and they resented his merriment, but they were mistaken. He did He did not feel sorry and he did not feel glad; it was nothing to him, nothing one way or another; there was no reason why he should fight his way madly through the crowd, and indeed there was no good reason why he stood there at all.

'Those that win may laugh, Mr. Seaton,' said a harsh voice at his elbow; and turning he saw a man who, like others, fancied he was amused by the play then in full progress.

'You, Allold!' he remarked, the sensation that he was acting some part in a dream growing stronger upon him; 'I am not laughing, and I do not win-or-lose,' he added, after an almost imperceptible pause.

'What a lucky fellow you are! I wish I could say the same.' "Heavily hit?'

For answer Mr. Allold drew his forefinger lightly but suggestively across his windpipe.

'So bad as that!' commented the great promoter, with a faint interest.

The other nodded and walked off. The gentleman on the steps looked after his retreating figure and smiled in earnest.

'I do not think it is so bad as that.

I daresay he is not in at all.' Really it was like looking down from another world upon the shifts and lying and subterfuges and cares of this; but after a time Mr. Seaton grew weary of it all, and returned to his office.

There he found his partner-a man, his junior in the firm, though his senior in age, who, having brought money into the business, asked anxiously,

'Will it affect us much?' 'There is no telling. One can never know the houses that may be dragged down in a smash like

this; but we need not walk out to meet trouble half-way. If it is coming it will be here soon enough.'

'You take matters very coolly.' 'It is of no use to take them otherwise; yet-'

Afterwards the partner who had brought in money thought with a sort of frenzy over this conversation.

He sat opposite to me, sir, where you are sitting now,' he explained subsequently to a solicitor, 'and never blenched. I give you my word I should, from his manner, as soon have ventured to suspect the Governor of the Bank of England.'

Though there was not much actual business to transact at his office Mr. Seaton did not leave till long after the time when he usually returned to Palace Gardens.

'There has been a tremendous failure in the City,' he remarked to his wife, in explanation of his detention; 'but perhaps you have heard of it?'

No, Mrs. Seaton had not heard of it. She had not been out; and no visitor had called likely to be interested in such matters. It was understood in Palace Gardens as well as elsewhere that Mrs. Seaton did not profess any fondness for business affairs. Except in the most general manner her husband never at home spoke of commerce; and when she drove into the City-to fetch him, as she sometimes did, though rarely-she did not alight from the carriage and enter his office, but sat outside awaiting his leisure.

She had not brought Mr. Seaton much of a dot; but such as it was he settled carefully the amount on her. Other settlement she had none.

'A man cannot afford to take money out of his business,' Mr. Seaton said, when speaking on the subject. When he made this

observation, those to whom he addressed it laughed, and thought if any man could afford to do so, it was he.

'Yes, Overends have come to grief,' Mr. Seaton went on. It was at dinner he uttered these confidences; for returning so late there was no time for conversation before he dressed in order to sit down to that meal. A frightful affair; must mean ruin to thousands. I never saw such a sight in the City before.'

He talked about the matter a little longer, and then, seeing how little interest Mrs. Seaton seemed to take in the subject, passed on to other matters.

When the butler went down to the basement, he was very full of the news, and went out to try and get an evening paper. Not one was to be had in the neighbourhood, however, for love or money; and he must have gone to bed dissatisfied had another of the servants not discovered 'master' had brought one home with him, for a Standard lay on the marble slab surmounting the coil of hot-water pipes in the billiard-room.

Master had gone out saying 'no one need wait up for him;' mistress was in the boudoir playing the piano; the children were in bed; there happened to be no company that night, and in spite of the pleasant excitement caused by the tidings that so many people were ruined, the servants felt the house seemed dull and quiet; ere twelve they were all in bed and asleep. Long before that time Mrs. Seaton had closed the piano and gone up to her own room.

Never an early riser, it was nearly noon the next morning before her maid awoke her.

'If you please, ma'am,' said that functionary, 'Mr. Harriman is here and wants to see master.' Now Mr. Harriman was the

partner who had brought money into Mr. Seaton's firm.

Mrs. Seaton opened her eyes and asked what the time was. 'Gone half-past eleven, ma'am.' 'So late; well he cannot expect to find Mr. Seaton here at this hour. He knows perfectly Mr. Seaton always leaves home punctually at nine o'clock.'

