“I can’t allow you, Ralph, to ask my father for what I would not ask him myself—­”

“Give me the name and address, or you will sour my excellent temper for the rest of my life.  Your obstinacy won’t do with me, Basil—­it didn’t at school, and it won’t now.  I shall ask my father for money for myself; and use as much of it as I think proper for your interests.  He’ll give me anything I want, now I have turned good boy.  I don’t owe fifty pounds, since my last debts were paid off—­thanks to Mrs. Ralph, who is the most managing woman in the world.  By-the-bye, when you see her, don’t seem surprised at her being older than I am.  Oh! this is the address, is it?  Hollyoake Square?  Where the devil’s that!  Never mind, I’ll take a cab, and shift the responsibility of finding the place on the driver.  Keep up your spirits, and wait here till I come back.  You shall have such news of Mr. Shopkeeper and his daughter as you little expect! Au revoir, my dear fellow—­au revoir.”

He left the room as rapidly as he had entered it.  The minute afterwards, I remembered that I ought to have warned him of the fatal illness of Mrs. Sherwin.  She might be dying—­dead for aught I knew—­when he reached the house.  I ran to the window, to call him back:  it was too late.  Ralph was gone.

Even if he were admitted at North Villa, would he succeed?  I was little capable of estimating the chances.  The unexpectedness of his visit; the strange mixture of sympathy and levity in his manner, of worldly wisdom and boyish folly in his conversation, appeared to be still confusing me in his absence, just as they had confused me in his presence.  My thoughts imperceptibly wandered away from Ralph, and the mission he had undertaken on my behalf, to a subject which seemed destined, for the future, to steal on my attention, irresistibly and darkly, in all my lonely hours.  Already, the fatality denounced against me in Mannion’s letter had begun to act:  already, that terrible confession of past misery and crime, that monstrous declaration of enmity which was to last with the lasting of life, began to exercise its numbing influence on my faculties, to cast its blighting shadow over my heart.

I opened the letter again, and re-read the threats against me at its conclusion.  One by one, the questions now arose in my mind:  how can I resist, or how escape the vengeance of this evil spirit? how shun the dread deformity of that face, which is to appear before me in secret? how silence that fiend’s tongue, or make harmless the poison which it will pour drop by drop into my life?  When should I first look for that avenging presence?—­now, or not till months hence?  Where should I first see it? in the house?—­or in the street?  At what time would it steal to my side? by night—­or by day?  Should I show the letter to Ralph?—­it would be useless.  What would avail any advice or assistance which his reckless courage could give, against an enemy who combined the ferocious vigilance of a savage with the far-sighted iniquity of a civilised man?