“He must have gone and married.  The wretch!” broke in Rosamond.

“No, oh no!” cried Anne.  “Only hear the rest.  ’I told him that I could not see that at all, and that there was a very warm and tender remembrance of him among us all, and he nearly broke down and said, ’For Heaven’s sake then, Miles, let them rest in that!  There’s more peace for them so.’  I suppose I looked—­I am sure I did not speak—­ as though I were a little staggered as to whether he were ashamed to be known; for he drew himself up in the old way I should have known anywhere, and told me there was no reason I should fear to shake hands with him; however his name might be blasted at home, he had done nothing to make himself unworthy of his mother and Jenny—­and there was a sob again.  So I let him know that up to my last letters from home Jenny was unmarried.  I even remembered those descriptive words of yours, Nannie, ’living in patient peacefulness and cheerfulness on his memory.’”

“I was called on deck just then, so I gave him my home photograph-book, and left him with it.  I found him crying like a child over it when I came back; I was obliged to strip it of all my best for him, for I could not move him.  We went through the whole of the old story, to see if there were any hope; and when he found that Tom Vivian was dead, and George Proudfoot too, without a word about him, he seemed to think it hopeless.  He believes that Proudfoot at least, if not Moy, was deeply in debt to Vivian, though not to that extent, and that Vivian probably incited them to ‘borrow’ from my mother’s letter.  He was very likely to undertake to get the draft cashed for them, and not to account for the difference.  It may have helped to hasten his catastrophe.  Moy I never should have suspected; Archie says he should once have done so as little; but he was a plausible fellow, and would do things on the sly, while all along appearing to old Proudfoot as a mentor to George.  Archie seemed to feel his prosperity the bitterest pill of all—­reigning like one of the squirearchy at Proudfoot Lawn—­a magistrate forsooth, with his daughter figuring as an heiress.  One thing worth note—­Archie says, that when it was too late, he remembered that the under-clerk, Gadley, might not have gone home, and might have heard him explain that the letter had turned up.’”

“Gadley?  Why that’s the landlord of the ‘Three Pigeons!’” exclaimed Rosamond.  “It is Mr. Moy’s house, and he supports him through thick and thin.”

“Yes,” said Julius, “the magistrates have been on the point of taking away his license, but Moy always stands up for him.  There is something suspicious in that.”

“I heard Miss Moy, with my own ears, tell Mrs. Duncombe that he was the apple of her father’s eye,” cried Rosamond.

“He’s bribed! he’s bribed!  Oh, I see it all.  Well, go on, Anne.  If Archie isn’t at home before he is a year older—­”