CHAPTER III.

A WAY OF ESCAPE.

The amazement of Miss Montressor had a double origin; the primary one, that Mr. Dolby should turn up, in this unexpected and extraordinary manner, in a place with which he had no connection that she had the most remote suspicion of; the secondary one, that her sister should have rushed into that gentleman's arms, and called him 'Ephraim.' Within the last few days her mind had been so absorbed in the terrible details of the Griswold story, that Mr. Dolby had hardly crossed it; and positively since that morning she had never remembered his existence until the fact was recalled to her in this unprecedented fashion. When she had thought of him at all, it was always with the fixed idea that he had preceded her to America for the purpose of watching her, and now she firmly believed her suspicions to be realised; but even the rapidity of thought did not enable her to do more than realise this fact before her sister said, turning to her, while she still clutched the stranger by the arm, 'This is my husband, Clara; what can you mean by calling him Mr. Dolby?'

Never had the self-possession inseparable from anything like a fair proficiency in her art stood Miss Montressor in such stead as at this moment. She recovered herself instantly, and replied, 'My dear Bess, is this really your husband, your Ephraim of whom we were talking only a few minutes ago? How very odd that an accidental but strong likeness should have led me to have imagined he was a friend of mine!'

'So he will be a friend of yours, I suppose,' said Mrs. Jenkins, with just the slightest possible revival of a combatant tone in her voice; for even the joy of her husband's unexpected return could not silence her from some measure of protest against her sister's indifference. 'And what in the world has brought you back, Eph, and why did you not tell me you were coming?'

'Why in the world was I sent for, Bess?' was Ephraim Jenkins's reply, as he fixed his eyes upon his wife's face with an unmistakably sincere expression of surprise.

Miss Montressor was not prepared to find her sister's husband a good-looking, gentlemanly, and well-dressed man; but these circumstances made no difference at all in the sensation of quiet, sincere, and irrepressible vexation with which she regarded this meeting. It was her most earnest wish that she should never be brought in contact with Jenkins under any circumstances; but to meet him under the present, and at Mrs. Griswold's, where she had such strong motives for disguising her identity with Mrs. Jenkins's sister, was especially annoying to her. Of course the secret could not be kept now, was almost her first thought, but it was worth trying for, and so she unceremoniously interrupted the explanation which Ephraim was about to give to his astonished wife by hurriedly explaining to him that no one must know of their relationship.

'Bess has made me a solemn promise,' she said, 'that she will not tell it, and I expect you to observe it for her sake.'

'Whoever do you suppose I am going to talk to about you,' said Jenkins roughly, with an instantaneous relief, throwing off all the gentlemanly manner and appearance, which was the merest disguise, and with which he equally discarded his previously striking resemblance to Mr. Dolby. 'Bess knows her own business, so do you; and if you don't want to acknowledge her, I'm not going to peach.'

'Thank you,' said Miss Montressor, with great self-command, and she actually put out her hand graciously to her detested brother-in-law.

He took it rather sulkily, and growled out that she need not be in such a hurry to disavow folks that didn't want anything from her.

'That's not my motive,' said Miss Montressor, 'as Bess will explain to you. But I must go now; she won't want me to stay with her now she has got you.'

'O, pray don't go!' exclaimed Mrs. Jenkins. 'I do want to talk to Ephraim, and find out how it is that he has dropped from the clouds in this unexpected way, but perhaps you won't mind staying all the same. There is no one in the boudoir, and I could take you up there while I talk to Ephraim. Mr. Duval and Mr. Carey will be here very shortly.'

Good-nature and curiosity united induced Miss Montressor to comply with her sister's request. 'Very well,' she said; 'I will go to the boudoir; you need not take me up, I know my own way there. Don't you remember, Bess, I have been all over the house with you.' And she went towards the door, but just as she had reached it, Ephraim Jenkins stopped her with a question.

'Would you mind telling me, Miss Montressor,' he said ceremoniously, and with a half-ironical sort of bow, 'who was the individual for whom you did me the honour to mistake me just now? Would you mind mentioning his name? I find it quite unpleasant enough to have one double, as I have already, without being accommodated with two.'

'I mistook you,' she said, 'for Mr. George Dolby, who is an American, like yourself, whom I knew very well in London. Pray don't be offended; I assure you you might very well accept my error as a compliment.'

