dreadful old study."

"Hush! he never likes to be disturbed in his writing," said Ursula,
soothingly.

And he sat at his "writing" to a much later hour than usual, and he
stumbled upstairs to his bed-room in the dead of the night, with the
same scared pale face which he had seen in the glass. Such a look as
that when it once comes upon a man's face takes a long time to glide
away; but his heart beat more tranquilly, and the blood flowed even in
his veins. After all, where was the harm?

CHAPTER XXIII.

TIDED OVER.

Next morning, Cotsdean was mournfully turning over his ledger in the
High Street, wondering whether he should go back to Mr. May on another
forlorn expedition, or whether he should betray his overwhelming anxiety
to his wife, who knew nothing about the state of affairs. The shop was
what is called a corn-factor's shop, full of sacks of grain, with knots
of wheat-ears done up ornamentally in the window, a stock not very
valuable, but sufficient, and showing a good, if not a very important,
business. A young man behind, attended to what little business was going
on; for the master himself was too much pre-occupied to think of bushels
of seed. He was as uneasy as Mr. May had been on the previous night, and
in some respects even more unhappy; for he had no resource except a sort
of dumb faith in his principle, a feeling that he must be able to find
out some way of escape--chequered by clouds of despondency, sometimes
approaching despair. For Cotsdean, too, felt vaguely that things were
approaching a crisis--that a great many resources had been
exhausted--that the pitcher which had gone so often to the well must, at
last, be broken, and that it was as likely the catastrophe was coming
now as at any other time. He said to himself that never in his previous
experience had things seemed so blank as at present; never had the
moment of fate approached so nearly without any appearance of
deliverance. He had not even the round of possibilities before him which
were in Mr. May's mind, however hopeless, at this particular moment, he
might find them.

Cotsdean, for his part, had nothing to think of but Mr. May. Would he
find some way out of it still, he who was always so clever, and must, in
his position, have always "good friends?" How the poor man wished that
he had never been led into this fatal course--that he had insisted, long
ago, on the settlement which must come some time, and which did not get
any