LONDON:
ROBSON AND SON, GREAT NORTHERN PRINTING WORKS,
PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.

[I.]"IN BATTALLIONS."
[II.] DELIBERATION.
[III.]HUSBAND AND WIFE.
[IV.]WINGED IN FLIGHT.
[V.]FAILURE.
[VI.]HESTER IN POSSESSION.
[VII.]A SPLIT IN THE CAMP.
[VIII.]THE PLEDGE REDEEMED.
[IX.]SUCCESS.
[X.]COMING HOME.

KISSING THE ROD

[CHAPTER I.]

"IN BATTALIONS."

It was perhaps fortunate for Robert Streightley that the pressure of an immediate necessity for exertion was put upon him at the same time that he received his wife's letter. The blow was so frightful that it might have completely crushed him, had he not been forced to rouse himself from its first effect, to put the meaning of the terrible communication aside for a time, while he attended to the stern duties which were his, as the only representative of the dead man. The subdued bustle, the ceaseless coming and going, the people to be seen, the letters to be written, the innumerable demands upon his attention in reference to his deceased father-in-law, to say nothing of the exigencies of his own affairs, from which he had not an hour's respite, controlled him in spite of himself, and by suspending softened the intensity of the knowledge of the punishment that had overtaken him.

The suspense and perplexity into which Katharine's unexplained absence from home had thrown the household on the preceding day had prepared them to expect that some important intelligence was contained in the letter which had reached their master that morning; and the unhappy man comprehended the necessity of making some communication on the subject. He briefly informed Katharine's maid that she had left town for the present; and on being asked whether the woman was to join her mistress at Middlemeads, he said Mrs. Streightley was not there; that she had better wait for orders, and in the mean time ask no more questions. An injudicious answer; but Robert neither knew nor cared what would have been the judicious course to pursue. He knew only that his sin had found him out; that the chastisement had come; and that the woman whom he had so loved and so wronged had left him for ever--left him hating and despising him.

The hours of that dreadful day wore through somehow. Robert had been engaged during many of them in making arrangements consequent upon Mr. Guyon's death; he had been at Queen Anne Street, and at his office in the City, transacting business of different but invariably unpleasant kinds. He had seen several persons, but not any by whom the domestic calamity which had fallen upon him was suspected. He had written to his mother, informing her of Mr. Guyon's death, and requesting that Ellen would not come to Portland Place for the present; but giving no explanation of this request. All the day he had carried about with him the dreadful knowledge of what had befallen him--had been oppressed by its weight, darkened by its shadow; but he had not examined his burden--he had gone his appointed way, and done his relentless task, and the day had been got through somehow. Now he was going to look the truth in the face; he was going to force his mind to understand it, to take it in fully, and to suffer the torture at his leisure.

He shut himself up in his "study," and gave orders that no one was to be admitted. Then, with the door locked and sure of solitude, he read Katharine's letter again,--not that he needed to do so; every one of its few remorseless words seemed to have burned themselves into his brain,--and then he read the letter which hers had enclosed--the letter endorsed "Shown to R. S." He had not looked at it in the morning; it had sufficed him to know that the letter which Mr. Guyon had shown him on the day which had witnessed their disgraceful compact--the letter which they had tacitly agreed to suppress, still existed, for his conviction, for his condemnation, and had reached the hands to which it had been addressed at last: he had put it away with a shudder. But now he read it--steadily, and with utter amazement. There it was; and on the blank side of the sheet, in Mr. Guyon's hand, were the words, "Shown to R.S." But this letter was sill in Mr. Guyon's hand, and Robert had never seen it--had never heard of it; this was not the letter from Gordon Frere to Katharine which her father had shown to him; there was a dreadful mistake somewhere. As Robert read the heartless words in which Mr. Guyon rejected Gordon Frere on his daughter's behalf, he understood for the first time how the conspiracy which had resulted in so sad a success had been carried out. This, then, was the method Mr. Guyon had adopted, and into which Robert had never inquired. He saw it all--he understood it all now; and he honestly recoiled at the baseness by which his triumph had been secured. He even thought he would not have consented, had he known how the thing was to be done; but his conscience was not so deadened as to accept that sophistry, and another moment's thought taught him that he was as guilty as ever.

But how came the letter to be endorsed with words, intended by their writer only as a private memorandum, which were not true? This puzzled Robert, until he guessed, what really was the case, that Mr. Guyon had put Frere's letter and his reply away together, and had mistaken the one for the other. Why had he kept them at all? thought Robert; why had he put such dangerous and useless documents aside, thus running the risk of detection now realised? "He never could have intended to use them as a weapon against me," thought Robert, who had arrived at a tolerably correct appreciation of the character of his deceased father-in-law. "They convict him directly; me, though conclusively to her, only indirectly to others. Why on earth did he keep them?"