and there’s some parcels, and there’s a gentleman which has called ever so many times, and is waitin’ to-night, for I towld him you’d written to me to say your rooms were to be aired.”

He opened the door of his sitting-room, and walked in. The canaries were singing their farewell to the setting sun, and the faint, yellow light was flickering upon the geranium leaves. The visitor, whoever he was, sat with his back to the window and his head bent upon his breast. But he started up as Robert Audley entered the room, and the young man uttered a great cry of delight and surprise, and opened his arms to his lost friend, George Talboys.

We know how much Robert had to tell. He touched lightly and tenderly upon that subject which he knew was cruelly painful to his friends; he said very little of the wretched woman who was wearing out the remnant of her wicked life in the quiet suburb of the forgotten Belgian city.

George Talboys spoke very briefly of that sunny seventh of September, upon which he had left his friend sleeping by the trout stream while he went to accuse his false wife of that conspiracy which had well nigh broken his heart.