CHAPTER XIX.
"There's a letter for you, Dyce; forwarded from Rivenoak, I see." It lay beside his plate on the breakfast table, and Dyce eyed it with curiosity.

The backward-sloping hand was quite unknown to him.

He tapped at an egg, and still scrutinised the writing on the envelope; it was Constance who had crossed out the Rivenoak address, and had written beside it "The Vicarage, Alverholme." "Have you slept well ?" asked his mother, who treated him with much more consideration than at his last visit.
"Very well indeed," he replied mechanically, taking up his letter and cutting it open with a table-knife.
"HAVE MORE COURAGE.

AIM HIGHER.

IT IS NOT TOO LATE." Dyce stared at the oracular message, written in capitals on a sheet of paper which contained nothing else.