"What can be sweeter or more charming than an English May-day? I declare I\'ve seen nothing in the East at all comparable to it."

The speaker was Tom Bristow; the person addressed was a casual compagnon de voyage, whose acquaintance he had made during the Channel passage; and the scene was a first-class compartment in the mail train from Dover to London.

"You wouldn\'t be so ready to praise an English May-day if you had been here last week, as I was," was the reply. "No sunshine--not a gleam; but, in place of it, a confounded east wind that was almost keen enough to shave you. Every second fellow you met spoke to you through his nose; and when you did happen to get near a fire, you were frozen through on one side before you were half warmed through on the other."

"Well, it\'s pleasant enough now, in all conscience," said Tom, with a smile of easy content.

Tom Bristow, who was very thorough in most of his undertakings, had remained abroad--extending his travels into Palestine and Egypt--till his health was completely reestablished. But, as he said to himself, he had now had enough of sands and sunsets; of dirty Algerines and still dirtier Arabs; of camel-riding and mule-riding; of beggars and bucksheesh; and he was now coming back, with renewed zest, to the prosaic duties of everyday existence, as exemplified, in his case, in the rise and fall of public securities and the refined gambling of the London Stock Exchange.

By the time he had been a week in London he had made himself thoroughly master of the situation again, and almost felt as if he had never been away. "I have been so long used to an idle life," he said to himself, about a fortnight after his return, "that very little work seems to knock me up. Why not take the five o\'clock train this afternoon, and run down as far as Gatehouse Farm, and spend a couple of days with old Li Dering? Where in the wide world is there any air equal to that which blows across the sandhills of the old farm?"

Between nine and ten o\'clock on Sunday morning Tom Bristow knocked at the well-remembered door. After sleeping at the Station Hotel, he had walked leisurely across the fields, his heart beating high with the expectation of shortly being able to grasp his friend by the hand. Everything seemed as if he had left the farm but yesterday, except that then it was autumn and now it was spring. Mrs. Bevis answered his knock. She started at the sight of him, and could not repress an exclamation of surprise. "Yes, here I am once more," said Tom, with his pleasant smile. "Don\'t tell me that Mr. Dering is not at home."

Mrs. Bevis\'s answer was a sudden burst of tears.

"What has happened, Mrs. Bevis?" cried Tom, in alarm. "Not--not--?" His looks finished the question.

"Oh, Mr. Bristow, haven\'t you heard, sir?" cried Mrs. Bevis through her sobs.

"I\'ve heard nothing--not a word. I have only just returned from abroad."

"Mr. Dering, sir, is lying in Duxley gaol, waiting to take his trial at the next assizes."

"His trial!" echoed Tom in amazed perplexity. "Trial for what?"

"For wilful murder, sir!"

"Can this be true?" cried Tom, as he sank back, with blanched face and staring eyes, on the old oaken seat in the porch.

"Only too true, sir--only too true!" moaned Mrs. Bevis. "But I\'ll never believe that he did it--never!" she added emphatically. "A kinder heart, a truer gentleman, never drew breath."

"I\'ll say amen to that," replied Tom, earnestly. "But Lionel Dering committed for wilful murder! It seems an utter impossibility."

"Why, all England\'s been ringing with the story," added Mrs. Bevis.

"And yet I\'ve never heard of it. But, as I said before, I\'ve only just got back from the East, where I was two months without seeing a newspaper.

"I couldn\'t bear to tell you about it, sir. My heart seems almost broken as it is. But I\'ve got the newspapers here with all the account in. Perhaps you would like to read them for yourself, sir."

"I should indeed, Mrs. Bevis. But did I understand you aright when you said that Mr. Dering was in Duxley gaol?"

"That\'s the place, sir."

"Duxley in Midlandshire?"

"The very same, sir."

"But what was Mr. Dering doing so far away from home?"

"Law, sir I\'d forgotten that you were a stranger to the news. Master\'s a rich man now, sir. His uncle died last autumn, and left him a great estate close by Duxley. He\'s been living there ever since."

"You astonish me, Mrs. Bevis. But what is the name of the estate?"

"Park Newton. But may I ask whether you know Duxley, sir?"

"I know Duxley very well indeed. I was born and brought up there."

"To think of that, now!"

"Then the name of Mr. Dering\'s uncle must have been Mr. Arthur St. George?"

"That\'s the name, sir. I recollect it quite well, because it put me in mind of St. George and the Dragon. But I\'ll fetch you the newspapers."

