Hide and Seek

sat still for a few minutes, with his head on his hand and his heavy eyebrows contracted by an angry frown, staring sullenly at the flame of the candle. Joanna Grice's letter still remained to be finished. He took it up, and looked back to the paragraph that he had last read.

'As for the child mentioned in the advertisement'—those were the words to which he was now referring. 'The child?'—There was no mention of its sex. 'I should like to know if it was a boy or a girl,' thought Mat.

Though he was now close to the end of the letter, he roused himself with difficulty to attend to the last few sentences which remained to be read. They began thus:—

'Before I say anything in conclusion, of the sale of our business, of my brother's death, and of the life which I have been leading since that time, I should wish to refer, once for all, and very briefly, to the few things which my niece left behind her, when she abandoned her home. Circumstances may, one day, render this necessary. I desire then to state, that everything belonging to her is preserved in one of her boxes (now in my possession), just as she left it. When the letters signed 'A. C.' were discovered, as I have mentioned, on the occasion of repairs being made in the house, I threw them into the box with my own hand. They will all be found, more or less, to prove the justice of those first suspicions of mine, which my late brother so unhappily disregarded. In reference to money or valuables, I have only to mention that my niece took all her savings with her in her flight. I knew in what box she kept them, and I saw that box open and empty on her table, when I first discovered that she was gone. As for the only three articles of jewelry that she had, her brooch I myself saw her give to Ellen Gough—her earrings she always wore—and I can only presume (never having found it anywhere) that she took with her, in her flight, her Hair Bracelet.'

'There it is again!' cried Mat, dropping the letter in astonishment, the instant those two significant words, 'Hair Bracelet,' caught his eye.

He had hardly uttered the exclamation, before he heard the door of the house flung open, then shut to again with a bang. Zack had just let himself in with his latch-key.

'I'm glad he's come,' muttered Mat, snatching up the letter from the floor, and crumpling it into his pocket. 'There's another thing or two I want to find out, before I go any further—and Zack's the lad to help me.'

CHAPTER IX. MORE DISCOVERIES.

When Zack entered the room, and saw his strange friend, with legs crossed and hands in pockets, sitting gravely in the usual corner, on the floor, between a brandy-bottle on one side, and a guttering, unsnuffed candle on the other, he roared with laughter, and stamped about in his usual boisterous way, till the flimsy little house seemed to be trembling under him to its very foundations. Mat bore all this noise and ridicule, and all the jesting that followed it about the futility of drowning his passion for Madonna in the brandy-bottle, with the most unruffled and exemplary patience. The self-control which he thus exhibited did not pass without its reward. Zack got tired of making jokes which were received with the serenest inattention; and, passing at once from the fanciful to the practical, astonished his fellow-lodger, by suddenly communicating a very unexpected and very important piece of news.

'By-the-bye, Mat,' he said, 'we must sweep the place up, and look as respectable as we can, before to-morrow night. My friend Blyth is coming to spend a quiet evening with us. I stayed behind till all the visitors had gone, on purpose to ask him.'

'Do you mean he's coming to have a drop of grog and smoke a pipe along with us two?' asked Mat rather amazedly.

'I mean he's coming here, certainly; but as for grog and pipes, he never touches either. He's the best and dearest fellow in the world; but I'm ashamed to say he's spooney enough to like lemonade and tea. Smoking would make him sick directly; and, as for grog, I don't believe a drop ever passes his lips from one year's end to another. A weak head—a wretchedly weak head for drinking,' concluded Zack, tapping his forehead with an air of bland Bacchanalian superiority.

Mat seemed to have fallen into one of his thoughtful fits again. He made no answer, but holding the brandy- bottle standing by his side, up before the candle, looked in to see how much liquor was left in it.

'Don't begin to bother your head about the brandy: you needn't get any more of it for Blyth,' continued Zack, noticing his friend's action. 'I say, do you know that the best thing you ever did in your life was saving Valentine's picture in that way? You have regularly won his heart by it. He was suspicious of my making friends with you before; but now he doesn't seem to think there's a word in the English language that's good enough for you. He said he should be only too glad to thank you again, when I asked him to come and judge of what you were really like in your own lodging. Tell him some of those splendid stories of yours. I've been terrifying him already with one or two of them at secondhand. Oh Lord! how hospitably we'll treat him—won't we? You shall make his hair stand on end, Mat; and I'll drown him in his favorite tea.'

'What does he do with them picters of his?' asked Mat. 'Sell 'em?'

'Of course!' answered the other, confidently; 'and gets enormous sums of money for them.' Whenever Zack found an opportunity of magnifying a friend's importance, he always rose grandly superior to mere matter-of-fact restraints, and seized the golden moment without an instant of hesitation or a syllable of compromise.

'Get lots of money, does he?' proceeded Mat. 'And keeps on hoarding of it up, I daresay, like all the rest of you over here?'

'He hoard money!' retorted Zack, 'You never made a worse guess in your life. I don't believe he ever hoarded six-pence since he was a baby. If Mrs. Blyth didn't look after him, I don't suppose there would be five pounds in the house from one year's end to another.'

There was a moment's silence. (It wasn't because he had money in it, then, thought Mat, that he shut down the lid of that big chest of his so sharp. I wonder whether—)

'He's the most generous fellow in the world,' continued Zack, lighting a cigar; 'and the best pay: ask any of his tradespeople.'

This remark suspended the conjecture that was just forming in Mat's mind. He gave up pursuing it quite readily, and went on at once with his questions to Zack. Some part of the additional information that he desired to obtain from young Thorpe, he had got already. He knew now, that when Mr. Blyth, on the day of the picture-show, shut down the bureau so sharply on Mr. Gimble's approaching him, it was not, at any rate, because there was money in it.

'Is he going to bring anybody else in here along with him, to-morrow night?' asked Mat.