'Mr. George Dolby,' repeated Ephraim, with an intent frown upon his face as of one trying painfully to retrace a track of thought or to work out a puzzle; 'Mr. George Dolby, an American? Is the gentleman in New York just now?'

'To the best of my belief,' returned Miss Montressor briefly, 'he is;' and with that she left the room.

'By Jove, Bess,' said Jenkins, laying his hand upon his wife's shoulder, holding her at a little distance from him, and looking into her face with an expression of strange mingled suspicion, curiosity, and amusement, 'it is Warren, and he has been up to his game with her in London--it must be, you know; but I am precious glad he has come back, though why he should not have let me know he is back, I cannot tell. However, his being here at New York gets me out of a devil of a mess that I should have been very much puzzled how to get out of myself; though I will tell you what it is,' he continued, drawing her close to him and kissing her fondly, 'I would have got into it ten times over, and trusted to my own luck, or the devil's own luck, to get out of it, for the relief the sight of your face gave me, and when I found there was nothing wrong with you.'

'But what brought you here, Eph, and how came you to think there was anything wrong with me?'

His wife was not to be won from her uneasiness, or diverted from her wish to understand precisely what had occurred, by even the affectionate assurance which was so dear to her, and she reiterated her question very earnestly.

'We shall have very little uninterrupted time, Eph,' she said; 'awful things have happened here. Mr. Griswold has been murdered in England--you must have seen all about it in the papers?'

'No, I didn't; I should have known the meaning if I had, on account of Warren as well as on account of you, Bess; for I haven't forgot, and I don't mean to, how kind Mrs. Griswold has been to you. Poor thing, she is awfully cut up, I suppose.'

'She's just heartbroken, Eph, and the police are coming here presently to make her tell all she knows, poor soul; and as I was saying to Nelly--to Clara, I mean--just now, that's not much, for they do say Mr. Griswold was the closest man in New York about his affairs; and I must leave you then and go to her; so you must tell me as much as you can as quick as you can. Take off that great heavy coat, Eph, and that hat, and sit down.'

'No, no; I mustn't do that, Bess,' replied Jenkins, drawing the coat still more closely round him, and ramming the hat still further down over his eyes by a blow on the crown. 'Whatever are you thinking about? They know Warren perfectly well here, and if they either took me for him, and found out I'm somebody else, or else if they discovered that there's anybody about so uncommon like him as I am, they might have their suspicions roused, and set to look for him directly. And that would not pay, Bess, my dear, neither on his account nor on my own; for though I don't suppose they could do me much harm, and for certain they couldn't make me out to be up to any--deliberate harm, I mean--of course, it ain't altogether on the square, this lay I'm on for Warren. And, then, if he should be up to anything out-of-the-way-fishy, which I'm sometimes tempted to suspect, and they find out that he is not at Chicago while he's pretending to be there, even suppose they couldn't molest me at all, they certainly could stop _his_ little game; and in our present circumstances, Bess, my girl, we must remember that stopping his little game means stopping our rations.'

'Yes, yes,' said Mrs. Jenkins mournfully, twisting the end of her apron about in her fingers in a way habitual to her in perplexity. 'I know that, Eph; and yet I cannot tell you how uneasy and wretched I am feeling, and have been feeling ever since we parted, and you went to undertake this dark and dirty business for Warren. Dark we know it is, and dirty I cannot but suspect it to be. O Eph, could you but give it up? If you only would be satisfied to stick regularly to some kind of fixed work, and let us live respectable, however poor!'

'We couldn't easily be poorer than we've been when we lived disrespectable,' said Jenkins, with a kind of surly good humour; 'and I think I could stick to work if only the pay would stick _to me_--but where is it to be had? You can't have forgotten, Bess, how hard I have had to work in this place, and how I never got any for a constancy--yes, yes, I know what your shake of the head means, and you've good right to shake it, I'm not going for a moment to deny that--and how, then, Warren was always giving me, or getting somebody else to get me, odd jobs. Well, one can't work steadily at odd jobs; it ain't in the nature of things, nor yet in one's own nature. If one's business is unsteady, one must be unsteady with it; and where any thing except odd jobs is to come from, especially if I vex Warren, and he shunts me off in earnest, I cannot guess. Can you?'

