tterly, "but my kindness seems to be
generally thrown away. Miss Thorne, I am going to the hotel to stay
to-night. A note will bring me back directly. Mrs Thorne, you must
excuse me now."

He spoke in a quiet very subdued voice, and left the house, lest they
should see the mortification he felt and he should burst out into a fit
of passionate reproach, so thoroughly had he hoped that, by coming down,
he might work Percy's trouble to his own advantage, and gain so great a
hold upon Hazel's gratitude that he might still win the life-game he had
been playing so long. But this was check and impending mate, and had he
not hurried away he felt that he would have lost more ground still.

He walked up to the hotel in a frame of mind of no very enviable
character, fully intending to stay for a few days; but on reaching the
place he found that it was possible to catch the night-train back to
town.

"Better let her think I am offended now," he muttered. "It is the best
move I can make;" and he went straight back to the station, so for the
present Hazel saw him no more, and to her great relief.

Percy only came to the cottage once a week, saying that Mr William
Forth Burge kept him hard at work writing, and he should be very glad to
get a post somewhere in town, for he was sick of Plumton, it was so
horribly slow, and Mr William Forth Burge was such a dreadful cad.

Percy's stay proved to be shorter than he expected, for at the end of a
month he was one morning marched up to Ardley, and brought face to face
with George Canninge, who was quiet and firm with him, asking him a few
sharp questions, and ending by giving him a couple of five-pound notes
and a letter to a shipping firm in London, the head of which firm told
him to come into the office the very next day, and was very short, but
informed him that his salary as clerk would begin at once at sixty
pounds a year, and that if he did his duty he should rise.

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE.

ANOTHER TROUBLE.

It was, some will say, a childish, old-fashioned way of keeping cash,
but all the same it was the plan adopted by Hazel, who every week
dropped the amounts she had received from the school pence, after
changing the coppers into silver, through the large slit of an old
money-box that had been given her when a child. It was a plain,
oak-wood box, with ordinary lock and key, and the slit at the top was
large enough to admit of each week's shillings and sixpences being ti