‘Very well.’

Gladys did exactly as she was bid, and, leaving the old man at his slender breakfast, ran up to the warehouse.  To her surprise, she found Walter, usually so active and so energetic, sitting on the office stool with his arms folded, and his face wearing a look of deepest gloom.  Some new trouble had come to him, that was apparent to her at once.

‘Why, Walter, how troubled you look!  No bad news from home, I hope?’

‘Bad enough,’ he answered in a kind of savage undertone.  ’I knew something was going to happen.  Haven’t I been saying it for days?’

‘But what has happened?  Nothing very bad, I hope?’

‘So bad that it couldn’t be worse,’ he said.  ‘Liz has run away.’

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XII.

SETTING HIS HOUSE IN ORDER.

Gladys opened her eyes.

‘Run away!  How?  Where?  I don’t understand.’

‘All the better if you don’t,’ he answered harshly.  ’She’s run away, anyhow, and it’s their blame.  Then they come to me, after the mischief’s done, thinking I can make it right.  I’m not going to stir a foot in the matter.  They can all go to Land’s End for me.’

He spoke bitterly—­more bitterly than Gladys had ever heard him speak before.  She stood there, with the keys on her forefinger, the picture of perplexity and concern.  She did not understand the situation, and was filled with curiosity to know where Liz had run to.

‘Have they quarrelled, or what?’ she asked.

’No; I don’t suppose there’s been any more than the usual amount of scrimmaging,’ he said, with a hard smile.  ’I don’t blame Liz; she’s only what they’ve made her.  I’ll tell you what it is,’ he said, suddenly clenching his right hand, his young face set with the bitterness of his grief and shame, ’if there’s no punishment for those that bring children into the world and then let them go to ruin, there’s no justice in heaven, and I don’t believe in it.’

Gladys shrank back, paling slightly under this torrent of passionate words.  Never had she seen Walter so bitterly, so fearfully moved.  He got up from his stool, and paced up and down the narrow space between the boxes in a very storm of indignation; and it seemed to Gladys that a few minutes had changed him from a boy into a man.

‘Dear Walter,’ she said gently, ’try to be brave.  Perhaps it will not be so bad as you think.’

’It’s so bad for Liz, poor thing, that it won’t be any worse.  She’s lost, and she was the only one of them I cared for.  If she’d had a chance, she’d have been a splendid woman.  She has a good heart, only she never had anybody to guide her.’

Gladys could not speak.  She had only the vaguest idea what he meant, but she knew that something terrible had happened to Liz.  A curious reticence seemed to bind her tongue.  She could not ask a single question.