'I think, Eph--indeed I am sure--Mrs. Griswold would be a good friend to us, if you would let me tell her the truth--I don't mean about Warren, of course, but about our difficulties. I think she would get you a fixed place somewhere, through Mr. Carey's influence--and Warren would never hear of it; or if he did hear of it, he would know, by her ignorance of your being his brother, that you had not betrayed his secret. And, after all, he would then be effectually rid of us, Ephraim, and I think he would be very glad to be rid of us--or I should say of you, because he does not know of my existence--at the price of having his pride hurt by Mrs. Griswold or Mr. Carey observing that there is a strong likeness between him and the husband of her baby's nurse. Do think of it, Ephraim, and let me ask her, when she has got over her great trouble a little, and can look beyond it for the sake of other people. It will not be long first, for she is the most unselfish woman, I do believe, in all the world. Will you let me speak to her, Eph, when I can get an opportunity?'

'Well,' replied Ephraim Jenkins, with a little reluctance in his tone, as of an instinctive, irrepressible shrinking from the burden of a threatened respectability in the future, combined with regular hours and regular work, 'I don't mind--only, you know, _I must_ see this piece of business through to the end; and now, Bess, I must tell you what has brought me here; you were awfully anxious to know a few minutes ago, until you went off at a tangent all about Mrs. Griswold, and a fixed occupation and what not, and now you seem to have forgotten all about it.'

'No, I haven't, Ephraim dear,' replied his wife, as she put her arm round his neck, and looked earnestly into his face; 'only the first feeling of fright has gone off in the pleasure of seeing you again so unexpected--for it did give me a shock of fright as well as a shock of joy. I suppose it was some business of Warren's?'

'_I_ suppose it is too,' he said; 'but I only suppose, for I don't _know_--and you have thrown more light on it since I came than it has had on it all through the journey, and before I started; for I came off in such a desperate mortal fright about you, my girl, that I never remembered, until I was hours on my way, that the telegram was intended for Warren, and not for me at all.'

'What telegram, Ephraim? I am all astray--I don't understand you. Did you get a telegram? From whom?'

'Yes, _I_ got a telegram, but I suppose, as you are all right, the message could not have had anything to do with me.'

He took out of a breast-pocket in his shaggy overcoat a crumpled and a dirty telegraph form, which was to the following effect:

'From Thornton Carey, New York, to Trenton Warren, 3 Bryan's Block, Chicago. You are earnestly requested by Mrs. Griswold to come to New York without delay. It is of the utmost importance that she should see you. A terrible calamity has occurred.'

Mrs. Jenkins read this document twice over with the seriousness of a person unaccustomed to telegrams, and then returned it to Ephraim. 'The terrible calamity, of course, means Mr. Griswold's murder.'

'Of course that is clear enough now; but can you not understand, Bess, that not knowing a word of that, and merely having this vague instruction, and being so accustomed to be and see myself called Trenton Warren in words and in writing, and, above all, having my mind so full of you, the mere notion of a calamity in connection with this house meant merely _you_ for my fears, and I started at once, never remembering that Mrs. Griswold could not possibly have meant to address me. It all came quite clear to me after a while, but then I began to torment myself again with fresh fears. "What," I thought, "if Bess should be very ill and dying, and have confessed it all to this kind woman whom she likes, and Mrs. Griswold should have taken this clever way of letting me know that she knows, and that I need not be afraid of anything but just come to her at once?" From the instant that flashed into my thoughts, Bess, you may guess I was in an agony to get on every mile of the road, and I give you my word I could hardly drag myself up the stoop to ring at the door-bell, so completely had that second notion taken possession of my mind. I was in such a state of alarm and suspense that, God forgive me, I do believe the news that old fellow told me at the door did not seem half terrible to me.'

'You were always fond of me, Eph, any way,' said his wife, as she kissed him heartily, while tears glittered in her frank sweet eves.

'I should think so, Bess,' he replied. 'I am bad enough, I know, but not such a duffer, no, nor such a brute neither, as I should be if I ever leave off being _that_. Hollo! there's somebody coming. I hope it isn't the police people, in which case I had better clear out. I can come back, you know, when they're gone; but I've a constitutional objection, to say nothing of the present circumstances, to being inside a house with them.'

The approaching steps were not those of undesirable intruders. It was only Annette, who had brought the baby--she carried the little creature very much as Moggs carried Gabriel Varden's sword, as if she was terribly afraid of it--to her nurse. Annette explained that the child having grown restless, madame had rung her bell, and asked for Mrs. Jenkins and on being told that Mrs. Jenkins had a friend to see her, she had merely asked her to carry the child down to her. Annette reported that madame was still where Mrs. Jenkins had left her, sitting at her writing-table sorting letters and other papers, and that she was quite composed, though looking very ill and mortally pale. And Annette, to whom Miss Montressor had been most gracious, had just glanced into the boudoir as she came down-stairs, and found the celebrity fast asleep.

