CHAPTER XXXVIII.

MOTHER AND LOVER.

JACK followed his father down-stairs, and did not say a word. It had been an exciting morning; and now that he knew all, though the excitement had not as yet begun to flag, care came along with it. Suspense and mystery were hard, and yet at the same time easier to bear than reality. The calamity might have loomed larger while it was unknown, but at least it was unaccompanied by those real details from which there is no escape. When Mr Brownlow and his son reached the bottom of the stair, they stopped, and turned, and looked at each other. A certain shade of apology was in Mr Brownlow's tone. "I thought it was all over last night," he said; “I thought you were all safe. You know my meaning now."

"Safe, sir, safe!" said Jack, "with this always hanging over our heads? I don't understand why

we were not allowed to know; but never mind. I am glad it has come, and there is nothing more to look for. It bears interest, I suppose."

"That must be a matter of arrangement. I suppose it does," said Mr Brownlow, with a sigh.

Jack gave vent to his feelings in a low, faint, prolonged whistle. "I'll go and tell them about the carriage," he said. This was all the communication that passed between the father and the son; but it was enough to show Mr Brownlow that Jack was not thinking, as he might very naturally have thought, of his new position as the future son-inlaw of the woman who had wrought so much harm. Jack's demeanour, though he did not say a word of sympathy to his father, was quite the contrary of this. He did not make any professions, but he took up the common family burden upon his shoulders. The fifty thousand pounds was comparatively little. It was a sum which could be measured and come to an end of; but the interest, that was the dreadful thought. Jack was practical, and his mind jumped at it on the moment. It was as a dark shadow which had come over him, and which he could not shake off. Brownlows was none of hers, and yet she might not be wrong after all in thinking that all was hers. The actual claim was heavy enough, but the possible claim was overwhelming. It seemed to Jack to go

into the future and overshadow that as it overshadowed the present. No wonder Mr Brownlow had been in despair-no wonder almost the young man gave a very heavy sigh as he went into the stable-yard and gave his instructions. He stood and brooded over it with his brow knitted and his hands buried in his pockets, while the horses were put into the carriage. As for such luxuries, they counted for nothing, or at least so he thought for the moment-nothing to him; but a burden that would lie upon them for years-a shadow of debt and difficulty projected into the future, that seemed more than any man could bear.

It will be seen from this that the idea of his own relations with Pamela making any difference in the matter had not crossed Jack's mind. He would have been angry had any one suggested it. Not that he thought of giving up Pamela; but in the mean time the idea of having anything to do with Mrs Preston was horrible to him, and he was not a young man who was always reasonable and sensible, and took everything into consideration, any more than the rest of us. To tell the truth, he had no room in his thoughts for the idea of marriage or of Pamela at that moment. He strode round to the hall door as the coachman got on the box, and went up to Sara's room without stopping to think. "The carriage is

here," he said, calling to Sara at the door. He would have taken the intruder down-stairs, and put her into it as courteously as if she had been a duchess; for, as we have already said, there was a certain fine natural politeness in the Brownlow blood. But when he heard the excited old woman still raving about her rights, and that they wanted to kill her, the young man became impatient. He was weary of her; and when she fell into threats of what she would do, disgust mingled with his impatience. Then all at once, while he waited, a sudden thought struck him. Poor little Pamela! what could she be thinking all this time? How would she feel when she heard that her mother had become their active enemy? In a moment there flitted before Jack, as he stood at the door, a sudden vision of the little uplifted face, pale as it had grown of late, with the wistful eyes wide open, and the red lips apart, and the pretty rings of hair clustering about the forehead. What would Pamela think when she knew? What was to be done, now that this division, worse than any unkind sentence of a rich father, had come between them? It was no fault of hers, no fault of his; fate had come between them in the wildest, unlooked-for way. And should they have to yield to it? The thought gave Jack such a sudden twinge in his own heart, that it roused him altogether out

of his preoccupation. It roused him to that fine self-regard which is so natural, and which is reckoned a virtue nowadays. What did it matter about an old mother? Such people had had their day, and had no right to control the young, whose day was still to come. Pamela's future and Jack's future were of more importance than anything that could happen at the end, as it were, of Mrs Preston's life, or even of Mr Brownlow's life.

This was the consideration that woke Jack up out of the strange maze he had fallen into on the subject of his own concerns. He turned on his heel all at once, and left Mrs Preston arguing the matter with Sara, and went off down the avenue almost as rapidly as his own mare could have done it. No, by Jove! he was not going to give up. Mrs Preston might eat her money if she liked-might ruin Brownlows if she liked; but she should not interfere between him and his love. And Jack felt that there was no time to lose, and that Pamela must know how matters stood, and what he expected of her, before her mother went back to poison her mind against him. He took no time to knock even at the door of Mrs Swayne's cottage, but went in and took possession like an invading army. Probably, if he had been a young man of very delicate and susceptible mind, he very knowledge that Pamela might now be con