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"We can love each other all the same," said Lucy, still sobbing; "only you must not come to see me any more-that is-I do not mean— never any more at all—but till you have told them all about it. I don't mean now, but some time, you know. When will you be of

age, Tom?"

"Oh, that makes no difference.

dependent, it's all the same.

As long's I'm

I wish I was my

own master. I should soon let them see I didn't care what they said."

Silence again followed, during which Lucy tried in vain to stop her tears by wiping them away. A wretched feeling awoke in her that Thomas was not manly, could not resolve-or rather, could not help her when she would do the right thing. She would have borne anything rather than that. It put her heart in a

vice.

The boat stopped at the Westminster pier. They went on shore. The sun was down, and the fresh breeze that blew, while it pleasantly cooled the hot faces that moved westward from their

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day's work, made Lucy almost shiver with cold. For loss had laid hold of her heart. They walked up Parliament-street. Thomas felt that he must say something, but what he should say he could not think. He always thought what he should say-never what he should do.

"Lucy, dear," he said, at last, "we wont make up our minds to-night. Wait till I see you I shall have time to think about it before

next.

then.

I will be a match for that sneaking rascal, Stopper, yet."

Lucy felt inclined to say that to sneak was no way to give sneaking its own. But she said neither that nor anything else.

They got into an omnibus at Charing Cross, and returned-deafened, stupified, and despondent-into the city. They parted at Lucy's door, and Thomas went home, already much later than usual.

What should he do?

He resolved upon

nothing, and did the worst thing he could have

done. He lied.

"You are very late to-night, Thomas," said

his mother. 66 Have you been all this time with Mr. Moloch ?"

"Yes, mother," answered Thomas.

And when he was in bed he consoled himself by saying that there was no such person as Mr. Moloch.

When Lucy went to bed, she prayed to God in sobs and cries of pain. Hitherto she had believed in Thomas without a question crossing the disc of her faith; but now she had begun to doubt, and the very fact that she could doubt was enough to make her miserable, even if there had been no ground for the doubt. My readers must remember that no one had attempted to let her into the secrets of his character as I have done with them. His beautiful face, pleasant manners, self-confidence, and, above all, her love, had blinded her to his faults. For although I do not in the least believe that Love is blind, yet I must confess that, like kittens and some other animals, he has his blindness nine days or more, as it may be, from his birth. But once she had begun to suspect, she found ground for suspicion

enough.

She had never known grief before

not even when her mother died-for death has not anything despicable, and Thomas had.

What Charles Wither had told Thomas was true enough. Mr. Stopper was after him. Ever since the dinner-party at Mr. Boxall's he had hated him, and bided his time.

Mr. Stopper was a man of forty, in whose pine-apple whiskers and bristly hair the first white streaks of autumn had begun to show themselves. He had entered the service of Messrs. Blunt and Baker some five-and-twenty years before, and had gradually risen through all the intervening positions to his present post. Within the last year, moved by prudential considerations, he had begun to regard the daughters of his principal against the background of possible marriage; and as he had hitherto, from motives of the same class, resisted all inclinations in that direction, with so much the more force did his nature rush into the channel which the consent of his selfishness opened for the indulgence of his affections.

For the moment he saw

Mary Boxall with this object in view, he fell in love with her after the fashion of such a man, beginning instantly to build, not castles, but square houses in the air, in the dining-rooms especially of which her form appeared in gorgeous and somewhat matronly garments amidst ponderous mahogany, seated behind the obscuration of tropical plants at a table set out à la Russe. His indignation when he entered the drawing-room after Mr. Boxall's dinner, and saw Thomas in the act of committing the indiscretion recorded in that part of my story, passed into silent hatred when he found that while his attentions were slighted, those of Thomas, in his eyes a mere upstart-for he judged everything in relation to the horizon of Messrs. Blunt and Baker, and every man in relation to himself, seated upon the loftiest summit within the circle of that horizonnot even offered, but only dropped at her feet in passing, were yet accepted.

Amongst men, Mr. Stopper was of the bulldog breed, sagacious, keen-scented, vulgar, and inexorable; capable of much within the range of

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