In less
than three years, by some kind of artful management, and by the
exercise of consummate hypocrisy, Mr. Milsom had contrived to get
himself free again, and to return to England his own master.
He landed in Scotland, and tramped from Granton to Yorkshire, where an
accidental encounter with an old acquaintance tempted him to linger at
Raynham. The two tramps, scoundrels both, and both alike penniless and
shoeless, had stood side by side at the gates of the park, to see the
stately funeral train pass out.
And thus Thomas Milsom had beheld her whom he called his daughter,--the
girl who had fled, with her old grandfather, from the shelter of his
fatal roof three years before.
After that unprofitable interview with Honoria, Thomas Milsom his face
Londonwards.
"The day will come when you and I will square accounts, my lady," he
muttered, as he looked up to those battlemented turrets, with a
blasphemous curse, and then turned his back upon Raynham Castle, and
the peaceful little village beneath it.
The direction in which Mr. Milsom betook himself, after he passed the
border-land of waste ground and newly-built houses which separates
London from the country, was the direction of Ratcliff Highway. He
walked rapidly through the crowded streets, in which the crowd grew
thicker as he approached the regions of the Tower. But rapidly as he
walked, the steps of Time were faster.
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