He ran his fingers through his hair again, I had not occupied, and dashed at his cheques Di taking two hands this time, and becoming thereby much fiercer in aspect and then turned suddenly so pale that I thought he must be a. very delicate young man. papers with extraordinary interest, turning his back upon me and ignoring my presence altogether It was very strange and startling, and I was beansning to think that all might not be well-that a "Yes-he has left," said Mr. Westmair, slowly; not like this hard-lined face, which seemed ad"I'll tell you in a minute-you don't know any-vancing towards me like a fate, beyond my power thing, then?" "Not anything-save that he was fortunate in life when he wrote last to me." "When was that?" "Some months ago, he wrote to me at Pietermaritzburg. Oh, sir, he has not met with an accident-he is not dead? You would not keep me in this suspense if he were dead, I am sure!" "No, no- -he is not dead, I am sorry to say-I mean I am glad to say. Pray sit down-pray compose yourself—I will tell you everything in a minute." He had forgotten that he was occupying the only chair in the room, and that I was leaning for support against a wainscot partition, yearning for the news, the bad news, which I knew now was on its way towards me. What could have happened since my father's stroke of good luck to have so wholly changed the scene? Was he really mad when he wrote last, and was his fortune only a dream? "I-I hope that I have been patient, sir-but I -I am very anxious," I hinted at last. He looked round quickly, then rose, snatched up his hat, and walked sharply from the countinghouse, down the steps into the office, and into the street. Was he going to fetch my father, or what? I peered through the window above the wire-blind as he went striding along the shop. The streetdoor was opened before he had reached it, and a tall, swarthy man entered and regarded the cashier with amazement. "What's the matter?" "Nothing. That is, only Kirby's daughter from the Cape; she is in the counting-house." "Well-you have told her, I suppose?" to resist. The gentleman who entered the counting-house, and took the place of his eccentric cashier, was a man of thirty years of age, who might have told the world he was forty-five, without surprising it in the least. He was a tall stiff-backed man, with one of the saddest countenances I had ever seen, stern it was as well as sad, in many respects, but it was not so wholly inflexible as I had fancied from my first look at it. He was very dark, with black eyes that seemed cold and unsympathetic, and unlike black eyes in general, and his closeshaven cheeks and chin did not give him one day's younger aspect. If he had shorn himself of all hirsute decoration for that purpose, it had been a mistake in art, and had only given him a grim Don Quixote looking head that was not pleasant to confront. He entered slowly, and after regarding me attentively for an instant, bowed, and pushed the chair over more towards me. "You are Miss Kirby," he said. "Sit down, please; you had better sit down, I think." I sat down thus adjured. I was in no hurry for the news now. I knew that it would be bad enough, and there came over me the wish, strangely at variance with my late impatience, to delay the revelation which this man, in his cold hard tones, would give out to me, as the hammer of a bell might strike out its time of day. "My name is Westmair-Abel Westmair, of the firm of Westmair and Son. I am the son," he added, as if by some mischance I should take him for his father. I bowed, but I could not speak to him. I was not awed by the greatness of his position, but by the consciousness of the terrible nature of his forth "No, I haven't-I couldn't; upon my soul, I coming revelation. couldn't I must leave it to you." "But I'm hanged if I do all the dirty work in this place; it does not suit me; and I can't tell that girl, who came in just now, all life and hope, the truth about her father. Tell her yourself, Abe." The swarthy man seemed more astonished by the excitable behaviour of his cashier than by the news of my presence in his office. He went to the door and looked out in the fog after his refractory subordinate, then with slow, precise steps, he came towards me and my sinking heart. I wished that the other man had stopped to tell me all the truth, though he had taken longer time about it. I did "You are Miss Faith Kirby, I presume, to whom I wrote a few weeks since, suggesting that you should remain in Pietermaritzburg, and not come to London, as your father had previously desired," he continued. "It was his wish too, I believe, that you should stay; but I was following out my own ideas, certainly not his." "Is he dead, then? Oh, he is dead!" I cried very quickly now. "Pardon me, but he