Roland Yorke / A Sequel to "The Channings"

by Mrs. Henry Wood

And Gerald, lightly vaulting into a passing hansom, was cantered off. Winny turned to her good friend Ellen Channing for consolation, who gave her the best that the circumstances admitted of.

Hamish, beyond his bright welcome, saw very little of Winny that evening; he was shut up with her husband's manuscript. He took her home at night. The lodgings engaged by Gerald consisted of a sitting-room and two bedchambers, the people of the house to cook and give attendance. Hamish paid the cab and accompanied her indoors. The first thing Mrs. Gerald Yorke did, was to sit down on the lowest chair, and begin to cry. Her little girls, worn out with the day's excitement and the happy play in Nelly Channing's nursery, were fit to drop with fatigue, and put themselves quietly on the carpet.

"Oh, Mr. Channing! do you think he is not going to forgive me! It is so cruel of him to send us into this strange place all alone."

"He had an engagement, you know," answered Hamish, his tone taking, perhaps unconsciously, the same kind of soothing persuasion that he would have used to a child. "London engagements are sometimes not to be put off."

"I wish I was back in Gloucestershire!" she bewailed.

"It will be all right, Mrs. Yorke," he returned gaily. "One always feels unhappy in a fresh place. The night Ellen first slept in London she cried to be back at Helstonleigh."

A servant, who looked untidy enough to have a world full of work upon her back, showed Hamish out. In answer to a question, she said that she was the only one kept, and would have to wait on the new lodgers. Hamish slipped some money into the girl's hand and bade her do all she could for the lady and the little children.

And so, leaving Gerald's wife in her new home, he went back to his work.

He, Hamish Channing, with his good looks and his courtly presence, was treading the streets gaily on the following morning. Many a man, pressing on to business, spared a moment to turn and glance at him, wondering who the fine, handsome fellow was, with the bright and good face. It was a face that would be bright always, bright in dying; but it had more than two shades of care on it today. For if any one living man hated, more than another, to inflict pain and disappointment, it was Hamish Channing. He was carrying back Gerald's manuscript, and had no good report to give of it.

However clever Gerald might be at dashing off slashing articles in the review line, he would never be able to succeed in fiction. This first attempt proved it indisputably to Hamish Channing. The story was unconnected, the plot scarcely distinguishable, and there were very grave faults besides, offending against morality and good taste. Not one reader in fifty, and that must be some school-girl, inveterate after novels, could get through the first volume. Certainly, in plunging into a long work of fiction, Gerald Yorke had mistaken his vocation. How entirely different this crude and worthless book was from the high-class work Hamish was writing, his cheeks glowed to contemplate. Not in triumph over Gerald; never a tarnish of such a feeling could lie in his generous heart; but at the consciousness of his own capability, the gift given him by God, and what the work would be to the public. But that he deemed it lay in his duty, in all kindliness, not to deceive Gerald, he would not have told him the truth; no, in spite of the promise exacted of him to give a just, unvarnished report.