They had not left empty-handed.
When the squire looked towards the place where he had left the deed-box, with his late wife’s letters, jewels, and valuables, it was gone.
CHAPTER XXX.
HOW FATHER AND SON MET AGAIN.
As the dusk set in, George Heritage and his young wife drew nearer and nearer to the home they had both quitted under such different circumstances.
For the last half hour of their walk George had been almost silent; but Bess, who was picturing in her mind the meeting with her father, hardly noticed it.
The determination he had made to throw himself upon his father’s generosity, to return like the prodigal and crave forgiveness, was becoming weaker and weaker as the time came for it to be carried into effect.
But for Bess, he would have turned back now at the eleventh hour; yet the thought of the misery which his penniless condition would entail upon her forced him to go on.
He waited a little way off while Bess went on first and saw her father. He fancied there might be a scene, and he didn’t like scenes. He was no longer George Smith, the unknown clerk. Here he was George Heritage, Marks’s young master; and he felt that the position, till explained, would be awkward.
Had Bess risen from the dead, her father would not have been more astonished than he was when she crept into the little lodge and fell at his feet.
‘Father!’ she cried, ‘don’t you know me?’