'Yes, ma'am, but he did not do so this morning; he never came home last night at all.'

'What can you mean?' asked Mrs Seaton, bewildered.

'He never came home, ma'am ; the door was on the latch this morning when Sarah went downstairs, and master always puts up the chain after he comes in; and he is not in his dressing-room, and he has not been to the office, and Mr. Harriman says, if you please, ma'am, he wants to know where he is likely to find him, for he is needed in the City most particular.'

All in a hurry Mrs. Seaton suffered her maid to assist her to dress, and ran down-stairs to the library, where Mr. Harriman waited her coming.

'It is most important I should see Seaton immediately,' he began. 'Can you tell me where I had better go and look for him?

No; Mrs. Seaton could not. He went out after dinner, down to his club as she understood, and she had not seen him since.

'He was not going on any journey, I suppose?' asked Mr. Harri

'Not the least. Unless he has gone to the office, and you have crossed him as you came here; and yet,' she added, he would never go to the office without changing his dress. Do you think anything can have happened to him, Mr. Harriman ?'

'No, I think not; but I fancy something has happened to me,' was the answer.

Mrs. Seaton looked straight in his face, and asked him what he meant.

'I would rather not say at present,' he replied. "I hope and trust that I may never have to say fully what I mean.'

Without further ceremony he went out of the house and down into Kensington High-street, where, hailing the first hansom he met, he bade the man drive to Pall Mall.

Yes, Mr. Seaton had been at his club the previous evening; but he only stopped a few minutes. It was late, and he jumped into a cab, and told the porter to direct the driver to take him to Palace Gardens.

Mr. Harriman went from Pall Mall to Scotland-yard; there he had a tale to tell, and he told it.

'He has never left London, I think you will find, sir,' was the remark hazarded by the person in authority at the head office of police; but we will soon know all about it.'

In this case, however, as in many others, the police never knew anything about it. For all the information they could glean, Mr. Seaton might have thrown himself over one of the bridges or taken the wings of the morning and flown to the uttermost parts of the earth. He might have been in St. Giles's or in the next world; he had vanished utterly, disappeared as totally as though the

ground had opened and swallowed him up alive.

Mr. Harriman never saw him again. The detectives employed independently by many indignant creditors failed to discover the faintest clue to his whereabouts. Palace Gardens lost him for ever that night when he went out with only a light top-coat over his evening dress, and said no one need sit up for him. To wife and children he never returned; the postman left no letters from foreign parts; the 'master mind' had proved its superiority in this at least that it enabled its possessor to disappear in the very nick of time, and to leave no trace nor tiding of his whereabouts.

Another twelve hours and he I would have been under surveillance; now it was about as useful looking for him as for a needle in a truss of hay.

If he had stayed he could not have proved a source of profit to any one, and he might have been a cause of inconvenience to many. The lawyers made a great fuss about his disappearance; but they managed to run up plenty of costs, as they always do, no matter who goes or who stays, who wins or who loses. There was nothing for the creditors; but then, all the same, there would have been nothing had they sent him into. penal servitude. It was very hard for his wife to encounter such a storm as ensued all alone; but her husband could not have stood beside her when in Millbank, and in Millbank most assuredly he would have found himself had he waited to stand his trial.

It was whispered that some of those who talked most loudly of his 'cowardice' in running away from 'the consequences of his own acts' and 'leaving them to bear the burden of his misdeeds' were

In various parts of the kingdom widows and orphans clamoured for vengeance; but they had to partake of poverty without that condiment, and probably in the long run digested their bitter meal as well as if he had been stood in the public pillory for their gratification.

Not a creature was much the worse because of his absence except Mr. Harriman, and with one mind therefore the wise public decided he was an accomplice, the worse criminal perhaps of the two. He stuck to his guns, and people wondered he was not ashamed of himself. He made himself active in endeavouring to trace the missing man, and universal opinion decided he had been well paid to preserve the secret.

He

had lost everything, and proved the loss by figures; whereupon the wise men of Gotham said, 'Figures could be so manipulated as to prove anything,' and the loss, if he sustained any, had been made up to him in other ways.

