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LONDON: PRINTED BY

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

(All rights reserved.)

PERPLEXITY.

CHAPTER I.

I HAD been a week now at Huddleston. I had received no letter from Mrs. Gregory, and the only chance left for me was to advertise. I had finished my breakfast: I had watched, with aching sight, the postman pass down the street, knocking, it seemed, at every door but mine. Now I rose, took a sheet of paper, a pen and ink, and tried to make out an advertisement. I was strangely abstracted; I could not fix my attention upon the task. I had commenced :

6

A young lady of good birth and

VOL. II.

B

and had got no further. The ink that marked this line soon dried; with my forehead supported on my hand I leant over the paper, still clutching the pen, my eyes fixed on the scrap of writing, but with my thoughts far away; away with that stout-hearted tender old man who lay sleeping under the shadow of the church at Hunton; away in the years long dead, but revived now by memory, bringing their old joys, their old calm, their old dreams before me, like a rippling tide strewing a shore with the fragments of the gay bark it has wrecked in the darkness. Hot large drops clouded my eyes, and stained the paper; I sobbed with cruel convulsive efforts that seemed to strangle me.

As I sat deep in thought there suddenly fell upon the hall-door a quick, a pealing summons. I started, rose, approached the window, and tried to catch a glimpse of the visitor. He was a stranger-that I could see, of an outline wholly unfamiliar to me. It is one of Mrs. Shaw's old lodgers, I thought; more probably it

is some one who has knocked by mistake. I threw myself into an armchair. Mrs. Shaw came upstairs; expectation and hope were in the good-natured thing's tread. The hall-door was opened, and I heard a frank, manly voice enquire,

'Does Miss Kate Howard live here?'

You may conceive my consternation? Was this a trap laid by John Graham? Was this one of the paid emissaries which I sometimes. fancied he would employ to find me out? My first impulse was to run to the door and tell Mrs. Shaw to deny me-an Irish impulse with a vengeance under the circumstances. But I had hardly time to rise before the door wast opened, and

"A gentleman would like to see you, please; miss,' said Mrs. Shaw.

She extended a card; I took it and read the name Dr. Frank Monck.'

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Monck? Monck? I said to myself, pondering. The name was wholly unfamiliar.

It must be a mistake, Mrs. Shaw,' I said.

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