It was night in the old cathedral town. The ten o\'clock bell had rung, and Mr. Galloway, proctor and surrogate, at home in his residence in the Boundaries, was thinking he might go to rest. For several days he had been feeling very much out of sorts, and this evening the symptoms had culminated in what seemed a bad cold, attended with feverishness and pain in all his limbs. The old proctor was one of those people whose mind insensibly sways the body; and the mysterious disappearance of Arthur Channing was troubling him to sickness. He had caused a huge fire to be made up in his bedroom, and was seated by it, groaning; his slippered feet on a warm cushion, a railway rug enveloping his coat, and back, and shoulders; a white cotton nightcap with a hanging tassel ornamenting gracefully his head. One of his servants had just brought up a basinful of hot gruel, holding at least a quart, and put it on the stand by his easy chair. Mr. Galloway was groaning at the gruel as much as with pain, for he hated gruel like poison.

Thinking it might be less nauseous if disposed of at an unbroken draught, were that possible--or at least soonest over--Mr. Galloway caught up the basin and put it to his lips. With a cry and a splutter, down went the basin again. The stuff was scalding hot. And whether Mr. Galloway\'s tongue, or teeth, or temper suffered most, he would have been puzzled to confess.

It was at this untoward moment--Mr. Galloway\'s face turning purple, and himself choking and coughing--that a noise, as of thunder, suddenly awoke the echoes of the Boundaries. Shut up in his snug room hearing sounds chiefly through the windows, the startled Mr. Galloway wondered what it was, and edged his white nightcap off one ear to listen. He had then the satisfaction of discovering that the noise was at his own front door. Somebody had evidently got hold of the knocker (an appendage recently made to the former naked panels), and was rapping and rattling as if never intending to leave off. And now the bell-handle was, pulled in accompaniment--as a chorus accompanies a song--and the alarmed household were heard flying towards the door from all quarters.

"Is it the fire-engine?" groaned Mr. Galloway to himself. "I didn\'t hear it come up."

It appeared not to be the fire-engine. A moment or two, and Mr. Galloway was conscious of a commotion on the stairs, some visitor making his way up; his man-servant offering a feeble opposition.

"What on earth does John mean? He must be a fool--letting people come up here!" thought Mr. Galloway, apostrophising his many years\' servitor. "Hark! It can never be the Dean!"

That any other living man, whether church dignitary or ordinary mortal, would venture to invade him in his private sanctum, take him by storm in his own chamber, was beyond belief. Mr. Galloway, all fluttered and fevered, hitched his white nightcap a little higher, turned his wondering face to the door, and sat listening.

"If he is neither in bed nor undressed, as you say, I can see him up here just as well as below; so don\'t bother, old John," were the words that caught indistinctly the disturbed invalid\'s ear: and somehow the voice seemed to strike some uncertain chord of memory. "I say, old John, you don\'t get younger," it went on; "where\'s your hair gone? Is this the room?--it used to be."

Without further ado the door was flung open; and the visitor stepped over the threshold. The two, invader and invaded, gazed at each other. The one saw an old man, who appeared to be shrunk in spite of his wraps, with a red face, surmounted by a cotton nightcap, a flaxen curl or two peeping out above the amazed eyes, and a basin of steaming gruel: the other saw a tall, fine, well-dressed young fellow, whose face, like the voice, struck on the chords of memory. John spoke from behind.

"It\'s Mr. Roland Yorke, sir. He\'d not be stayed: he would come up in spite of me."

"Goodness bless me!" exclaimed the proctor.

Putting down his hat and a small brown paper parcel that he carried, Roland advanced to Mr. Galloway, nearly turning over the stand and the gruel, which John had to rush forward and steady--and held out his hand.

"I don\'t know whether you\'ll shake it, sir, after the way we parted. I am willing."

"The way of parting was yours, Mr. Roland, not mine," was the answer. But Mr. Galloway did shake the hand, and Roland sat down by the fire, uninvited, making himself at home as usual.

"What\'s amiss, sir?" he asked, as John went away. "Got the mumps? Is that gruel? Horrid composition! I think it must have been invented for our sins. You must be uncommon ill, sir, to swallow that."

"And what in the world brings you down here at this hour, frightening quiet people out of their senses?" demanded Mr. Galloway, paying no heed to Roland\'s questions. "I\'m sure I thought it was the parish engine."

"The train brought me," replied matter-of-fact Roland. "I had meant to get here by an earlier one, but things went cross and contrary."

"That was no reason why you should knock my door down."

"Oh, it was all my impatience: my mind\'s in a frightful worry," penitently acknowledged Roland. "I hope you\'ll forgive it, sir. I\'ve come from London, Mr. Galloway, about this miserable business of Arthur Channing. We want to know where you sent him to?"

Mr. Galloway, his doubts as to fire-engines set at rest, had been getting cool; but the name turned him hot again. He had grown to like Arthur better than he would have cared to tell; the supposition flashed into his mind that a discovery might have been made of some untoward fate having overtaken him, and that Roland\'s errand was to break the news.

