you at the Bank to-morrow morning. Most impudent he
was!--stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives. I
don't believe he would have gone away, if Blucher had not happened to
break his chain and come running round on the gravel--for I was in the
garden; so I said, 'You'd better go away--the dog is very fierce, and I
can't hold him.' Do you really know anything of such a man?"

"I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, in his usual
subdued voice, "an unfortunate dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much
in days gone by. However, I presume you will not be troubled by him
again. He will probably come to the Bank--to beg, doubtless."

No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode
had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner. His wife, not
sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him
with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and
staring absently at the ground. He started nervously and looked up as
she entered.

"You look very ill, Nicholas. Is there anything the matter?"

"I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr. Bulstrode, who was so
frequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this
cause of depression.

"Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar."

Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the
affectionate attention soothed him. Though always polite, it was his
habit to receive such services with marital coolness, as his wife's
duty. But to-day, while she was bending over him, he said, "You are
very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something new in it to her
ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was, but her woman's
solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he might be going
to have an illness.

"Has anything worried you?" she said. "Did that man come to you at the
Bank?"

"Yes; it was as I had supposed. He is a man who at one time might have
done better. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature."

"Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for certain
reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable to hear
him calling himself a friend of yours." At that moment she would not
have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness
that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with
her own. Not that she knew much about them. That her husband had at