"Is she a good woman or a bad one?" she wondered, as she sat by the fire in her own comfortable apartment. "If she is a bad woman, she's an out-and-outer; for she looks one in the face, with those superb black eyes of hers, as bright and clear as the image of truth itself. She must be good and true. She must! And yet that night's absence, and that story about Yarborough Tower—that seems too much for anybody on earth to believe."
CHAPTER XIV.
A GHOSTLY VISITANT.
For nearly three years Thomas Milsom had been far away from London. He had been arrested on a charge of burglary, within a month of Valentine Jernam's death, and condemned to five years' transportation. In less than three years, by some kind of artful management, and by the exercise of consummate hypocrisy, Mr. Milsom had contrived to get himself free again, and to return to England his own master.
He landed in Scotland, and tramped from Granton to Yorkshire, where an accidental encounter with an old acquaintance tempted him to linger at Raynham. The two tramps, scoundrels both, and both alike penniless and shoeless, had stood side by side at the gates of the park, to see the stately funeral train pass out.
And thus Thomas Milsom had beheld her whom he called his daughter,—the girl who had fled, with her old grandfather, from the shelter of his fatal roof three years before.
After that unprofitable interview with Honoria, Thomas Milsom his face
Londonwards.
"The day will come when you and I will square accounts, my lady," he muttered, as he looked up to those battlemented turrets, with a blasphemous curse, and then turned his back upon Raynham Castle, and the peaceful little village beneath it.
The direction in which Mr. Milsom betook himself, after he passed the border-land of waste ground and newly-built houses which separates London from the country, was the direction of Ratcliff Highway. He walked rapidly through the crowded streets, in which the crowd grew thicker as he approached the regions of the Tower. But rapidly as he walked, the steps of Time were faster. It had been bright noon when he entered the quiet little town of Barnet. It was night when he first heard the scraping fiddles and stamping feet of Ratcliff Highway. He went straight to the 'Jolly Tar'.
Here all was unchanged. There were the flaring tallow candles, set in a tin hoop that hung from the low ceiling, dropping hot grease ever and anon on the loungers at the bar. There was the music—the same Scotch reels and Irish jigs, played on squeaking fiddles, which were made more inharmonious by the accompaniment of shrill Pandean pipes. There was the same crowd of sailors and bare-headed, bare-armed, loud-voiced women assembled in the stifling bar, the same cloud of tobacco-smoke, the same Babel of voices to be heard from the concert-room within; while now and then, amongst the shouts and the laughter, the oaths and the riot, there sounded the tinkling of the old piano, and the feeble upper notes of a very poor soprano voice.