“God forbid!” said Hilary, solemnly.  And again she felt the strong conviction, that whatever his father had been, or his mother, of whom they had heard nothing till she was dead, Ascott could not have lived all these years of his childhood and early boyhood with his three aunts at Stowbury without gaining at least some good, which might counteract the hereditary evil; as such evil can be counteracted, even as hereditary disease can be gradually removed by wholesome and careful rearing in a new generation.

“Well, I’ll not say any more,” continued Peter Ascott:  “only the sooner the young fellow takes himself off the better.  He’ll only plague you all.  Now, can you send out for a cab for me?”

Hilary mechanically rang the bell, and gave the order.

“I’ll take you to town with me if you like.  It’ll save you the expense of the omnibus.  I suppose you always travel by omnibus?”

Hilary answered something, she hardly knew what, except that it was a declining of all these benevolent attentions.  At last she got Mr. Ascott outside the street door, and returning, put her hand to her head with a moan.

“Oh, Miss Hilary, don’t look like that.”

“Elizabeth, do you know what has happened?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t want you to know.  And you must never try to find it out; for it is a secret that ought to be kept strictly within the family.  Are you to be trusted?”

“Yes, Miss Hilary.”

“Now, get me my bonnet, and let us make haste and go home.”

They walked down the gas-lit Kensington High Street, Hilary taking her servant’s arm; for she felt strangely weak.  As she sat in the dark corner of the omnibus she tried to look things in the face, and form some definite plan; but the noisy rumble at once dulled and confused her faculties.  She felt capable of no consecutive thought, but found herself stupidly watching the two lines of faces, wondering, absently, what sort of people they were; what were their lives and histories; and whether they all had, like herself, their own personal burden of woe.  Which was, alas! the one fact that never need be doubted in this world.

It was nigh upon eleven o’clock when Hilary knocked at the door of
No. 15.

Miss Leaf opened it; but for the first time in her life she had no welcome for her child.

“Is it Ascott?  I thought it was Ascott,” she cried, peering eagerly up and down the street.

“He is gone out, then?  When did he go?” asked Hilary, feeling her heart turn stone-cold.

“Just after Selina came in.  She—­she vexed him.  But he can not be long?  Is not that man he?”

And just as she was, without shawl or bonnet, Johanna stepped out into the cold, damp night, and strained her eyes into the darkness; but in vain.

“I’ll walk round the Crescent once, and may be I shall find him.  Only go in, Johanna.”

And Hilary was away again into the dark, walking rapidly, less with the hope of finding Ascott than to get time to calm herself, so as to meet, and help her sisters to meet, this worst depth of their calamity.  For something warned her that this last desperation of a weak nature is more to be dreaded than any overt obstinacy of a strong one.  She had a conviction that Ascott never would come home.