first time for an easy chair in his dressingroom, where he had fallen into such a deep sleep that it was thought best not to disturb him. So, leaving the shaded lamp in the adjoining chamber, that no glimmer of light might arouse him from the long coveted slumber, Letty sat in the darkness beside the invalid, listening to his heavy breathing and pondering over her husband's message.

Unpleasant doubts and fears were mingling with her affectionate trust in his innate goodness. This projected departure-from which Mark shrunk when his sister most vehemently urged it-who had first planned it, and why? If the people in the village, like the servants at the park, predestined poor Mark all sorts of evil fortune, were there not other and pleasanter places in England where they could dwell unknown, till their honest industry had wiped the stain from his name? And whither were they going? Mark had never breathed a word as to his destination, or how the necessary cash was to be raised for a voyage. Letty began to feel herself ill-used, and was mentally penning a remonstrance to her husband for his reticence, when fatigue weighed down her weary eyelids, and she slept to dream that she was nestling beside him, in the porch of a rose-covered cottage, in some Utopian land, whose name escaped her.

She woke up with a start and a smile, for the dream was so vivid that Mark's kisses still seemed warm on her lips, and his voice in her ear. But the start was followed by a shiver, and as she drew her shawl around her, she could have fancied that the air had grown much colder; that the night wind was blowing through the room as if from an open casement. But was it indeed fancy? Letty resolved to go and ascertain. But as, after drawing the blankets more closely round the sleeping Squire, she softly rose, a slight noise struck upon her ear, and a shadow flitted across the adjoining bed-chamber, between her and the dim lamp.

And now the girl's heart beat fearfully, and her limbs would scarcely support their weight. One of the windows, easily reached by means of the trellis work nailed against the house, had evidently been raised; and a man whose back was towards her, after listening a moment at the closed curtains of the couch, crossed the room and unlocked the Indian cabinet.

In her extreme terror Letty caught at a chair for support, and slightly stirred it. At the sound the intruder sharply raised his head and looked around him. The next moment Letty was clinging round him, striving to wrest from his hands the bag of gold he had just appropriated.

"No, no; never, never!" she gasped,

But his firm grip retained its hold, and the eye that met her imploring gaze was hard and stern.

"It was my father's, it is mine, and I must have it," he hissed in her ear. "The Providence you talk about has given me the opportunity, and I will not let it slip. Loose me!"

But the same wild whisper, "No, no, never! Put it back, put it back," answered him.

"Letty," he muttered, "I swear to you that I will not take one farthing more than the sum of which my parents were robbed. But for that I came, and I will not stir without it. Go you away, and forget that you have seen me here."

Letty released his hands to throw her arms round his neck. "You will not hear me," she sobbed," and there is nothing before us but sin and misery. God help me! God help us both! I could have borne poverty, sickness, anything but the loss of your honesty. Oh, Mark! my poor, poor mistaken husband."

And then, gliding on to her knees, with streaming eyes and folded palms she prayed in broken but fervent words, scarcely spoken above her breath, that some good spirit would bend the stubborn will, and touch the closed heart which refused her entreaties.

Mark, with the coveted money still in his possession, took one stride towards the window, then paused and looked back at his kneeling wife. He had never meant her to know this. Mrs. Henderson, misinformed by one of the servants, had assured him that the slumbers of the convalescent Squire were no longer watched. And Letty had seen him! Henceforth he was abased in the eyes of the only creature by whom he cared to be honoured. Could he complete the crime while she knelt there invoking heaven in his behalf? He came back to her side, bent over her till his lips touched her clammy forehead, then dropping the bag of gold in her lap, he sprang through the casement and disappeared in the darkness.

But Letty did not rise. With features that were stiffening with horror she crouched lower and lower, staring wildly at the door of the dressing-room. For there, unnoticed by Mark, or by herself until this moment, stood Squire Desborough, supporting himself against the door-post, and holding in his right hand one of the loaded pistols which always hung over the mantel-piece.

CHAPTER XLIII.

FROM JOYCE DORMER'S DIARY.

HE house is quiet now. Aunt Letheby and Aunt Jane and their husbands have gone away, and Aunt Lotty, Doris, and I are alone.

How desolate a house seems when there has been a death in it. We move quietly about, as though we feared to disturb some one. We speak in I low voices, and if we hear a door shut suddenly it makes us start. There is 2 cloud hanging over us that weighs us down, and we cannot free ourselves from its atmosphere.

I thought all these feelings would have vanished when the funeral was over, and the blinds drawn up, and daylight let in once more-when the house was relieved of the solemn presence of the dead man.

But we cannot shake off the weight that oppresses us, though we wonder that we should feel thus deeply the death of a man we so little liked as Mr. Carmichael-that is, Doris and I wonder, for Aunt Lotty mourns as an affectionate wife would mourn for the best of husbands.

