Mr. O'Donnell got home that evening in remarkably good-humour. Lavirotte had explained to him that his own hope of coming into this money had been absolutely nothing until the visit from the man who was working with him. So that here were two men who knew all about a certain chance, believing thoroughly in it. Why should not he, a third, who knew absolutely nothing about the matter, accept their judgment? What a splendid thing it would be if, after all, the firm which he had created did succeed in weathering the storm! He had said nothing to his wife about the matter on his way to the station, in the train to Glengowra, or from the Glengowra station to his own home. He thought he would preserve the good news-by this time it had taken the substantial form of news in his mind-until they were quietly seated in his little library, where many of the projects leading to his fortune had been devised. When at last he reached that haven, he found the writing-table littered with the ledgers he had left upon it, and between the leaves of one of these ledgers was the completed rough balance-sheet he had made out. Mrs. O'Donnell was astonished to find her husband in such good-humour. She could in no way understand it, for he had not even seen their boy or noticed the progress towards recovery he was making. "The run has done you good, James," she said. "I told you it would. Why, it has been as much to you as good news." "I should think it has," he said; "in fact, Mary, I have heard the very best news while I was in Glengowra. I have every reason to hope we may be able to save the business, anyway." "Thank God!" cried the woman devoutly. There was a tone of incredulity in her voice. It was not easy to imagine that, after all the hideous certainties of ruin they had been facing for days, there was any prospect these certainties would melt away before doubts that might be shaped into hopes. They were now both seated in their accustomed easy-chairs. The old man caught the arms of his firmly, as though he now saw no reason why it should come under the hammer and pass away for ever from him. "Yes," he said; and then he told her all that had passed between him and Lavirotte, enjoining her to strict secrecy. Then the wife lifted up her voice in praise of Lavirotte, and thanksgiving for their great deliverance, and bargained with her husband for one thing-namely, that she should be allowed to tell the good news to Nellie. "For," said the mother, "she heard the bad news, and bore it like a true-hearted woman! Of course if she was only to think of him, she must have been very sorry to hear it, but when we remember it affected herself too, it must have been harder still to bear. Eugene never heard the bad news. It is only now fair she should hear what Lavirotte promises." It was there and then settled that the hopes aroused that evening should be made known to Ellen Creagh. Next day Mrs. O'Donnell found herself under no necessity of keeping close to her husband, for he was not only not depressed and hopeless, but active, cheerful, and full of projects for the future. So she went early to Glengowra, and, having taken the girl aside, told her all. Nellie clasped her hands in mute stupefaction, and when she did speak at last, could say only: "Mr. Lavirotte! Mr. Lavirotte! Has he really promised to do this, and do you think the thing is in his power? I never felt more bewildered in all my life." Yes, it was enough to make one think one was dreaming. This Lavirotte had asked her to marry him. He had said her refusal would ruin him. O'Donnell had asked her to marry him, and she had consented. Then this Lavirotte had sought O'Donnell's life. In the struggle both had been badly hurt. O'Donnell had forgiven Lavirotte. Upon this came the absolute ruin of O'Donnell's father, and the consequent ruin of his son also. By this commercial catastrophe the possibility of his marrying her was indefinitely postponed, and at the very moment when it might be supposed a man in Lavirotte's position, and of his excitable temperament, would nourish hope anew of succeeding where he had failed before with her, he offered to rescue the father from ruin, and reinstate the whole family in affluence! "It is incredible," she said, after a long pause. "I cannot believe it possible." "But it is true," said Eugene's mother. "Believe me, my dear, it is true. My husband, after all his years and years in business, is not likely to make a mistake or be misled in such matters." "It may be true," said the girl, "but I cannot believe it." All things were now going on well with everybody. The old merchant was no longer in dread of bankruptcy. Lionel Crawford had got an additional hold on Lavirotte. The two wounded men were progressing rapidly towards perfect health. Lavirotte had forsworn his fickleness, and declared himself devoted to Dora. The two men who had met in a struggle for life had shaken hands by proxy, and sworn friendship anew; and Nellie and Dora passed the happy days in the full assurance of the devotion of their lovers, and the speedy approach of their marriages. The time went quickly by. Dr. O'Malley called regularly at the hotel, and regularly reported favourably of the patients. Now Lavirotte wrote a few lines every day to Dora, and she