you
deserve!"

When Jeffreys, stunned and stupefied, looked up, the room was empty.

Mechanically he finished a sentence he had been writing, then letting
the pen drop from his hand, sat where he was, numbed body and soul.
Mrs Rimbolt's words dinned in his ears, and with them came those old
haunting sounds, the yells on the Bolsover meadows, the midnight shriek
of the terrified boy, the cold sneer of his guardian, the brutal laugh
of Jonah Trimble. All came back in one confused hideous chorus, yelling
to him that his bad name was alive still, dogging him down, down,
mocking his foolish dreams of deliverance and hope, hounding him out
into the night to hide his head indeed, but never to hide himself from
himself.

How long he sat there he knew not. When he rose he was at least calm
and resolved.

He went up to his own room and looked through his little stock of
possessions. The old suit in which he had come to Wildtree was there;
and an impulse seized him to put it on in exchange for the trim garments
he was wearing. Of his other goods and chattels he took a few special
favourites. His Homer--Julius's collar--a cricket cap--a pocket compass
which Percy had given him, and an envelope which Raby had once directed
to him for her uncle. His money--his last quarter's salary--he took
too, and his old stick which he had cut in the lanes near Ash Cottage.
That was all. Then quietly descending the deserted stairs, and looking
neither to the right hand nor the left, he crossed the hall and opened
the front door.

A pang shot through him as he did so. Was he never to see Percy again,
or _her_? What would they think of him?

The thought maddened him; and as he stood in the street he seemed to
hear their voices, too, in the awful clamour, and rushed blindly forth,
anywhere, to escape it.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

A PLUNGE DOWNWARD.

A chill October squall was whistling through the trees--in Regent's
Park, stirring up the fallen leaves on the footpaths, and making the
nursemaids, as they listlessly trundled their perambulators, shiver
suddenly, and think of the nursery fire and the singing kettle on the
hob. The gathering clouds above sent the park-keeper off to his shed
for a waterproof, and emptied the carriage-drive of the vehicles in
which a few semi-grand people were taking an afternoon airing at half a
crown an hour. A little knot of small boys, intently playing football,
with piled-up jackets for goal