is not dead. He--how careless!" and Mr. Westmair, Junior, stooped under the table, picked up several cheques and papers, and looked over them as he continued, "He is not dead, but in trouble.” His black eyes were fixed upon me over the edge of the papers, and he was watching the effect with great attention. Was he breaking the news to me kindly or not? It was impossible to guess from his stolid countenance. "In trouble," I repeated mechanically Mr. Westmair restores the cheques to the ir place from which his cashier had swept them in his hurry to depart, leaned against the table, crossed his legs, clasped his thin hands together, and once more looked at me with fixed intentness, "In trouble by his own acts-and by his own weakness, and consequently there is no one to blame but himself for all the misery that he has brought about.” “I don't know; I—I think I do I suppose I fainted away 1" “Because—you told me that my father—hwiz i this gentle man better go now I am much of aged to him, but———— *You can go, Simpson," said Mr. Westmair Not that it matters,” he added, after Simpson had retired, “ for he knows the whole story, wi he could have told you much better than L I am "Poor father! is he very ill in very great not used to this kind of thing.” trouble 1′′ “I don't see that he deserves any pity from you -any more," he added, after a moment's patise, than he deserves it from me" "Go on, sir." Mr. Westmair, having as he thought sufficiently prepared me, or having grown tired of his circumlocutory process of information, or having attended so far as he considered necessary to the injunctions of the young man who had beaten an uncere monious retreat, delivered the rest of his communication at one shot. "Your father is in prison.” There was a sudden singing in my ears, an upheaving of the floor towards the ceiling, a merrygo-round of the iron safe, the counting house window, and Abel Westmair, and then the mist was very dense and thick about me, as if a grand rush of all the fog in Watling Street had streamed into the office, to hide me with my grief and shame from him who had told me all the news. I was quite certain that I had fainted and made a scene, some minutes afterwards. I hated scenes and to have given way like this, and before this man, was humiliating to reflect upon, when the strength for reflection returned to me. I had always fancied that I was inclined to be firm, but this weakness convinced me that I was only a silly girl, after all, unable to bear up against trouble. Should I ever bear up against real trouble again— such real, downright trouble as this was? "I shall be better in a minute," I said, though my lips trembled very much, and I am sure were as white as paper; "it's-it's the long journey. I have been some time on board ship, and-and the journey was a fatiguing one." He said it in an aggrieved tone of voice, as it he had been imposed upon very much that afternoon. He stooped, picked up his cheques, regarded their damp condition ruefully, and finally directed hus attention to myself again. *Will you not put your bonnet on 1” he saši, and I was conscious that that article of attire had been removed, and that my hair had become rough and tumbled. I made myself as tidy as possit ie, and as my agitation would allow, keeping my eyes upon him, feeling that I should flinch no more, and be uncomfortable never again beneath his microscopic stare. My father in prison!" I said: "in prison for what " *For robbing us.” "My father turn robber-oh, I don't believe that! My father was honour itself, with all his faults, and do you tell me-do you dare to tell me that he is a thief ?" "I would certainly refrain from exciting myself in this way," said Abel Westmair, coldly; “it unnerves you.' "Tell me all you know-or, rather, all that you believe against him." I dare say that I was unpleasantly peremptory in my tone, but I was so beset with the conviction that my father had been the victim of a cruel plot, that I did not study the feelings, if he had any, of my companion. Mr. Westmair complied with my request. I was seated in the chair again, and he was leaning against the table in his old position. He spoke clearly and precisely, but betrayed no emotion at the story, or any further concern for my feelings. He was one of the great Westmairs, and I was one of the Kirbys for two generations the Kirbys had "It's a considerable distance from the Cape to been the servants of these people. London," Mr. Westmair observed. He had been bending over me along with his book-keeper, whom he had evidently called to my assistance. The cheques were all over the floor again, and at some stage or other of my convalescence I had knocked a water-bottle and glass from his hand, the contents of which were all over the cheques. "Do you feel better now?" he inquired, after I had dreamily regarded him for a minute or two. "Your father was a clever book-keeper and an ingenious man at figures. When we made him cashier, and when a great deal of money passed through his hands, he turned his talents to a bad account, and robbed us systematically. We discovered it, and prosecuted him, as we should prosecute on principle any one guilty of a breach of trust in this establishment. He pleaded guilty and——” "He pleaded guilty!" I cried. "Yes-the facts were too clear for any attempt | at refutation—and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment." "Where is he now?" "In Holloway Prison." "God help him!