communicate with her.  He began to realize that he had been duped, and that all these specious promises as to a future consent to their union had been so many baits to amuse him while the valuable present was slipping away.  What could he do now to repair the past?  His only course was to wait for the morrow and see whether the senior partner would appear at the offices.  If he did so, the young man was determined that he should have an understanding with him.

So downcast was Tom that, on arriving at Phillimore Gardens, he would have slipped off to his room at once had he not met his burly father upon the stairs.  “Bed!” roared the old man upon hearing his son’s proposition.  “Nothing of the sort, sir.  Come down into the parlour and smoke a pipe with me.  Your mother has been waiting for you all the evening.”

“I am sorry to be late, mother,” the lad said, kissing the old lady.  “I have been down at the docks all day and have been busy and worried.”

Mrs. Dimsdale was sitting in her chair beside the fire, knitting, when her son came in.  At the sound of his voice she glanced anxiously up at his face, with all her motherly instincts on the alert.

“What is it, my boy?” she said.  “You don’t look yourself.  Something has gone wrong with you.  Surely you’re not keeping anything secret from your old mother?”

“Don’t be so foolish as that, my boy,” said the doctor earnestly.  “If you have anything on your mind, out with it.  There’s nothing so far wrong but that it can’t be set right, I’ll be bound.”

Thus pressed, their son told them all that had happened, the rumour which he had heard from Von Baumser at the Cock and Cowslip, and the subsequent visit to Eccleston Square.  “I can hardly realize it all yet,” he said in conclusion.  “My head seems to be in a whirl, and I can’t reason about it.”

The old couple listened very attentively to his narrative, and were silent some little time after he had finished.  His mother first broke the silence.  “I was always sure,” she said, “that we were wrong to stop our correspondence at the request of Mr. Girdlestone.”

“It’s easy enough to say that now,” said Tom ruefully.  “At the time it seemed as if we had no alternative.”

“There’s no use crying over spilt milk,” remarked the old physician, who had been very grave during his son’s narrative.  “We must set to work and get things right again.  There is one thing very certain, Tom, and that is that Kate Harston is a girl who never did or could do a dishonourable thing.  If she said that she would wait for you, my boy, you may feel perfectly safe; and if you doubt her for one moment you ought to be deuced well ashamed of yourself.”

“Well said, governor!” cried Tom, with beaming face.  “Now, that is exactly my own feeling, but there is so much to be explained.  Why have they left London, and where have they gone to?”

“No doubt that old scoundrel Girdlestone thought that your patience would soon come to an end, so he got the start of you by carrying the girl off into the country.”