"It's a lovely evening," he said.

"John!" I looked him in the face. He could not palm off that kind
deceit upon me. "You have heard something about her?"

"I have," he groaned. "She is leaving Norton Bury."

"Thank God!" I muttered.

John turned fiercely upon me--but only for a moment. "Perhaps I too
ought to say, 'Thank God.' This could not have lasted long, or it
would have made me--what I pray His mercy to save me from, or to let
me die. Oh, lad, if I could only die."

He bent down over the window-sill, crushing his forehead on his
hands.

"John," I said, in this depth of despair snatching at an equally
desperate hope, "what if, instead of keeping this silence, you were
to go to her and tell her all?"

"I have thought of that: a noble thought, worthy of a poor 'prentice
lad! Why, two several evenings I have been insane enough to walk to
Dr. Jessop's door, which I have never entered, and--mark you well!
they have never asked me to enter since that night. But each time
ere I knocked my senses came back, and I went home--luckily having
made myself neither a fool nor a knave."

There was no answer to this either. Alas! I knew as well as he did,
that in the eye of the world's common sense, for a young man not