—he was not guilty; I am sure he was not guilty, Mr. Westmair." Mr. Westmair's face shadowed more at my persistence. "That is a reflection on my word-on the honour of the house, Miss Kirby," he said slowly; "but you are suffering from natural excitement. What do you think of doing? You have some money, I suppose, and friends in London, and-and so on? Shall Simpson fetch a cab?" "No, sir-I can walk," said I, rising at this hint, "do not trouble yourself about me in any way. Of what sum were you robbed?” "Eight hundred pounds." "And when was my father tried for the robbery?" 66 The fifteenth of September." "I-I must get a newspaper, or something, and understand it for myself. I can't understand you," I added abruptly," and I do not want." "Just as Miss Kirby pleases," he said, more coldly still. "You never took his part, or thought that he might have been innocent; you believed every fact against an old servant at once. And yet his father before him had been in this firm." "There was a Kirby here before your father," said Abel Westmair, "but we were not called upon to regard the matter from a sentimental or a dramatic point of view. We were robbed, and we found out the thief, that is all. If he had been our dearest and nearest friend, it would have still been our duty to repay a base act of ingratitude with the law's justice and might. There was no malice in the matter, and so far as regards yourself, young lady, I, speaking for the firm, will add that we are sorry." He said it with some dignity, perhaps with as much kindness as it was in his nature to evince, but I saw in him only a hard master who had had no mercy on my father. I hated the man; I could have cursed him in my desolation, and for all the forced calmness which I had at last assumed I hated him; but I was too proud to show that he or his words had any power to move me, and as my reiteration of a belief in my father's innocence appeared to vex him slightly, I expressed again my firm conviction that my father had been wronged. He did not defend himself, or offer any further explanation; he regarded me with his old aggravating stolidity, and as I moved towards the door he opened it for me, standing thereat like a statue. I was going out in the world, not knowing which way to turn, wholly uncertain concerning my next step, more bewildered by the strangeness of my position than I could have been aware at the moment, when I remembered that an all-important question had not been asked yet. "And where's little Kate?" The question leaped from me with spasmodic force, and he elevated his eyebrows and stared at me harder than ever. "Where's who?" he said. "Little Kate, my sister?" "I didn't know that you had a sister. Really I have been quite in the dark as to your family connections." "And my father never spoke of her to you?" "Not a word-why should he?" "Great Heaven! that child is alone in the world then. And she is only seventeen. Where can she be?" I went out of the counting-house, pondering on this mystery, on the impossibility of my finding her in the dark City of London, wherein I was myself submerged. I went out of Westmair and Son's with a heart that I thought was broken. My own position was precarious, but I had not time to think of it. Where was the child I had loved so much, and to whom I had been more like a mother than a sister after the real mother had died? She had been a wild, excitable, pretty girl, wayward, vain, fragile; she had been my chief anxiety in going away; what was she now in my coming back again? There were troubles and cares on all sides of me, as I crept out of the office of the Westmairs into the fog, which had become very thick and black with the night. All seemed as impenetrable as my own life ahead, and there was no seeing a step before me. KING JOHN AND THE ABBOT. N ancient story Ile tell you anon And Ile tell you a story, a story so merrye, A of a notable prince, that was called King John; Concerning the Abbot of Canterburye, And he ruled England with maine and with might, How for his house-keeping, and high renowne, They rode poste for him to fair London towne. |