every day a long letter to him. And every day came Nellie to sit a while with Eugene, and hear his voice, and go away with strengthening consciousness that daily he grew more like his own self. Once more Lionel Crawford was happy at his old work, excavating at the base of the old tower with increased vigour, and getting rid of the fruits of his toil with greater despatch. Nothing, indeed, but good seemed to have come of that dark night's work. It is true that the police were still a little bitter over their disappointment, and that the townsfolk observed a more reserved attitude towards those connected with that affair. But if those chiefly concerned in the matter were content, the police and the people might be dismal and disagreeable if they pleased. In the town of Rathclare, besides Mr. and Mrs. O'Donnell, there was another person greatly pleased with the turn things had taken. This was Mr. John Cassidy, a gentleman of slight build, pale, small, impertinent, pretty face, the nose of which turned up slightly. He had an exquisitely fair moustache, an exquisitely fair imperial, and the most exquisitely made clothes a man on a hundred pounds a year could afford to wear in a provincial town in Ireland. He had what he believed to be a very pretty English accent, although he never had been out of Ireland. He wore a delicate yellow watch-chain purely as an ornament, for its use had no existence. He wore an eye-glass for ornament also. He had never been seen to smoke a pipe, and never much more than the tenth part of a cigar at a time. He was always scrupulously neat and consciously pretty, and spoke of the whole female sex as "poor things," as though it grieved him to the soul he could not make every woman alive absolutely happy by marrying her. He really wasn't a scamp, and had no offensive accomplishments or acquirements. He had a ravenous curiosity, particularly in love affairs. How it came to be that a man who devoted so much of his time to the courtship of others, should have himself the time to break and cast away all female hearts he encountered, no one could tell. It was the great prerogative of his genius to be able to do so. The chief source of his present amiable condition of mind was that he found himself about to start in a few days for London, and that, by way of an introduction to that vast place, he carried with him the clue to a mysterious love affair in which he was not a principal, and which he had sworn to follow up. He had sworn to his friend of the Post Office that he would discover what girl Lavirotte was sweet on in London before he had made love to Nellie Creagh, and his efforts in such a case hitherto had seldom failed. He had no heart and no tact, but instead of these a wonderful power of going straight at the mark, and in a case of this kind demanding of a woman point-blank: "Is it a fact that Mr. Lavirotte, while engaged to you, asked Miss Creagh to marry him? I'm interested in all subjects of this kind." Mr. John Cassidy had up to this been employed in the head office of the railway at Rathclare, and was now about to separate himself from his dear friend, a clerk in the Post Office, and go to London, where something better had offered, and where he should have, he hoped, for the sake of womankind, a larger female audience to hearken to his attractions, and where, moreover, he should have a very handsome mystery of his own particular pattern to solve.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The gloom of irreparable ruin had fallen on the house of Vernon. The deeper its business affairs became investigated the more ghastly appeared the inevitable finish. At first people were doubtful as to whether the result of the failure would be this or that or the other, in connection with Mr. Vernon's social position. Now it seemed there was no longer any room for speculation. Bankruptcy of the worst kind would be the end. All at once a still more startling rumour got abroad. At first people whispered it only in quiet places, and only to confidential friends. Then gradually a murmur arose. Finally, within a month of the failure of the bank, and before yet the accounts had been fully investigated, people had been heard to say openly that William Vernon ought to be made the object of a criminal prosecution and put in the dock. The panic of fear which had kept people's mouths shut, upon this suggestion, disappeared at once; and where there had been, a few hours before, but hints and faint whispers, and timid words of acquiescence, there was now a loud, clear, articulate demand for the impeachment of William Vernon. There was, on the day of the bank's failure, scarcely less talk of that disaster than there was now of the passionate desire that this fraudulent speculator should suffer at the hands of the law. An evening paper hinted that steps of the kind ought to be taken at once. Next morning, Mr. William Vernon was not to be found. He had left Dublin-Ireland-for some place unknown abroad-Mexico it was supposed. A few days after the flight of Vernon, the accountants, in whose hands the bank affairs had been placed, made a report, and upon this report was based the first call. It was not a heavy one. It ruined only a few people, and drove only one man mad. James O'Donnell