ll stand by you.
I'll go West with you myself to-morrow--on Christmas day. I need a
change. I want to get away for a little time."

Waring drew back a step, for Bulstrode had risen. Cold Anglo-Saxon as
he was, the unprecedented miracle this gentleman presented made him
seem almost lunatic. He stared blankly.

"It's simpler than it looks." Bulstrode attempted conventionally to
shear it of a little of its eccentricity. "There's every reason why I
should look after my property out there. I've never seen it at all."

"I'm not worth such a goodness," Waring faltered, earnestly,--"not
worth it."

"You will be."

"Don't hope it."

"I believe it," smiled the gentleman; "and at all events I'll stand by
you till you are--if you'll say the word."

Waring, whose lips were trembling, repeated vaguely, "The _word_?"

"Well," replied Bulstrode, "you might say those--they're as good
any--will you stand by _me_----?"

Making the first hearty spontaneous gesture he had shown, the young man
seized the other's outstretched hand. "Yes," he breathed; "by Heaven!
I will!"

It was past midnight when Bulstrode, pushing open the curtains of his
bedroom, looked out on the frozen world of Washington Square, where of
tree and arch not an outline was visible under the disguising snow; and
above, in the sky swept clear of clouds by the strongest of winds, rode
the round full disk of the Christmas moon.

The adoption of a vagrant, the quixotic decision he had taken to leave
New York on Christmas day, the plain facts of the outrageous folly his
impulsiveness led him to contemplate, had relegated his more worldly
plans to the background. Laying aside his waistcoat, he took out the
letter in whose contents he had been absorbed when Cecil Waring crossed
the threshold of his drawing-room.

Well ... as he re-read at leisure her delightful plan for Christmas
day, he sighed that he could not do for them both better than to go two
thousand miles away! "Waring thinks himself a vagrant--and so, poor
chap, he has been; but there are vagrants of another kind." Jimmy
reflected he felt himself to be one of these others, and was led to
speculate if there were many outcasts like himself, and what
ultimately, if their courage was sufficient to keep them banished to
the end, would be the reward?

"Since," he reflected, "there's only one thing I desire--and it's the
one thing forbidden--I fail sometimes to quite puzzle it out!"

He had fin