And now farewell for a season.

When we next meet we shall have a larger common ground; we shall be master and pupil no longer.
"You shall see the boy once again, by his wish and my own.

He shall go with you to your house to-night, and travel with you the first stage to-morrow.

I have arranged for his return." He then conducted Arthur into the house, where he bade adieu to the mistress and to the younger son; the elder, his charge that was to be, meeting him as he came out, and accompanying him home.

The boy had formed a great attachment to him, and the idea of their future relations sent a strange and unwonted glow into Arthur's mind, so that he parted from him on the next day, "with wonder in his heart," and something very like an ache too.
This last episode will appear to my readers to be so fantastic as to give the work at once a fictional character; they will say that on some real lines I have constructed a romance of the wildest type, and that Arthur is no longer an interesting personality, because as a rule he is too ordinary to be ideal, in the last two chapters too illusory to be real.
All I can urge is this: the chapters shall be their own defence.