And there Mrs. Harvey stopped short, turned pale, and burst into such an agony of tears, that Grace, terrified, threw her arms round her neck, and entreated forgiveness, all the more intensely on account of those thoughts within which she dared not reveal.  So the storm passed over.  But not Grace’s sadness.  For she could not but see, with her clear pure spiritual eye, that her mother was just in that state in which some fearful and shameful fall is possible, perhaps wholesome.  “She would sell her soul for me?  What if she have sold it, and stopped short just now, because she had not the heart to tell me that love for me had been the cause?  Oh! if she have sinned for my sake!  Wretch that I am!  Miserable myself, and bringing misery with me!  Why was I ever born?  Why cannot I die—­and the world be rid of me?”

No, she would not believe it.  It was a wicked, horrible, temptation of the devil.  She would rather believe that she herself had been the thief, tempted during her unconsciousness; that she had hidden it somewhere; that she should recollect, confess, restore all some day.  She would carry it to him herself, grovel at his feet, and entreat forgiveness.  “He will surely forgive, when he finds that I was not myself when—­that it was not altogether my fault—­not as if I had been waking—­yes, he will forgive!” And then on that thought followed a dream of what might follow, so wild that a moment after she had hid her blushes in her hands, and fled to books to escape from thoughts.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FIRST INSTALMENT OF AN OLD DEBT.

We must now return to Elsley, who had walked home in a state of mind truly pitiable.  He had been flattering his soul with the hope that Thurnall did not know him; that his beard, and the change which years had made, formed a sufficient disguise:  but he could not conceal from himself that the very same alterations had not prevented his recognising Thurnall; and he had been living for two months past in continual fear that that would come which now had come.

His rage and terror knew no bounds.  Fancying Thurnall a merely mean and self-interested worldling, untouched by those higher aspirations which stood to him in place of a religion, he imagined him making every possible use of his power; and longed to escape to the uttermost ends of the earth from his old tormentor, whom the very sea would not put out of the way, but must needs cast ashore at his very feet, to plague him afresh.

What a net he had spread around his own feet, by one act of foolish vanity!  He had taken his present name, merely as a nom de guerre, when first he came to London as a penniless and friendless scribbler.  It would hide him from the ridicule (and, as he fancied, spite) of Thurnall, whom he dreaded meeting every time he walked London streets, and who was for years, to his melancholic and too intense fancy, his bete