"Is Arthur dead?" he questioned, in a low tone.

"I think so," answered Roland. "But he has not turned up yet, dead or alive. I\'m sure it\'s not for the want of looking after. I\'ve spent my time pretty well, since he was missing, between Waterloo Bridge and the East India Docks."

"Then you\'ve not come down to say he is found?"

"No: only to ask you where you sent him that night, that he may be."

When the explanation was complete, Roland discovered that he had had his journey for nothing, and would have done well to take the opinion of Hamish Channing. Every tittle of information that Mr. Galloway was able to give, he had already written to Hamish: not a thought, not a supposition, but he had imparted it in full. As to Roland\'s idea, that business might have carried Arthur to dishonest neighbourhoods in London, Mr. Galloway negatived it positively.

"He had none to do for me in such places, and I\'m sure he\'d not of his own."

Roland sat pulling at his whiskers, feeling very gloomy. In his sanguine temperament, he had been buoying himself with a hope that grew higher and higher all the way down: so that when he arrived at Mr. Galloway\'s he had nearly persuaded himself that--if Arthur, in person, was not there, news of him would be. Hence the loud and impatient door-summons.

"I know he is at the bottom of the Thames! I did so hope you could throw some light on it that you might have forgotten to tell, Mr. Galloway."

"Forgotten!" returned Mr. Galloway, slightly agitated. "If I remembered my sins, young man, as well as I remember all connected with him, I might be the better for it. His disappearance has made me ill; that\'s what it has done; and I\'m not sure but it will kill me. When a steady, honourable, God-fearing young man like Arthur Channing, whose heart I verily believe was as much in heaven as earth; when such a man disappears in this mysterious manner at night in London, leaving no information of his whereabouts, and who cannot be traced or found, nothing but the worst is to be apprehended. I believe Arthur Churning to have been murdered for the large sum of money he had about him."

Mr. Galloway seized his handkerchief, and rubbed his hot face. The nightcap was pushed a little further off in the process. It was the precise view Roland had taken; and, to have it confirmed by Mr. Galloway\'s, seemed to drive all hope out of him for good.

"And I never had the opportunity of atoning to him for the past, you see, Mr. Galloway! It will stick in my memory for life, like a pill in the throat. I\'d rather have been murdered myself ten times over."

"I gave my consent to his going with reluctance," said Mr. Galloway, seeming to repeat the fact for his own benefit rather than for Roland\'s. "What did it signify whether Charles was met in London, or not? if he could find his way to London from Marseilles alone, surely he might find it to Helstonleigh! Our busy time, the November audit, is approaching: but it was not that thought that swayed me against it, but an inward instinct. Arthur said he had not had a holiday for two years; he said there was business wanting the presence of one of us in London: all true, and I yielded. And this is what has come of it!"

Mr. Galloway gave his face another rub; the nightcap went higher and seemed to hang on only by its tassel, admitting the curls to full view. In spite of Roland\'s despairing state, he took advantage of the occasion.

"I say, Mr. Galloway, your hair is not as luxuriant as it was."

"It\'s like me, then," returned Mr. Galloway, whose mind was too much depressed to resent personal remarks. "What will become of us all without Arthur (putting out of sight for a moment the awful grief for himself) I cannot imagine. Look at his mother! He nearly supported the house: Mrs. Channing\'s own income is but a trifle, and Tom can\'t give much as yet. Look at me! What on earth I shall do without him at the office, never can be surmised!"

"My goodness!" cried modest Roland. "You\'ll be almost as much put to it, sir, as you were when I went off to Port Natal."

Mr. Galloway coughed. "Almost," assented he, rather satirically. "Why, Roland Yorke," he burst forth with impetuosity, "if you had been with me from then till now, and abandoned all your lazy tricks, and gone in for hard work, taking not a day\'s holiday or an hour\'s play, you could never have made yourself into half the capable and clever man that. Arthur was."

"Well, you see, Mr. Galloway, my talents don\'t lie so much in the sticking to a desk as in knocking about," good-humouredly avowed Roland. "But I do go in for hard work; I do indeed."

"I hear you didn\'t make a fortune at Port Natal, young man!"

Roland, open as ever, gave a short summary of what he did instead--starved, and did work as a labourer, when he could get any to do and drove pigs, and came back home with his coat out at elbows.

"Nobody need reproach me; it was worse for me than for them--not but what lots of people do. I tried my best; and I\'m trying it still. It did me one service, Mr. Galloway--took my pride and my laziness out of me. But for the lessons of life I learnt at Port Natal, I should have continued a miserable humbug to the end, shirking work on my own score, and looking to other folks to keep me. I\'m trying to do my best honestly, and to make my way. The returns are not grand yet, but such as they are I\'m living on them, and they may get better. Rome was not built in a day. I went out to Port Natal to set good old Arthur right with the world; I couldn\'t bring myself to publish the confession, that you know of, sir, while I stopped here. I thought to make my fortune al............