her, he would disclose himself to her.  The statement he had just heard affected him deeply, but in opposite ways.  The justification of himself in no way moved him—­he did not need that; it was also far too late for his heart to be touched by the expression of the old detective’s good-will, though the time had been when he would have thanked him for its utterance with honest tears; but the revelation of his mother’s toil and suffering in his behalf reawakened all his dormant love for her, while it made his purpose firmer than ever to be the Nemesis of her enemies and his own.

As he went to bed that night the clock struck twelve.  It was just four-and-twenty hours since he had left his victim in the bowels of Wheal Danes.  If a free pardon could have been offered to him for the crime, and the mine been filled with gold for him to its mouth, he would not have stretched out his hand to save him.

CHAPTER XLIV.

STILL HUMAN.

Mr. Balfour atoned for his previous indifference to the wares of the news-boy by sending him next morning to the station for all the local papers.  In each, as he expected, there was a paragraph headed Mysterious Disappearance, and as lengthened an account as professional ingenuity could devise of the unaccountable departure of Mr. Solomon Coe from his house at Gethin.  The missing man was “much respected;” and, “as the prosperous owner of the Dunloppel mine, which had yielded so largely for so many years, he could certainly not have been pressed by pecuniary embarrassments, and therefore the idea of suicide was out of the question.”  Unlikely as it seemed in the case of one who knew the country so well, the most probable explanation of the affair was that the unfortunate gentleman, in taking a walk by night along the cliff top, must have slipped into the sea.  The weather had been very rough of late and the wind blowing from off the land, which would have accounted—­if this supposition was correct—­for the body not having been washed ashore.  “In the mean time an active search was going on.”

Balfour had resolved not to return to London for at least ten days.  Mrs. Coe and her son would, without doubt, be telegraphed for, and he could not repair to their house in their absence.  The idea of being under the same roof alone with his mother was now repugnant to him.  He felt that he could not trust himself in such a position.  It had been hard and grievous, notwithstanding his resentment against her, to see her in company with others, and her absence of late from table had been a great relief to him.  With his present feeling toward her it would be impossible to maintain his incognito; and, if that was lost, his future plans—­to which he well knew she would oppose herself—­would be rendered futile.  He had seen with rage and bitter jealousy that both Harry and her boy, and especially the latter, were dear to her; and it was certain she would interfere