"Lies--lies--lies! I feel no assurance of the kind. I place no credence in anything you have told me. Go, and never darken the threshold of this house again!"
Without a word more the stranger passed out of the Green Parlor, and the instant he had done so the door was shut and locked behind him.
"A fiend--nothing less than a fiend!" he remarked half aloud, as Lucy, with a scared face, proceeded to let him out at the front door.
Barney Dale, who had been away on some errand for his mistress at the time of the stranger's visit, was duly informed by his niece of all that had happened during his absence, as far as the facts were known to her. After Miss Pengarvon had retired for the night, Barney, perceiving the pieces of torn card on the floor, picked them carefully up, and succeeded, after a little trouble, in arranging them in their proper order, That being done he read, "Major Strickland, Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall."
"I canna call the name to mind nohow," muttered the old fellow. "What business can it ha' been that brought him all the way from London to Broome? Not----? No--that was all passed and over years ago. No, anything but that."
[CHAPTER XXII.]
EPHRAIM JUDD'S STRANGE EXPERIENCE.
Ephraim Judd's mother was a widow. Her husband, a journeyman carpenter by trade, had died many years before, leaving her with three young children and a small legacy of debts. Help, however, had come to her from various quarters. A home had been found for her two younger children, both of whom were girls, in a certain charitable institution, while she herself had been set up in a small way of business as a clearstarcher, and presently enough work had come to her in that line to keep her constantly employed. At this time Ephraim was at school, an earnest, painstaking lad, who wrote a beautiful hand, and had a clever head for figures. As it happened, Mr. Avison the elder was one of the school visitors, and Ephraim being one of the show scholars, his attention was drawn to the boy; and thus it fell out that when the latter was fourteen years old, a position as boy-messenger was found for him in the Bank. There, in the course of years, he had gradually worked himself up from the lowest rung of the ladder to the position we now find him occupying.
Mrs. Judd still lived in the same humble domicile in which her husband had died, and Ephraim lodged with her, paying her a fixed weekly sum. To do the young fellow justice, he would fain have had the widow give up her clear-starching business, and remove with him to a house in a better class neighborhood.
"I can afford it, mother," he used to say. "There's no need for you to do another day's work as long as you live."