
bore some abbreviations in pencil with a notation of small sums. Nothing could
be gathered from the comparison of the writing in the book with that of the
yellow letters which lay in the box: the smeared name had been carefully
printed, and so bore no resemblance to the signature of those letters; and the
pencil abbreviations and figures had been made too hurriedly to bear any
decisive witness. »I will ask him to write - to write a description of the
locket,« had been one of Mr Lyon's thoughts; but he faltered in that intention.
His power of fulfilling it must depend on what he saw in this visitor, of whose
coming he had a horrible dread, at the very time he was writing to demand it. In
that demand he was obeying the voice of his rigid conscience, which had never
left him perfectly at rest under his one act of deception - the concealment from
Esther that he was not her natural father, the assertion of a false claim upon
her. »Let my path be henceforth simple,« he had said to himself in the anguish
of that night; »let me seek to know what is, and if possible to declare it.« If
he was really going to find himself face to face with the man who had been
Annette's husband, and who was Esther's father - if that wandering of his from
the light had brought the punishment of a blind sacrilege as the issue of a
conscious transgression, - he prayed that he might be able to accept all
consequences of pain to himself. But he saw other possibilities concerning the
claimant of the book and chain. His ignorance and suspicions as to the history
and character of Annette's husband made it credible that he had laid a plan for
convincing her of his death as a means of freeing himself from a burthen-some
tie; but it seemed equally probable that he was really dead, and that these
articles of property had been a bequest, or a payment, or even a sale, to their
present owner. Indeed, in all these years there was no knowing into how many
hands such pretty trifles might have passed. And the claimant might, after all,
have no connection with the Debarrys; he might not come on this day or the next.
There might be more time left for reflection and prayer.
    All these possibilities, which would remove the pressing need for difficult
action, Mr Lyon represented to himself, but he had no effective belief in them;
his belief went with his strongest feeling, and in these moments his strongest
feeling was dread. He