But Aunt Lotty believes him to have been the best of husbands, and if she ever happened to see any faults in him, death has blotted them all out, for death is a great obliterator of failings. As a general rule, we remember more good of our friends after their death than we ever did in their lives; perhaps, also, we have a superstitious reverence for the dead, and care not to speak lightly of them.

Aunt Lotty certainly remembers more good of Mr. Carmichael than ever belonged to him. If either of them was ever to blame, she fears it was herself. She was not good enough for such a man, so full of virtues, so superior in intellect. Poor Aunt Lotty! She has

canonised Mr. Carmichael already, and he will for ever reign as a saint in her calendar.

Well, it is best that it should be so, and when time has dried up her tears, and healed her sorrow, she will have pleasant memories to look back upon, none the less pleasant because a loving heart and a kindly imagination have thrown the halo of pardonable fiction around them.

But it is not thus with me. I look back upon Mr. Carmichael's death with a feeling of

awe.

My vision was clearer than Aunt Lotty's. She did not understand as I did the struggle of those dying hours. She knew not that her husband had descended to the grave with a heavy load upon his conscience-some wrong committed, that it was past his power to obtain forgiveness for, or even to reveal. No, Aunt Lotty knew not this, and I fervently pray that she may ever be kept from such knowledge.

Will any of us ever know what this secret is? They say that, deep as some secrets are hidden, yet shall they be made known, even as oftimes both earth and sea reject the murdered victim, and cast it back at the murderer's feet. However, there seems little chance of this present mystery being cleared up. Mr. Carmichael is dead, and Doris's packet is lost; and what other hope remains of a revelation ?

Still one does not know what miracle may happen, for I am almost beginning to believe in miracles. Since I have emerged from the Wonder Age, I have left off wondering, and am gradually drifting into the Age of Faith. At least, I am trying to drift into it, and to believe that everything has a deeper significance than appears upon the surface, and that each event we are disposed to look upon as trifling has some well-ordered end: that nothing is small or unimportant, but that everything is best as it happens. I am trying, I say, to believe all this; but faith does not come all at once, though, when it comes in its full development, man may remove mountains; however, until then it is hard work enough even to clear away a molehill.

I hope Doris is not going to be ill. I found her yesterday lying on the hearth-rug in front of the porch-room fire, with her head resting on the great arm-chair.

VOL. III. NEW SERIES.

No. 60.

Doris, are you ill ?" I asked; and when she lifted up her face I saw that she had been crying.

"I think," I continued, "that you and I may now change places, and I may tax you with looking wretchedly ill. What ails you ?"

"I'm not ill, and yet I am ill," answered Doris.

"I'm sick at heart, Joyce, and very unhappy," and her face was again hidden.

"Surely you have nothing to distress you? You heard from Mr. Chester yesterday,

and-"

"I was not thinking of Gabriel. I am not troubling myself about him. It's Lynncourt, Joyce. I dare say it's wrong, but the feeling grows stronger and stronger upon me that I cannot go there. Joyce, I do believe in presentiments; I can't help it; I have such a strong feeling that there's something not right in this matter. I don't know what I think. Sometimes I dare not think; but if I could only stay with Aunt Lotty, or go to Mrs. Howell, I should be so much happier than I shall ever be at Lynncourt."

"But you will not have long to stay there, Doris," I said.

She looked up at me with a searching glance.

Why not?"

"You know why, Doris, as well as I do. It will only be until Mr. Chester returns from the continent."

"Uncle Carmichael's death may make a difference. Aunt Lotty will not like a wedding to follow a funeral so soon.'

"I don't know. I never saw any reason why a marriage need be put off for a death, that is beyond a few weeks. It can be as quiet as people like to have it, and of course yours will be a very quiet wedding, Doris."

"I have few friends to invite to it, certainly, Joyce; but the wedding may be put off for other reasons." "Doris !

you?"

And is that what is fretting

No," returned Doris, sharply. "I told you that it was Lynncourt that troubled me, Joyce," she continued, suddenly springing up and standing before me. "I've had strange thoughts lately, waking dreams that seem so real, dark shadows that fall across the little light that's shining upon me now. I feel as if I belonged to no one, as if I had no place, no home; as if I wanted to go forth into the world, and wander about until I had found a quiet resting-place for myself, and had forgotten all about Green Oake and Lynncourt, and could remember only the happy days when I was poor and with my mother. Joyce, I can't help it, and I'm sorry to speak ill of

"The day your seal was lost."

Doris grasped my arm, she looked eagerly into my face.

"And you never said a word of this thought of yours to me ?" said she, reproachfully.

"I did not dare to breathe such an accu

sation on such slight grounds. I had no evidence, I had only an intuition to go upon." "And now

"Mr. Carmichael's death-bed makes me feel convinced that I was right. There was something upon his mind, Doris, something that he strove to reveal when it was too late; and that something was connected with your mother's packet."

