“Oh, the caprices of young ladies!  Well, can you write large and plain?  Not you.”

“I can imitate anything or anybody.”

“Imitate this hand then.  I’ll walk and dictate, you sit and write.”

“Oh, how nice!”

“Delicious!  The first is to—­Hetherington.  Now, Lucy, this is a dishonest, ungrateful old rogue, who has made thousands by me, and now wants to let me into a mine, with nothing in it but water.  It would suck up twenty thousand pounds as easily as that blotting-paper will suck up our signature.”

“Heartless traitor! monster!” cried Lucy.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes,” and her eye flashed and the pen was to her a stiletto.

Bazalgette dictated, “My dear Sir—­”

“What? to a cheat?”

“Custom, child.  I’ll have a stamp made.  Besides, if we let them see we see through them, they would play closer and closer—­”

“My dear Sir—­In answer to yours of date 11th instant, I regret to say—­that circumstances prevent—­my closing—­with your obliging—­and friendly offer.”

They wrote eight letters; and Lucy’s quick fingers folded up prospectuses, and her rays brightened the room.  When the work was done, she clung round Mr. Bazalgette and caressed him, and seemed strangely unwilling to part with him at all; in fact, it was twelve o’clock, and the drawing-room empty, when they parted.

At one o’clock the whole house was dark except one room, and both windows of that room blazed with light.  And it happened there was a spectator of this phenomenon.  A man stood upon the grass and eyed those lights as if they were the stars of his destiny.

It was David Dodd.  Poor David! he had struck a bargain, and was to command a coasting vessel, and carry wood from the Thames to our southern ports.  An irresistible impulse brought him to look, before he sailed, on the place that held the angel who had destroyed his prospects, and whom he loved as much as ever, though he was too proud to court a second refusal.

“She watches, too,” thought David, “but it is not for me, as I for her.”

At half past one the lights began to dance before his wearied eyes, and presently David, weakened by his late fever, dozed off and forgot all his troubles, and slept as sweetly on the grass as he had often slept on the hard deck, with his head upon a gun.

Luck was against the poor fellow.  He had not been unconscious much more than ten minutes when Lucy’s window opened and she looked out; and he never saw her.  Nor did she see him; for, though the moon was bright, it was not shining on him; he lay within the shadow of a tree.  But Lucy did see something—­a light upon the turnpike road about forty yards from Mr. Bazalgette’s gates.  She slipped cautiously down, a band-box in her hand, and, unbolting the door that opened on the garden, issued out, passed within a few yards of Dodd, and went round to the front, and finally reached the turnpike road.  There she found Mrs. Wilson, with a light-covered cart and horse, and a lantern.  At sight of her Mrs. Wilson put out the light, and they embraced; then they spoke in whispers.