Chapter XXVII. Ronald Comes of Age

'Strange,' Ronald Le Breton thought to himself, as he walked along the Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo, some weeks later--the day of Herr Max's trial,--'I had a sort of impulse to come down here alone this afternoon: I felt as if there was an unseen Hand somehow impelling me. Depend upon it, one doesn't have instincts of that sort utterly for nothing. The Finger that guides us guides us always aright for its own wise and unfathomable purposes. What a blessing and a comfort it is to feel that one's steps are continually directed from above, and that even an afternoon stroll through the great dreary town is appointed to us for some fit and sufficient reason! Look at that poor girl over there now, at the edge of the Embankment! I wonder what on earth she can have come here for. Why...how pale and excited she looks. What's she going so near the edge for? Gracious heavens! it can't be...yes...it is... no, no, but still it must be...that's what the Finger was guiding me here for this afternoon. There's no denying it. The poor creature's tempted to destroy herself. My instinct tells me so at once, and it never tells me wrong. Oh, Inscrutable Wisdom, help me, help me: give me light to act rightly! I must go up this very moment and speak to her!'

The girl was walking moodily along the edge of the bank, and looking in a dreamy fashion over the parapet into the sullen fast-flowing brown water below. An eye less keen than Ronald's might have seen in a moment, from her harassed weary face and her quick glance to right and left after the disappearing policeman, that she was turning over in her own mind something more desperate than any common everyday venture. Ronald stepped up to her hastily, and, firm in his conviction that the Finger was guiding him aright, spoke out at once with boldness on the mere strength of his rapid instinctive conjecture.

'Stop, stop,' he said, laying his hand gently on her shoulder: 'not for a moment, I beg of you, not for a moment. Not till you've at least told me what is your trouble.'

Selah turned round sharply and looked up in his face with a vague feeling of indefinable wonder. 'What do you mean?' she asked, in a husky voice. 'Don't do what? How do you know I was going to do anything?'

'You were going to throw yourself into the river,'Ronald answered confidently; 'or at least you were debating about it in your own soul. I know you were, because a sure Guide tells me so.'

Selah's lip curled a little at the sound of that familiar language. 'And suppose I was,' she replied, defiantly, in her reckless fashion; 'suppose I was: what's that to you or anybody, I should like to know? Are you your brother's keeper, as your own Bible puts it? Well, yes, then, perhaps I was going to drown myself: and if I choose, as soon as your back's turned, I shall go and do it still; so there; and that's all I have to say about it.'

Ronald turned his face towards her with an