There couldn’t have been much to say.  There was nothing for it but to let him go—­was there?—­for the affair had got into the papers.  And perhaps the kindest thing would have been to forget him.  Anyway the easiest.  Forgiveness would have been more difficult, I fancy, for a young lady of spirit and position drawn into an ugly affair like that.  Any ordinary young lady, I mean.  Well, the fellow asked nothing better than to be forgotten, only he didn’t find it easy to do so himself, because he would write home now and then.  Not to any of his friends though.  He had no near relations.  The professor had been his guardian.  No, the poor devil wrote now and then to an old retired butler of his late father, somewhere in the country, forbidding him at the same time to let any one know of his whereabouts.  So that worthy old ass would go up and dodge about the Moorsom’s town house, perhaps waylay Miss Moorsom’s maid, and then would write to ‘Master Arthur’ that the young lady looked well and happy, or some such cheerful intelligence.  I dare say he wanted to be forgotten, but I shouldn’t think he was much cheered by the news.  What would you say?”

Renouard, his legs stretched out and his chin on his breast, said nothing.  A sensation which was not curiosity, but rather a vague nervous anxiety, distinctly unpleasant, like a mysterious symptom of some malady, prevented him from getting up and going away.

“Mixed feelings,” the Editor opined.  “Many fellows out here receive news from home with mixed feelings.  But what will his feelings be when he hears what I am going to tell you now?  For we know he has not heard yet.  Six months ago a city clerk, just a common drudge of finance, gets himself convicted of a common embezzlement or something of that kind.  Then seeing he’s in for a long sentence he thinks of making his conscience comfortable, and makes a clean breast of an old story of tampered with, or else suppressed, documents, a story which clears altogether the honesty of our ruined gentleman.  That embezzling fellow was in a position to know, having been employed by the firm before the smash.  There was no doubt about the character being cleared—­but where the cleared man was nobody could tell.  Another sensation in society.  And then Miss Moorsom says:  ’He will come back to claim me, and I’ll marry him.’  But he didn’t come back.  Between you and me I don’t think he was much wanted—­except by Miss Moorsom.  I imagine she’s used to have her own way.  She grew impatient, and declared that if she knew where the man was she would go to him.  But all that could be got out of the old butler was that the last envelope bore the postmark of our beautiful city; and that this was the only address of ‘Master Arthur’ that he ever had.  That and no more.  In fact the fellow was at his last gasp—­with a bad heart.  Miss Moorsom wasn’t allowed to see him.  She had gone herself into the country to learn what she could, but she had to stay downstairs while the