"Am I really Verity--Verity Westbrook, who used to live in that dreadful Montagu Street ?" And then she would look wistfully at him--for she had grown strangely timid and self-distrustful.

But he would only laugh at her in his kindly way.
"Yea-Verily, my child, it is certainly you yourself," he would answer; "when Nature made you she broke her mould, there could not be two editions of Verity." Sometimes, when she was low and weak, and memories of the past horrors were too vivid, and even his big laugh and little jokes failed to drive them away, she would cling to his arm and entreat him not to send her back.

"If I see that place again I shall die," she once said, and the look in her eyes, and the way her small hand went to her throat, as though the very thought impeded her breathing, told him that she spoke the truth.
What was he to do with her?
That was the question that occupied him for many a day.

The summer had passed, and autumn was well advanced before he found the right answer.
One October afternoon he had taken her out for a walk as usual, and they had sat down to rest on a bench under a wide-spreading chestnut tree overlooking a village green.

An aged donkey and some geese were feeding near them, but there was no one in sight.