“Where do you come from, boy?  Who sent you here?” she reiterated.

“I come from mamma.  She would have sent me before, but I caught cold, and was in bed all last week.”

Mr. Hamlyn rose.  It was a momentous predicament, but he must do the best he could in it.  He was a man of nice honour, and he wished with all his heart that the earth would open and engulf him.  “Eliza, my love, allow me to deal with this matter,” he said, his voice taking a low, tender, considerate tone.  “I will question the boy in another room.  Some mistake, I reckon.”

“No, Philip, you must put your questions before me,” she said, resolute in her anger.  “What is it you are fearing?  Better tell me all, however disreputable it may be.”

“I dare not tell you,” he gasped; “it is not—­I fear—­the disreputable thing you may be fancying.”

“Not dare!  By what right do you call this gentleman ’papa’?” she passionately demanded of the child.

“Mamma told me to.  She would never let me come home to him before because of not wishing to part from me.”

Mrs. Hamlyn gazed at him.  “Where were you born?”

“At Calcutta; that’s in India.  Mamma brought me home in the Clipper of the Seas, and the ship went down, but quite everybody was not lost in it, though papa thought so.”

The boy had evidently been well instructed.  Eliza Hamlyn, grasping the whole truth now, staggered back in terror.

“Philip!  Philip! is it true?  Was it this you feared?”

He made a motion of assent and covered his face.  “Heaven knows I would rather have died.”

He stood back against the window-curtains, that they might shade his pain.  She fell into a chair and wished he had died, years before.

But what was to be the end of it all?  Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make things any the better for herself.

III.

New Year’s Night at Leet Hall, and the banquet in full swing—­but not, as usual, New Year’s Eve.

Captain Monk headed his table, the parson, Robert Grame, at his right hand, Harry Carradyne on his left.  Whether it might be that the world, even that out-of-the-way part of it, Church Leet, was improving in manners and morals; or whether the Captain himself was changing:  certain it was that the board was not the free board it used to be.  Mrs. Carradyne herself might have sat at it now, and never once blushed by as much as the pink of a sea-shell.

It was known that the chimes were to play this year; and, when midnight was close at hand, Captain Monk volunteered a statement which astonished his hearers.  Rimmer, the butler, had come into the room to open the windows.

“I am getting tired of the chimes, and all people have not liked them,” spoke the Captain in slow, distinct tones.  “I have made up my mind to do away with them, and you will hear them to-night, gentlemen, for the last time.”