met this call promptly and cheerfully. It did not strain him in the least. He had put most of his savings into Vernon's bank, but then he was a man of large prudence, and held a considerable reserve of ready money. Indeed, after he had paid the first call he had still at command what people in moderate circumstances would consider a very large sum. When he got the acknowledgment from Dublin, he showed it to his wife with a buoyant laugh, and said: "You see, Mary, I am not yet quite a bankrupt. Up to this I have met every engagement, this included, and, please God, I shall be able to meet all." Although it had been hoped that there would have been no delay to the marriage of Eugene and Nellie, a variety of circumstances made it desirable that a postponement of about a month should take place. In the present posture of affairs it would have been impossible for Mr. O'Donnell to settle money on his son; or, indeed, to give him anything worth speaking of, beyond the salary he drew in connection with the firm. When Eugene had recovered sufficient strength to bear the shock, he had been told of the misfortune which had overtaken his father in business. When he heard it he made little of it. He thought little of everything except his approaching marriage. It was Nellie who broke the news to him. She had been timid, fearful, as she approached the subject. She had prepared the way by saying that all those people who were dear to him were in good health and spirits, but that a certain unpleasant thing had occurred-a very unpleasant thing-a terribly unpleasant thing of a purely business nature; in fact, his father had lost a vast sum of money-all his savings. The young man looked grave, and said he was very sorry for the poor old man; but that-as long as the business held they should be more than comfortable, and that he was sure Nellie did not want riches such as would be his if this misfortune had not arisen. What exactly had happened? She told him all. He was serious, and said it was too bad-too hard on the governor, who was the best of men. In an interview later with his father, the latter told him that for the present he was not in a position to make any settlement whatever, but that if his son was contented to marry on his present salary, there would be no opposition. The son said he would be more than contented; that he had no extravagant habits or expensive tastes, and that he and Nellie could manage very well on the five hundred pounds a year his father allowed him. The old man said he had felt quite sure his son would be satisfied; but what would Nellie say, in the face of former promises he, the father, had made? The young man laughed a strong, joyous, wholesome laugh, and told his father that Nellie would marry him on a pound a week. "For you know, sir," he said, "she is not used to luxuries. She does not want them, and she is the most sensible, as she is the best, girl in the world." Then Eugene's father told his son of what Lavirotte had promised. "I am not surprised, father, to hear he has offered to help us. I always told you he was true as steel." At the word steel he winced, but recovered himself instantly. "People here don't like him, because they can't understand his quick southern ways. But the longer you know him the better you like him, and the more you'll trust him." When Eugene spoke to Nellie on the subject of his father's conversation with him, she confirmed his anticipations, and said: "You know, Eugene, that five hundred pounds a year is a great deal more than a girl like me could ever reasonably have hoped for. Why, it's a small fortune to one who has been a poor governess, and who never knew what it was to have even one hundred pounds a year." He took her in his arms and kissed her, and called her his own true, loyal darling, his best of girls, his wisest sweetheart, his only sweetheart. "And if the worst comes to the worst, Nellie, even supposing that the Lavirotte affair never turns up, you know I am young and once more strong, and if we had to go to America, love, I could hoe a field, or split rails, or conduct a car, or heave on a winch, or get a crust for the two of us somehow; and if the two of us mean, above all things, to be together, what are all other things to us compared to our being together?" She was of the same opinion, and so it was settled that at the end of the month to which the marriage had been postponed, it should take place as quietly as possible, but otherwise as though no trouble had overtaken the house of O'Donnell. By this time Lavirotte was established in London. Lionel Crawford had taken lodgings for Dora in Charterhouse Square, and Lavirotte lived in one of the streets leading from the Strand towards the river. John Cassidy was now regularly installed in his London situation, and had taken a genteel lodging in Bloomsbury. His fellow clerks did not, as a rule, live so near the great centre of London. They had rooms in Peckham, Islington, Kennington, and such ungenteel neighbourhoods. But no man with any pretensions to be handsome, a gentleman, and a lady-killer, could condescend to associate his name with such haunts of rabble London as Peckham, Islington, and Kennington. Up to this he had not been able to devote much time to what he