“No, Tom, do not comfort me!  I ought to die, and I shall die.  I cannot face her again; let her forget me, and find a husband who will—­and be a father to the children whom I neglected!  Oh, my darlings, my darlings!  If I could but see you once again:  but no! you too would ask me where I had been so long.  You too would ask me—­your innocent faces at least would—­why I had killed your little brother!—­Let me weep it out, Thurnall; let me face it all!  This very misery is a comfort, for it will kill me all the sooner.”

“If you really mean to go to Whitbury, my poor dear fellow,” said Tom at last, “I will start with you to-morrow morning.  For I too must go; I must see my father.”

“You will really?” asked Elsley, who began to cling to him like a child.

“I will indeed.  Believe me, you are right; you will find friends there, and admirers too.  I know one.”

“You do?” asked he, looking up.

“Mary Armsworth, the banker’s daughter.”

“What!  That purse-proud, vulgar man?”

“Don’t be afraid of him.  A truer and more delicate heart don’t beat.  No one has more cause to say so than I. He will receive you with open arms, and need be told no more than is necessary; while, as his friend, you may defy gossip, and do just what you like.”

Tom slipped out that afternoon, paid Elsley’s pittance of rent at his old lodgings; bought him a few necessary articles, and lent him, without saying anything, a few more.  Elsley sat all day as one in a dream, moaning to himself at intervals, and following Tom vacantly with his eyes, as he moved about the room.  Excitement, misery, and opium were fast wearing out body and mind, and Tom put him to bed that evening, as he would have put a child.

Tom walked out into the Strand to smoke in the fresh air, and think, in spite of himself, of that fair saint from whom he was so perversely flying.  Gay girls slithered past him, looked round at him, but in vain; those two great sad eyes hung in his fancy, and he could see nothing else.  Ah—­if she had but given him back his money—­why, what a fool he would have made of himself!  Better as it was.  He was meant to be a vagabond and an adventurer to the last; and perhaps to find at last the luck which had flitted away before him.

He passed one of the theatre doors; there was a group outside, more noisy and more earnest than such groups are wont to be; and ere he could pass through them, a shout from within rattled the doors with its mighty pulse, and seemed to shake the very walls.  Another; and another!—­What was it?  Fire?

No.  It was the news of Alma.

And the group surged to and fro outside, and talked, and questioned, and rejoiced; and smart gents forgot their vulgar pleasures, and looked for a moment as if they too could have fought—­had fought—­at Alma; and sinful girls forgot their shame, and looked more beautiful than they had done for many a day, as, beneath the flaring gas-light, their faces glowed for a while with noble enthusiasm, and woman’s sacred pity, while they questioned Tom, taking him for an officer, as to whether he thought there were many killed.