you here of all places in the world?"

"My cousin Audrey Craven."

There was no reserve about Hardy. At the name, so unexpectedly spoken,
the under-world opened again for Ted, with all its Furies. They walked
on for some minutes in silence, then Hardy began again--

"I called to see her. Of course she was out. Hard lines, wasn't it?"

Ted forced himself to speak. "Oh yes, beastly hard."

"You must have met her lately. How is she looking?"

"Oh, remarkably cheerful, when I last saw her."

"When was that?" Hardy asked, a little anxiously.

"The day before yesterday."

"Ah! She'd got my telegram then."

Ted bit his lip. They were too much absorbed, he in his misery and Hardy
in his joy, for either to be conscious of the other's feeling.

"Old boy," said Hardy, as they turned out of the King's Road, "what have
you got to do?"

"Nothing."

"Then come and help me to hunt up some diggings. How about Devon
Street?"

"I don't know; but I suppose we can look," said Ted, dismally. Hardy's
spirits were beginning to pall on him.

"I may as well go and look up Katherine, while I'm about it. Dear old
Sis, I suppose she'll be out too."

"Not she--she's too busy for that."

"Not too busy to see her old playfellow, you bet your boots."

He was so glad to see everybody again that he was sure everybody must be
glad to see him. In his rapture at being in London, the place he loathed
and execrated a year ago, he could have embraced the stranger in the
street. Those miles of pavement, those towering walls that seemed to
make streets of the sky as he looked up, all that world of brick and
mortar was Audrey's world, the ground for her feet, the scene of all her
doings. The women that went by wore the fashions she would be wearing
now. At any moment she herself might turn out of some shop-door, round
some corner. A faint hope that he might find her with Katherine had led
him to Devon Street.

But Ted's, not Audrey's, were the first hands that touched his; and it
was not Audrey, but his "little half-sister," that gave Hardy his first
welcome home.

"Well, Sis?"

"Vincent! is it you?"

There was nothing in the words but the glad courtesy of the woman who
had been his playfellow in the days when he was a boy and she a tomboy,
but they went to Hardy's heart and dried up his speech. They were the
first kind words he had heard since he left England.

Katherine put away her work and made him sit in the one comfortable
cha