was pleased to call "the Lavirotte mystery." A variety of other matters claimed his most careful attention. On his arrival in London, he found that his coats, and collars, and ties, and socks, although the very best that his money would allow him to get in Rathclare, were not at all the right things for a man of his antecedents in the matter of the fair sex. His clothes were, it is true, equal if not superior to those worn by the mere common, ordinary clerks with whom he was bound to associate, and whose coarse and ungenteel ways he was for a portion of the day obliged to endure. But then the clothes, which in Rathclare had been those of a man of distinguished fashion, were, to his chagrin, in London no more than those proper to a mere common clerk. This was a terrible revelation to a sensitive soul. Of course it could be remedied in the future; but how terribly the fact reflected upon the past, and fancy the figure he should have made in Rathclare if he, when there, had only known as much as he did now. Imagine how ladies would have stared and admired if he had but appeared in a costume such as he was now hastening to assume. Dainty shoes, clocked socks, trousers that fitted the limb as the daintiest of gloves fit the hands of the daintiest of duchesses, coat and waistcoat which could only be put on before meals and when the lungs were empty, collars and scarfs designed by Royal Academicians and tenderly executed by tradespeople who might, if they would, have written sartorial epics; such were the splendours now preparing for his exquisite person. Apart from the cares born of his tailor and outfitter, certain other little matters had to be arranged about his room. A Japanese letter-rack had to be purchased and hung up for the reception of his prospective love-letters. Open work, china dishes of elegant hues, although of cheap manufacture, had to be obtained and set forth for the reception of rose-leaves, photographs, and cards. The portraits of celebrated beauties had to be hung up, so that, should an acquaintance drop into his room, he might have an opportunity of showing his visitor the counterpart of his dearest friends. His fellow-clerks were coarse enough to consider him a humbug. His superiors at the office did not know whether he was an ass or not; but the clerks and the superiors agreed that he had two priceless virtues-he could tot all day long without making an error, and there was not a spot of extraneous ink on any folio of his books. By this time Lavirotte was thoroughly restored to health. Daily he paid a visit to Dora. The course of their true love was running with idyllic smoothness. No suitor could be more tender, enthusiastic, constant-minded than he. Dora's life was one long daydream. Her former solitary life in London now seemed to her like a dreary unreality, forced upon her imagination merely that her present life might stand out in glory against so gray and sad a background. Since Lavirotte left London of old, the place had grown dull and dismal around her. Now the whole city was bright and joyous once again. Instead of being a vast chasm filled with unfamiliar things and unfriendly forms, and dark with her inner solitude, the buildings now were full of vital beauty, and the people of courteous friendliness. Although she looked forward with pleasant anticipations to the time when she would not be even temporarily separated from Dominique, she could not persuade herself that the future would be more happy than the present. She seemed to want nothing now beyond just a little more of his society. Meanwhile Lavirotte had availed himself of Lionel Crawford's offer and taken the money, and was getting lessons. But, in addition to these, he was now busy in another way. The idea of the treasure mastered him as completely as it had the old man. He seemed to take but a second-rate interest in his own affairs, and every hour he could spare from the lessons and Dora was devoted to helping Crawford in his work at St. Prisca's Tower. He had said to Crawford: "There is no knowing when these poor O'Donnells will want the money. You said we should have it in six to eighteen months. We must have it sooner, much sooner, as soon as ever we possibly can." And so he bent himself to the work as he did to any other work he took in hand-wholly, passionately, fiercely. The old man said he would kill himself. He swore he did not care so long as he might succeed. Now that he had entered fully into the scheme of Crawford, and was actively helping him, he, too, felt the wild pleasure of the search; the inexorable determination of not sharing the secret with anyone. No; it was their secret, and they two, unassisted by anyone who might betray them, should alone reach the golden goal. So absorbed was he in the work at the tower that he could think of little else, and felt rather put out when one morning he received a letter from Eugene O'Donnell, saying that he and Nellie were to be married on Wednesday next week, and asking him to come over a day or two beforehand, as became a best man. About this time Mr. John Cassidy found himself arrayed according to his taste, with his room in order for the reception of anyone he might care to ask in, and with his hands free to follow up the Lavirotte mystery.