She brought the papers presently, and left Tom to himself while he read them. The case was as Mrs. Bevis had stated it. Lionel Dering stood committed to take his trial at the next assizes for the wilful murder of Percy Osmond.

Mrs. Bevis, coming back after a quarter of an hour, found Mr. Bristow buried deep in thought, with the newspapers lying unheeded by his side.

"You don\'t believe that he did it, do you, sir?" she asked, with tearful earnestness.

"I would stake my existence on Mr. Dering\'s innocence!" said Tom, emphatically.

"God bless you, sir, for those words!" cried Mrs. Bevis. "There must surely be some way to help him--some way of proving that he did not do this dreadful thing?"

"Whatever friendship or money can do shall be done for him. That you may rely upon."

"Mr. Dering saved your life, sir. You will try and save his, won\'t you?"

"I will--so help me Heaven!" answered Tom, fervently.

"It is strange," mused Tom, as he walked sadly back to the station, "that in all our long conversations together Dering should never have mentioned that he had an uncle living within three miles of Duxley, and I should never have spoken of the town by name as the place where I was born and reared. And then to think that Tobias Hoskyns, my old governor, should be the man of all men into whose hands Dering has entrusted his case! But the whole affair is a tissue of surprises from beginning to end."

Next morning, at nine o\'clock, Mr. Tom Bristow, after a preliminary knock, walked into the private office of Mr. Tobias Hoskyns, of Duxley, attorney-at-law.

Mr. Hoskyns was a frail-looking, spare-built man of some fifty-five or sixty years. He was rather short-sighted, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles. He had gray hair, and gray whiskers that ended abruptly half-way down his cheeks, as though too timid to venture farther. He was dressed with a certain old-fashioned precision, that took little or no heed of the variations of fashion, but went on quietly repeating itself from one year\'s end to another. He was very fond of snuff, which he imbibed, not after the reckless and defiant manner affected by some lovers of the powdered weed, but in a deferential, half-apologetic kind of way, as though he were ashamed of the practice, and begged you would make a point of forgetting his weakness as speedily as possible. He carried an old-fashioned silver snuff-box in his waistcoat pocket, and in another pocket a yellow silk handkerchief of immense size, bordered with black. In short, Mr. Hoskyns was a clearly individualized figure, and one might safely say that, by sight at least, he was known to every man, woman, and child in Duxley.

He was very pleased indeed to see his quondam clerk. "Then you do still manage to keep your head above water, eh?" he said, as he shook Tom warmly by the hand.

"Yes. The waters of speculation have not quite swallowed me up," said Tom, demurely.

"Ah, you know the old proverb, \'a rolling stone,\' et cetera. You should have stuck to your stool in the outer office, as I advised you to do. You might, perhaps, have been junior partner by this time, and--this in your ear--the business gets more lucrative every year; it does really. Ah, Tom, Tom, you made a great mistake when you left Duxley! Thought you were going to set the Thames on fire, I know you did."

"Experience, sir, is said to make fools wise. Let us hope that I shall have gathered a little of the commodity by-and-by."

"Well, you must come and dine with me this evening. Can\'t stay now. I\'m due at the gaol in fifteen minutes."

"That\'s the very place to which I want to go with you."

"Eh? Bless my heart, what do you want to go there for?"

"To see the same man that you are going to visit--to see my dear friend, Lionel Dering."

"Why, good gracious, you don\'t mean to say----" and Mr. Hoskyns took off his spectacles, and stared at Tom in blank amazement.

Then Tom had to explain, in the fewest possible words, how it happened that he and Lionel Dering were such excellent friends. Five minutes later they were on their way to the gaol.

As they passed through the lawyer\'s outer office, Tom glanced round. With one exception, the faces of all there were strangers to him. The exception was not a very inviting person to look at, but Tom went up and shook hands with him. He was a tall, big-boned, loosely-built man of five and forty, dressed in very rusty black--an awkward, shambling sort of fellow, unshaven and uncombed, with grubby hands and bleared eyes, and with a wild shaggy mop of hair which had once been jet black, but was now thickly sprinkled with gray. The man\'s features were wanting neither in power nor intellect, but they were marred by an air of habitual dissipation--of sottishness, even--which he made no effort to conceal.

"Jabez Creede is still with you, I see," said Tom, as he and the lawyer walked down the street.

"Yes, I still keep him on," answered Hoskyns, "though, if I have threatened once to turn him away, I have a hundred times. With his dirty, drunken ways, the man, as a............