Mrs. Jenkins laughed. Her sister had always been famous for a most enviable power of going to sleep. 'I never remember a time when Nelly--Clara, I mean--could not eat and sleep, no matter what happened, or to whom it occurred,' she said admiringly to Ephraim, who remembered that those faculties were useful, but not particularly sentimental, 'and that for his part, he liked a touch of nerves about a woman; least-ways what some people called nerves, but he called feelings.'

In this pointed remark Ephraim Jenkins did injustice to his fair sister-in-law. Miss Montressor was by no means deficient in feeling, but she was very healthy, and just now she was very tired, so that it was her nature to sleep under the circumstances, and sleep she accordingly did. Having made her communications, Annette tripped out of the room, after having honoured Mrs. Jenkins's visitor with a condescending bow and a long, steady, attentive stare, of which he was uncomfortably conscious, and which he tried to avoid, but in vain.

He need not have felt alarmed, however, at any risk of recognition by Mdlle. Annette. She merely remarked in soliloquy, 'How all these Yankees resemble one another in an astonishing fashion. When one has seen one of them, one has seen them all, except just in the regard of height and thinness. It is only in France that we find variety of physiognomy.'

'What a pretty child!' said Ephraim Jenkins, touching the infant's dimpled cheek with his finger, as it lay close to his wife's breast--'not much like our poor little man, Bess?'

'No, bless her heart; not like him in the plump healthy face, but sweet and clever like him;' and the mother, who had not buried her dead out of her memory, hugged the baby with a slight rapidly-suppressed sob, and loved her husband all the more dearly for the reference to the little crippled sufferer who had been her treasure and her heartache in one.

'Now then, Bess, we must consult about what is to be done, for I do think things look extremely queer. The last communication I had from Warren was from London, and there was nothing at all unusual in it; he merely enclosed some letters to be sent on to New York, and sent me a lot of blank signatures. He has never given me the slightest inkling of what his business in England is really about. By the bye, isn't it odd that there should be the same sort of mystery about what Mr. Griswold has been doing over there? I wonder if they were in the same boat.'

'I have heard Mr. Warren spoken of among the servants,' said Mrs. Jenkins, 'as being Mr. Griswold's greatest friend, but I have never heard them say anything about any business partnership between them, and there is no other name in the firm that I know of.'

'O, then I suppose they were not mixed up in business,' said Ephraim, 'and I must say, knowing what I do of my worthy brother, I should feel inclined to add, so much the better for poor Mr. Griswold during his own lifetime, and for those whom he has left to profit by his gains. I suspect they would find them materially reduced if Warren had had the handling of any of them. Of course, I have not had much to do with his affairs down at Chicago; but there is a precious lot of bogus in what I have had to do with, and I have been asked some very nasty questions lately--in writing, of courser I mean, and in his person, which I was totally unable to answer; and as he didn't authorise me to go in for cable expenses, I have been obliged to leave them unanswered, and I expect some of my correspondents are getting rather impatient under these circumstances. Bess, you will observe that what Miss Montressor let out just now when she took me for Mr. Dolby has rather a curious meaning; for suppose Warren should have left London, as her account of Mr. Dolby seems to imply, he will not have got my last letters informing him of the dilemma in which I find myself; and how I am to get out of it I am sure I can't tell should this be the case. Of course, as long as I felt sure he was in England, it was tolerably plain sailing; there was nothing to fear but delay; but if he has left England and come back here, and is hiding about anywhere and not communicating with me, I consider something much worse than delay is to be apprehended, and I don't at all bargain for getting into any extensive and difficult scrape in the matter. So that you see I had more motives than one in coming up immediately on receipt of the telegram; because, though I really did make the blunder I have told you of in forgetting that it could not be addressed to me in reality, I have had for some weeks a great wish to find out, if possible, what Warren is about. I don't think I can be involved in any serious mischief, because I have taken such care never to forge his name--all papers that have left my hands bearing it are genuine signatures.'

'That's a comfort,' said Bess; 'but how can you find out anything about him here? You can't go to any of the places where he is known without betraying him.'

