“Oh! my boy! my boy!” cried Lady Holmhurst, for it was she, “I thought you were dead—­long ago dead!”

And then she turned, and, before all the people there, clung about Augusta’s neck and kissed her and blessed her, because she had saved her only child, and half removed the deadweight of her desolation.  Whereat the crowd cheered, and wept, and yelled, and swore with excitement, and blessed their stars that they were there to see.

And then, in a haze of noise and excitement, they were led through the cheering mob to where a carriage and pair were standing, and were helped into it, Mrs. Thomas being placed on the front seat, and Lady Holmhurst and Augusta on the back, the former with the gasping Dick upon her knee.

And now little Dick is out of the story.

Then another event occurred, which we must go back a little to explain.

When Eustace Meeson had come to town, after being formally disinherited, he had managed to get a billet as Latin, French, and Old English reader in a publishing house of repute.  As it happened, on this very afternoon he was strolling down the Strand, having finished a rather stiff day’s work, and with a mind filled with those idle and somewhat confused odds and ends of speculation with which most brain workers will be acquainted.  He looked older and paler than when we last met him, for sorrow and misfortune had laid their heavy hands upon him.  When Augusta had departed, he had discovered that he was head over heels in love with her in that unfortunate way—­for ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is unfortunate—­in which many men of susceptibility do occasionally fall in love in their youth—­a way that brands the heart for life in a fashion that can no more be effaced than the stamp of a hot iron can be effaced from the physical body.  Such an affection—­which is not altogether of the earth—­will, when it overcomes a man, prove either the greatest blessing of his life or one of the heaviest, most enduring curses that a malignant fate can heap upon his head.  For if he achieves his desire, even though he serve his seven years, surely for him life will be robbed of half its evil.  But if he lose her, either through misfortune or because he gave all this to one who did not understand the gift, or one who looked at love and on herself as a currency wherewith to buy her place and the luxury of days, then he will be of all men among the most miserable.  For nothing can give him back that which has gone from him.

Eustace had never seen Augusta but twice in his life; but then passion does not necessarily depend upon constant previous intercourse with its object.  Love at first sight is common enough, and in this instance Eustace was not altogether dependent upon the spoken words of his adored, or on his recollection of her very palpable beauty.  For he had her books.  To those who know something of the writer—­sufficient, let us say, to enable him to put an approximate value