What a to-do there was for a time in Palace Gardens as well as in Throgmorton-street! As nothing was in settlement, the trustees in bankruptcy and the lawyers worked their will amongst the goods and chattels the great man had gathered together.

That they were somewhat disappointed by the result of their capture goes perhaps without saying. Persons like Mr. Seaton go in more for show than for intrinsic worth. The furniture had cost a large amount, it is true; but furniture once used is after

all but second-hand, whereas a good picture is value until its canvas hangs in tatters, ay, and after.

An old master, however, no matter how valuable, would not have served Mr. Seaton's end so well as a suite of chairs, sofa, and ottoman upholstered in silk. He had kept open house in order to maintain his credit, and nothing which failed to minister to that end could be found in it.

To decorators, upholsterers, the makers of mirrors, the inventors of parquet, and the sellers of carpets he had been a liberal patron. Turn where he pleased in Holyrood House, which was the modest name of the desirable residence in Palace Gardens, he could scarcely fail to see his own reflection in some looking-glass; go where he would his eyes were gladdened with the sight of some entirely new effect in ornament. Now he wandered through what might have been a Moorish interior; from that he passed into a bookroom decorated in the style of the Middle Ages. The conservatory resembled a square cut out of the corridor of the Crystal Palace, and the dining-room could only be likened to the Egyptian Court in the same building. As for the drawing-room, it at once combined all styles and defied definition of any. Its windows opened on to a broad terrace, such as is sometimes presented to view on the stage; below that a small and pretty garden bordered and sheltered by great elm-trees; beyond that an iron railing divided a paddock-like enclosure in Kensington Gardens from the 'grounds' of Holyrood House; and further off still were to be seen the dark yews and oaks that are historical in the annals of the old comfortable-looking palace where our present Queen was born, and many

another king and queen lived and died.

Mrs. Seaton had left Palace Gardens long ere the things came to be ticketed. Indeed, as she went almost immediately after the disappearance of her husband, strangers going through the house said it did not look like a place where there had been such a shipwreck, but rather like a mansion waiting the return of the family.

After a time the servants departed also, making a noise and confusion ere they scattered abroad, such as bees indulge in when they swarm.

Before their final exodus they were much given to feel cold shivers' and to 'expect to meet master sudden.' His portrait in the library upset them,' and a few of his belongings which a housemaid turned out of a drawer in the bookcase 'gave her quite a turn.'

When the time for the auction arrived the house would have been overrun with the curious and the indignant had the ruling powers not decided to charge five shillings each for catalogues, and without a catalogue no one was admitted to view. Every article in the house was arranged and lotted; the mirrors were taken down from the mantelpieces and the curtains from the windows. Mr. Seaton himself was propped up against a pile of books, and surveyed the bidders blandly from his costly frame.

Everything was sold; from the croquet set to the carriage-horses, from the oldest saucepan in the kitchen to the billiard-table; every article was put up, bidded for, knocked down, and carted away.

It was not known who secured Mr. Seaton: the competition for his presentment was by no means so spirited as that for his person had been, but even that went, carried off speedily and securely

in a cab; and finally not a thing was left about or on the premises save a few broken flower-pots, a battered tin kettle no one would take at any price, a black cat who had certainly not brought her late owner any of that good luck which is supposed to follow the footsteps of the negro portion of the feline species, and the fixtures, which of course remained in their accustomed places.

The board in front which stated the desirable mansion was to be sold had been put up long before, and all having been done in the way of dismantling the place and making it look forsaken and forlorn that could be done, the last man to remain in the house took his departure from it on a melancholy evening towards the end of the September of 1866, and left the residence in charge of an old woman whose profession it was to look after family residences, and who told a young clerk who questioned her upon the subject she never felt afraid in a house, was it ever so big, 'because, sir,

lor bless you!-I ain't worth a-murdering.'

Holyrood House did not go off as easily as its former owner; on the contrary, it hung on hand for an unconscionable period.

Times were bad, though not so bad as some of us have since known them. Money was scarce, as money always is when people who own it are afraid of investing in any security that can be offered. City people perhaps felt shy of living where so much notoriety had been compassed. West-end folks thought possibly the sort of celebrity which hung about the house was not precisely of that description which made it quite a desirable residence.

Anyhow, let the reason be what it would, though plenty of persons went to view no one re