'That's just my difficulty,' said Jenkins, 'because it's a perfectly new light to me that his real business friends here, the people with whom he is actually mixed up in big transactions, verily and indeed believe him to be at Chicago. My notion was that it was only some one or two particular persons he wanted to impose upon; but the matter takes a completely different complexion now that I find out his most confidential people here believe him to be where he is not.'

'How do you know they are also imposed upon?' asked Bess.

'By the telegram, my dear. Of course Mr. Carey must have got the address from Mrs. Griswold, or at Warren's office--there can be no two ways about that--and of course, under the circumstances, they would not deceive him, nor can Mrs. Griswold be reasonably supposed to be in ignorance of his whereabouts. If any one was to be in the secret, it would be the people in this house; and now it is plain that Warren is deceiving them all round, and, you see, it isn't pleasant. He was always a good hand at getting from out of one more than one bargained for; but I must say, in this matter I should like to know what amount of dirty work I am expected to do, and how deep the dirtiness is.'

Jenkins had said all this in his usual light and careless way, and while he was speaking had kept playing with the baby in his wife's arms; but she, watching him closely, discerned very real alarm and anxiety under his slightly-swaggering manner and at once well-founded fright.

'Ephraim,' she said, laying her hand upon his arm impressively, 'have you ever been sorry for listening to my advice?'

'Never, Bess', he replied; 'but I have very often been sorry for not listening to it.'

'Well,' she said, 'hear it and take it now. Of course, I understand no more, but a good deal less, of what your brother's object and actions are than you do; but something within me, something which I have heard before now in my life, and which never told me a lie, says plainly to me that you have put yourself into a dreadful danger; that whatever Warren is about it can be no good, and it is going wrong. Just think for a moment. I suppose it was for the best of purposes in the world, but how mad a thing it must be for any man well known in business in a great city like New York to imagine that he could successfully pretend to be in one place while he is in another, in these days of telegraphs, for any length of time beyond a few hours or days at the outside. He is a clever man, well up in business, and must have known this,--the difficulty would have been quite plain to him,--and therefore it is only reasonable to conclude that he had some motive for running this great risk strong enough to induce him to throw aside all his knowledge of business, and all his shrewd habits of calculating the consequences. Is this motive likely to be a good one, to say nothing of the crooked ways and the deceit through which he has to carry it out? I think you know your brother by this time too well to give him credit for good motives; besides, good things do not need doing in the dark. Now I will tell you what you must do, Eph, and you must do it at once if you want to save me from distraction, and yourself from being mixed up in the ruin which I am certain is coming on Warren. Whatever he intended to do while he was supposed to be at Chicago he intended to do quicker than this; he never can have imagined that the sham could be prolonged up to this time; and your not having heard from him, his not having returned, or, if what Miss Montressor says is the case, that he has been passing under the name of Dolby, and that he has come back to America, which would make it all look much more extraordinary and more dangerous, it is plain that he has failed, and failure in any object which he had to gain by such risky means must have a big meaning, and you must get out of it, Eph.'

'Get out of it, Bess? How am I to get out of it? I will do anything you tell me; you have got a clearer head than mine--since I have been down there at Chicago I have come to think myself no end of a bungler--but all your clear-headedness won't see my way out of this fix, at all events until we can get hold of Warren. If he comes back and shows up, I will promise you I will face him, and tell him at once that I will have no more of it, come what may; and I can't stir a peg until he does come.'

'Yes you can, Eph, and you must,' said his wife; 'you must, or we shall be utterly ruined, without doing him any good. I feel convinced this is no business matter, but something very bad, in which he has not succeeded, and which will involve us all. Now this is what you must do. Get back to Chicago without an hour's delay, without seeing any one, bring away all the business papers, take them to Warren's real place of business, and get off to England.'

Jenkins stared at her in open-eyed wonder. 'Get off to England! What on earth for?'

'How can I tell?' she said, rather impatiently. 'I speak under an irresistible impulse and a great fear. You must have done with this thing, and this is the only way to get rid of it.'

'But I haven't money to do all this,' said Jenkins. 'You don't suppose Warren would trust me with more than he could help; and if I were to leave him in the lurch in this way, I shouldn't like to take any in advance, you know; that would look as ugly as anything he may have been doing, for I suppose the worst of it has been dabbling in other people's dollars.'

