the slim hand
she vouchsafed him, and "Good-bye," echoed the young lady, adding,
with another of those hard little laughs that jarred so on Tom's
nerves, "Come with better news next time, and don't give in while
there's a chance left; depend upon it the money's better worth having
than the client. By the bye, I sent you a card for Lady Goldthred's
this afternoon--only a stupid breakfast--did you forget it?"

"Are you going?" returned Tom, with the clouds clearing from his brow.

"Perhaps we shall, if it's fine," was the reply. "And now I can't wait
any longer. Don't forget what I told you, and do the best you can."

So Tom Ryfe departed from his garden of Eden with sundry misgivings
not entirely new to him, that the fruit he took such pains to ripen
for his own gathering might but be gaudy wax-work after all, or
painted stone, perhaps, cold, smooth, and beautiful, against which he
should rasp his teeth in vain.

The well-tutored Puckers, dressed in faded splendour, and holding a
brown-paper parcel in her hand, was waiting for her young lady at the
corner of the Square.

While thus engaged she witnessed a bargain, of an unusual nature, made
apparently under extraordinary pressure of circumstances. A ragged
boy, established at the crossing, who had indeed rendered himself
conspicuous by his endeavours to ferry Puckers over dry-shod, was
accosted by a shabby-genteel and remarkably good-looking man in the
following vernacular--

"On this minnit, off at six, Buster; two bob an' a bender, and a three
of eye-water, in?"

"Done for another joey," replied Buster, with the premature acuteness
of youth foraging for itself in the streets of London.

"Done," repeated the man, pulling a handful of silver from his pocket,
and assuming the broom at once to enter on his professional labours,
ere Puckers had recovered from her astonishment, or Buster could
vanish round the corner in the direction of a neighbouring mews.

Though plying his instrument diligently, the man kept a sharp eye on
the Square gardens. When Tom Ryfe emerged through the heavy iron gate
he whispered a deep and horrible curse, but his dark eyes shone and
his whole face beamed into a ruffianly kind of beauty, when after a
discreet pause, Miss Bruce followed the young lawyer through the same
portal. Then the man went to work with his broom harder than ever. Not
Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak at the feet of his sovereign
mistress lest they should take