f the day had not allowed him any opportunities of repose.
"Since the morning," he said, "things have hurried so, one on the top
of the other, that I am beginning to feel a little dazed and weary."
Without a word of remark, Rufus produced the remedy. The materials were
ready on the sideboard--he made a cocktail.

"Another?" asked the New Englander, after a reasonable lapse of time.

Amelius declined taking another. He stretched himself on the sofa; his
good friend considerately took up a newspaper. For the first time that
day, he had now the prospect of a quiet interval for rest and thought.
In less than a minute the delusive prospect vanished. He started to his
feet again, disturbed by a new anxiety. Having leisure to think, he had
thought of Regina. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "she's waiting to see
me--and I never remembered it till this moment!" He looked at his watch:
it was five o'clock. "What am I to do?" he said helplessly.

Rufus laid down the newspaper, and considered the new difficulty in its
various aspects.

"We are bound to go with Mrs. Payson to the Home," he said; "and, I
tell you this, Amelius, the matter of Sally is not a matter to be played
with; it's a thing that's got to be done. In your place I should write
politely to Miss Regina, and put it off till to-morrow."

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a man who took Rufus for his
counsellor was a man who acted wisely in every sense of the word.
Events, however, of which Amelius and his friend were both ignorant
alike, had so ordered it, that the American's well-meant advice, in this
one exceptional case, was the very worst advice that could have been
given. In an hour more, Jervy and Mrs. Sowler were to meet at the tavern
door. The one last hope of protecting Mrs. Farnaby from the abominable
conspiracy of which she was the destined victim, rested solely on the
fulfilment by Amelius of his engagement with Regina for that day. Always
ready to interfere with the progress of the courtship, Mrs. Farnaby
would be especially eager to seize the first opportunity of speaking to
her young Socialist friend on the subject of his lecture. In the course
of the talk between them, the idea which, in the present disturbed state
of his mind, had not struck him yet--the idea that the outcast of the
streets might, by the barest conceivable possibility, be identified with
the lost daughter--would, in one way or another, be almost infallibly
suggested to Amelius;