far too liberal allowance you have made me for many years back.  Will you think I have gone mad if I ask you to stop that now?  The fact is, I am going to have a try at earning something, for the fun of the thing; and, to make the experiment satisfactory, I start to-morrow morning for a district in the West Highlands, where the most ingenious fellow I know couldn’t get a penny loaf on credit.  You have been very good to me, Aunt Lavender:  I wish I had made a better use of your kindness.  So good-bye just now, and if ever I come back to London again I shall call on you and thank you in person.

“I am your affectionate nephew,

“FRANK LAVENDER.”

So far the letter was almost business-like.  There was no reference to the causes which were sending him away from London, and which had already driven him to this extraordinary resolution about the money he got from his aunt.  But at the end of the letter there was a brief postscript, apparently written at the last moment, the words of which were these:  “Be kind to Sheila.  Be as kind to her as I have been cruel to her.  In going away from her I feel as though I were exiled by man and forsaken by God.”

She came back from the window the letter in her hand.

“I think you may read it too, papa,” she said, for she was anxious that her father should know that Lavender had voluntarily surrendered this money before he was deprived of it.  Then she went back to the window.

The slow rain fell from the dismal skies on the pavement and the railings and the now almost leafless trees.  The atmosphere was filled with a thin white mist, and the people going by were hidden under umbrellas.  It was a dreary picture enough; and yet Sheila was thinking of how much drearier such a day would be on some lonely coast in the North, with the hills obscured behind the rain, and the sea beating hopelessly on the sand.  She thought of some small and damp Highland cottage, with narrow windows, a smell of wet wood about, and the monotonous drip from over the door.  And it seemed to her that a stranger there would be very lonely, not knowing the ways or the speech of the simple folk, careless perhaps of his own comfort, and only listening to the plashing of the sea and the incessant rain on the bushes and on the pebbles of the beach.  Was there any picture of desolation, she thought, like that of a sea under rain, with a slight fog obscuring the air, and with no wind to stir the pulse with the noise of waves?  And if Frank Lavender had only gone as far as the Western Highlands, and was living in some house on the coast, how sad and still the Atlantic must have been all this wet forenoon, with the islands of Colonsay and Oronsay lying remote and gray and misty in the far and desolate plain of the sea!

“It will take a great deal of responsibility from me, sir,” Mrs. Paterson said to old Mackenzie, who was absently thinking of all the strange possibilities now opening out before him, “if you will tell me what is to be done.  Mrs. Lavender had no relatives in London except her nephew.”