night,” she answered indifferently, “as you have come to-night.”

“Ay, surely,” he said, rising stiffly, “but you should be able to answer me immediately.”

“I have said to-morrow night.”

“You, madam, guaranteeing that you will remain here in the meantime on my assurance that I do not seek to promote the interests of Mr. Charles Craike. You will not seek to elude me?”

“You have my promise, Mr. Bradbury,” she said quietly; and moving to the door, unbarred it. She curtsied to his stiff bow; wrapping his cloak about him he passed out swiftly.

p. 39Chapter IV. A Journey Planned

p. 39

When Mr. Bradbury returned to the cottage on the following evening, my mother would not allow me to remain in the room to hear what passed. She would have had me go to bed immediately on Mr. Bradbury’s knocking at the door; recollecting then, that from my room I must inevitably hear all that passed, she bade me wait in the garden, until her conversation with him was ended.

She had refused in the interval between his visits to answer any of my eager questions; she offered me no information. To be sure, my head was full of notions; this much I knew: that my grandfather was wealthy; that my father and mother had assumed her name—for what reason I could not conjecture, and that Mr. Bradbury, if he had his will, would surely make me known as the only son of Richard Craike, and, may be, heir to old Edward. Ay, and that Charles, my father’s brother, was an enemy of my mother; that he and his wife had wronged her cruelly in the past; that she hated him, and that the p. 40prospect of revenge on him inclined her to accede to Mr. Bradbury’s wish.

p. 40

Through the day my mother went about her household duties calmly, as was her wont. She insisted that I should go to my studies with Mr. Vining and Tony as on any day; only stressing that I should say nothing to my friend concerning Mr. Bradbury. But, I promise you, I had no mind that day for Latin grammar, or for the Letters of Cicero; the event was inevitable,—Mr. Vining caning me soundly, with a display of wrath ill-fitting a clergyman, even as, I took it from Tony’s uneasiness and writhing on his chair, he had chastised his son for his late return the night before. I was all eagerness for the night and the coming of Mr. Bradbury.

He came 

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