"Have you heard from your father?"

She began to turn pale again, but
controlled herself bravely, and answered in a
whisper:

"Mrs. Baggs had a short note from him
this morning. It was not dated; and it only
said circumstances had happened which
obliged him to leave home suddenly, and
that we were to wait here till he wrote again,
most likely in a few days."

"Now, Laura," I said, as lightly and
jestingly as I could, "I have the highest
possible opinion of your courage, good-sense,
and self-control; and I shall expect you to
keep up your good reputation in my eyes,
while you are listening to what I have now to
tell you."

Saying these words, I took her by the
hand, and made her sit close by me; then,
breaking it to her as gently and gradually as
possible, I told her all that had happened at
the red-brick house since the evening when
she left the dinner-table, and we exchanged
our parting look at the dining-room door.

It was almost as great a trial to me to
speak as it was to her to hear. She suffered
so violently, felt such evident misery of shame
and terror, while I was relating the strange
events which had occurred in her absence,
that I once or twice stopped in alarm, and
almost repented my boldness in telling her
the truth. However, fair-dealing with her,
cruel as it might seem at the time, was the
best and safest course for the future. How
could I expect her to put all her trust in me,
if I began by deceiving her—if I fell into
prevarications and excuses at the very outset
of our renewal of intercourse? I went on
desperately to the end, taking a hopeful view
of the most hopeless circumstances, and
making my narrative as mercifully short as
possible. When I had done, the poor girl, in
the extremity of her forlornness and distress,
forgot all the little maidenly conventionalities
and young-lady-like restraints of
every day life, and, in a burst of natural grief
and honest, confiding helplessness, hid her
face on my bosom, and cried there as if she
were a child again, and I was the mother to
whom she had been used to look for comfort.

I made no attempt to stop her tears—they
were the safest and best vent for the violent
agitation under which she was suffering. I
said nothing; words, at such a time as that,
would only have aggravated her distress. All
the questions I had to ask; all the proposals
I had to make, must, I felt, be put off—no
matter at what risk—until some later and
calmer hour. There we sat together, with
one long unsnuffed candle lighting us
smokily; with the discordantly-grotesque
sound of the housekeeper's snoring in the
front room, mingling profanely with the
sobs of the weeping girl on my bosom. No
other noise, great or small, inside the house
or out of it, was audible. The summer night
looked black and cloudy through the little
back window. I was not much easier in my
mind, now that the trial of breaking my bad
news to Laura was over. That stranger who
had called at the house an hour before me,
weighed on my spirits. It could not have
been Doctor Knapton. He would have gained
admission. Could it be the Bow Street
runner, or Screw? I had lost sight of them,
it was true; but had they lost sight of me?

Laura's grief gradually exhausted itself.
She feebly raised her head, and, turning it
away from me, hid her face. I saw that she
was not fit for talking yet, and begged her to
go up-stairs to the drawing-room and lie
down a little. She looked apprehensively
towards the folding-doors that shut us off
from the front parlour.

"Leave Mrs. Baggs to me," I said. "I
want to have a few words with her; and, as
soon as you are gone, I'll make noise enough
here to wake her."

Laura looked at me inquiringly and
amazedly. I did not speak again; but gently
led her to the door.

As soon as I was alone, I took from my
pocket one of the handbills which my
excitable fellow-traveller had presented to me,
so as to have it ready for Mrs. Baggs the
moment we stood face to face. Armed with
this ominous letter of introduction, I kicked
a chair down against the folding-doors, by
way of giving a preliminary knock to arouse
the housekeeper's attention. The plan was
immediately successful. Mrs. Baggs opened
the doors of communication violently—a
slight smell of spirits entered the room, and
was followed close by the housekeeper
herself, with an indignant face and a disordered
head-dress.

"What do you mean, sir? How dare
you—" she began; then stopped aghast,
looking at me in speechless astonishment.

"I have been obliged to make a slight
alteration in my personal appearance, ma'am,"
said I. "But I am still Frank Softly."

"Don't talk to me about personal appearances,
sir," cried Mrs. Baggs, recovering.
"What do you mean by being here? Leave
the house immediately. I shall write to the
Doctor, Mr. Softly, this very night."

"He has no address you can direct to," I
rejoined. "If you don't believe me, read
that." I gave her the handbill without
another word of preface.

Mrs. Baggs looked at it—lost in an instant
all the fine colour plentifully diffused over
her face by sleep and spirits—sat down
in the nearest chair with a thump that
seemed to threaten the very foundations of
Number two, Zion Place, and stared me
hard in the face; the most speechless and
helpless elderly female I ever beheld.

"Take plenty of time to compose yourself,
ma'am," said I. "If you don't see the Doctor
again soon under the gallows, you will
probably not have the pleasure of meeting with
him for some considerable time."