Doris sat still for a few minutes, very still; she held my arm with so tight a clasp that it was painful, but I did not move. Presently she loosed her fingers and rocked herself backward and forward, every now and then uttering a low moan like to some dumb animal in pain. At last she spoke, and her voice was forced and unnatural.

"Joyce, is it possible, do you think it possible, that my mother, that Ellen Carmichael was not my mother?"

I gave an irrepressible cry, the haunting suspicion born of the unproved theory was at length clothed in words, and stood out clear before me. Yet how could I bear to dash to the ground the fond belief of a lifetime? I could not speak. But Doris, seizing both my hands, implored me that I would be truthful with her. That I would tell her if

such a thought had ever crossed my mind. And I, with my arm round the poor trembling child, in broken accents answered,

"I have thought so, Doris."

"My mother, oh, my mother!" sobbed Doris.

And then in a low, sad voice she quoted this passage from the poor wife's story,—

"Two living women and two living babes were in the boat at night, but the dawn saw only one living mother, one living child-the other two had perished."

"One mother and one child were saved," said Doris, "but we are not told which. Oh! Joyce, Joyce, I see it all. How wicked, how cruel of uncle-no, thank heaven, he is not my uncle, I am no niece of his. And yet she was his sister; my only mother; my blessed, angelic mother; the only mother I ever knew; no mother could have been tenderer to me. Oh! Joyce, I see it all."

And so did I, and seeing, wondered I had had not known it all along. It was wonderful how the scales had at once fallen from my eyes, and I was blind no longer. A hundred trivial circumstances I had not heeded or had overlooked rose up before me, and now the overwhelming certainty seemed stronger than ever the doubt had been. I marvelled why I had not understood it all before; why I had hesitated to speak to Mr. Chester, even why I had not said to Mr. Carmichael upon his death-bed, "Doris is not your sister's daughter." And yet I had not shaped my thought clearly even then. It had come suddenly, now this moment, like a flash of lightning from a dark cloud that had been hovering on my horizon for many a day. So clear a revelation it now appeared that I wondered why it had ever been hidden from

me.

Yet why should I thus reproach myself,conviction does not force itself upon the mind all at once; there are many phases to go through ere one arrives at the truth, and until one has viewed a matter thoroughly in all its bearings, it is impossible to form an impartial decision. When one only half knows, or half suspects, everything is so vague, so dim, that it is useless to reason calmly, or to form any kind of judgment; one must wait until the whole lies mapped out before one, and one point can be set against another, one circumstance weighed with another, and facts and reason brought to bear where only suspicion and doubtful evidence existed before. Therefore I need not reproach myself; had it not been for that death-bed struggle, I might even now have had only dim surmisings instead of being in undoubting knowledge of the truth. For truth both Doris and I felt it

to be, though we saw no means of ever proving it.

Very plain it now appeared to us that, on that morning in August, only a few months ago—and yet that seems so very far back now-Mr. Carmichael had, in some way, obtained possession of Doris's key, and had, during our absence, mutilated and arranged the contents of the packet in the manner that suited his purposes. We understood now the blots, the erasures, the torn sheets, the seeming omissions, and I remembered the two kinds of wax with which the seal was evidently made.

Joyce, we can do nothing without Gabriel; he must come back."

I felt as Doris did, he was the person to consult; better even than Mr. Lynn, under the circumstances.

And poor Aunt Lotty! What a grief to her to know of her husband's guilt. But she must never know it. Surely Mr. Chester can help us in some way to keep the secret, or poor Aunt Lotty's gentle heart will be broken, and her recollections of the past be marred. Heaven grant that she may be spared the shattering of her idol, unworthy though he be.

I am not one of those stern iconoclasts who, for the sake of what they call candid speaking, and letting people know the whole truth, would deface an image in some weaker heart because loving fingers had chiselled it with too flattering a touch.

Poor

Aunt Lotty moves about the house quietly, looking very gentle and very sad in her black dress and widow's cap. Her tiny ringlets are brushed smoothly back, and her face looks none the worse for being a little paler. Aunt Lotty, she believes herself to have suffered an irreparable loss. When she has got over her first grief, she will put up a monument in Craythorpe Church, setting forth the virtues of Hugh Carmichael, Esq. I almost think she is looking out appropriate texts now, for I see her making notes from her Bible, and it was open for a long time at the first psalm.

Oh, dear! What are inscriptions on tombstones worth? When I die, I shall leave a request that on my headstone may be written no other words than these: "Here lies Joyce Dormer."

CHAPTER XLIV.

MR. CHESTER was again in Rome,-in the wonderful city, the queen city, before whom all other cities must bow down, even in these later days, despite their high pretensions; for the past has cast a royal mantle over her, such as no other city shall ever boast; it was ages in weaving, and it will be ages ere it