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“Why do I go on with this?” he thought; “how pitiless I am, and how relentlessly I am carried on. It is not myself; it is the hand which is beckoning me further and further upon the dark road, whose end I dare not dream of.”

He thought this, and a hundred times more than this, while the old man sat with his face still hidden, wrestling with his anguish, but without power to keep it down.

“Mr. Maldon,” Robert Audley said, after a pause, “I do not ask you to forgive me for what I have brought upon you, for the feeling is strong within me that it must have come to you sooner or later—if not through me, through some one else. There are—” he stopped for a moment hesitating. The sobbing did not cease; it was sometimes low, sometimes loud, bursting out with fresh violence, or dying away for an instant, but never ceasing. “There are some things which, as people say, cannot be hidden. I think there is truth in that common saying which had its origin in that old worldly wisdom which people gathered from experience and not from books. If—if I were content to let my friend rest in his hidden grave, it is but likely that some stranger who had never heard the name of George Talboys, might fall by the remotest accident upon the secret of his death. To-morrow, perhaps; or ten years hence, or in another generation, when the—the hand that wronged him is as cold as his own. If I could let the matter rest; if—if I could leave England forever, and purposely fly from the possibility of ever coming across another clew to the secret, I would do it—I would gladly, thankfully do it—but I cannot! A hand which is stronger than my own beckons me on. I wish to take no base advantage of you, less than of all other people; but I must go on; I must go on. If there is any warning you would give to any one, give it. If the secret toward which I am traveling day by day, hour by hour, involves any one in whom you have an interest, let that person fly before I come to the end. Let them leave this country; let them leave all who know them—all whose peace their wickedness has endangered; let them go away—they shall not be pursued. But if they slight your warning—if they try to hold their present position in defiance of what it will be in your power to tell them—let them beware of me, for, when the hour comes, I swear that I will not spare them.”

The old man looked up for the first time, and wiped his wrinkled face upon a ragged silk handkerchief.

“I declare to you that I do not understand you,” he said. “I solemnly declare to you that I cannot understand; and I do not believe that George Talboys is dead.”

“I would give ten years of my own life if I could see him alive,” answered Robert, sadly. “I am sorry for you, Mr. Malden—I am sorry for all of us.”

“I do not believe that my son-in-law is dead,” said the lieutenant; “I do not believe that the poor lad is dead.”

He endeavored in a feeble manner to show to Robert Audley that his wild outburst of anguish had been caused by his grief for the loss of George; but the pretense was miserably shallow.

Mrs. Plowson re-entered the room, leading little Georgey, whose face shone with that brilliant polish which yellow soap and friction can produce upon the human countenance.

“Dear heart alive!” exclaimed Mrs. Plowson, “what has the poor old gentleman been taking on about? We could hear him in the passage, sobbin’ awful.”

Little George crept up to his grandfather, and smoothed the wet and wrinkled face with his pudgy hand.

“Don’t cry, gran’pa,” he said, “don’t cry. You shall have my watch to be cleaned, and the kind jeweler shall lend you the money to pay the taxman while he cleans the watch—I don’t mind, gran’pa. Let’s go to the jeweler, the jeweler in High street, you know, with golden balls painted upon his door, to show that he comes from Lombar—Lombardshire,” said the boy, making a dash at the name. “Come, gran’pa.”