'Don't fret about that,' said his wife; 'there is a good deal coming to me, and I have had some handsome presents since I have been here, from people who have come to see the baby. I said nothing about it to you in my letters, because I thought I should like to have a little fund saved to give you a pleasant surprise. How thankful I am for it now! Even if it should not be enough, I know Mrs. Griswold, who has been most kind and generous to me, will help me, help me too in her ladylike and considerate way, without asking me any distressing questions. Besides, there is Nelly--Clara, I mean--she would help me in a minute; but I would rather not ask her for any help of that kind, but rather trust her to get you some employment in England.'

'You're settling it all, Bess,' said Eph, shaking his head doubtfully, but still with a lightening of his countenance and an additional cheerfulness in his voice, which brought the consoling conviction to his wife's mind that he was rapidly being swayed by her argument, and seeing in her own she was tracing relief and a future. 'You're settling it all very comfortably, and I believe you're right that it is about the best thing I could do.'

'It is the only thing!' said Bess emphatically.

'I don't like leaving you behind,' he said; 'there's a big difference between being parted as we are now, you in New York and I in Chicago, and being parted as we should be then, you in New York and I Heaven knows where, on the other side of the ferry; and I don't like it.'

'I don't like it either,' said Mrs. Jenkins; 'but it can't be otherwise, Eph dear, just now. You and I have to turn over a new leaf--you know you have promised me you will begin, and I believe you--but it is likely to be hard work just at first, and we shall want help from good friends. The best I have in the world, I feel quite sure, is Mrs. Griswold, and I could not desert her in this great trouble; first, for gratitude sake; secondly, for policy sake; and thirdly, because if I ask her to help us I must be ready to say I am prepared to help her. That is only fair, you know; but I will follow you, Eph, before very long, before the little store of money I shall be able to let you take with you is exhausted, even if you should not have good luck. But I feel you will have good luck, and Nelly--Clara, I mean--will be sure to be able to get something for you, even from the very first; now that she has seen you, she will know that you won't disgrace her recommendation.'

A rapidly-suppressed smile at his wife's enthusiasm crossed Jenkins's face. He did not absolutely believe that Miss Montressor had been captivated by her brief interview with him; but he secretly thought it by no means improbable that Miss Montressor would be glad to secure herself from any ill-timed allusion on his part to his extraordinary likeness to her very intimate friend Mr. Dolby, which might be embarrassing on this side the Atlantic, by facilitating his passage to the other; so that as his reflections on those Bess had reached the same result, he did not think it necessary to descant upon the divergence of their mental paths.

The desperate intentness of his wife's representations was seconded by Ephraim Jenkins's own conviction, and he became more and more serious as she pointed out how it must be known that Warren was being personated, since he was mixed up with the affairs of the Griswolds, and had been sent for in this emergency. She impressed upon her husband that his own danger of discovery could at best be delayed only until, weary of getting no reply to their telegrams and letters, Mrs. Griswold's friends should send some one to Chicago, and their ambassador would instantly discover that Warren was not at that city. This final representation had more effect upon him than any of her foregoing arguments. It showed him that the bubble was close upon bursting, and immediately won him to obedience to her wishes.

After that their interview lasted only a few minutes. It was arranged that he should start for Chicago that night, and immediately on his arrival should telegraph, in reply to Mrs. Griswold's message, that Warren was absent when it arrived; that he should then make immediate preparations for his own departure, warning Warren by letter to London of his determination, and come away, bringing all the business papers with him for deposit at Warren's office. This done, he was again to see his wife, receive from her the promised funds, and sail for England within a week, leaving Warren forewarned as far as lay in his power, but otherwise to get out of the Chicago scrape as well as he could.

It did not escape either Ephraim or his wife that there might be danger, supposing Warren should have returned to New York, of Eph's encountering him, which would have the double disadvantage of involving Ephraim in either the abandonment of his project of escape, or in a violent quarrel with his arbitrary brother. Mrs. Jenkins was much more disturbed when this possibility occurred to her mind; but recollecting that if Warren should be skulking about New York, he would be quite certain to avoid either his own offices or the steamer wharves, Eph would be safe from the risk of encounter, provided on his return he went to only those two places.

All this, and much more, having been hurriedly agreed upon between them, the husband and wife parted most affectionately, and though with much distress, with a dawning of hope in both hearts, and a conviction on the part of Mrs. Jenkins that Ephraim had really and truly turned over a new leaf.