decide on something! It is twelve o'clock
now, and Mr. Hawes comes at one. What
will you do, dear? What can we do?"

I ought to have told you that by this
time James and I were alone. Ashley had
been obliged to leave, and for the first time
in our acquaintance I had not been sorry to
see him go. He had been very kind to me
and very cheery with James, but I shrank
from him visibly; though he looked at me
as people do look at something seen for the
first time, and seemed almost as if he had
found me out, after such a long period of
overlooking! At any other time I should
have been transported with his attention;
it would have been my pride, my joy, my
heaven, but now—I felt degraded by it, as
if he wanted to buy my silence, to make
me an accomplice in his crime through my
love. Oh, Georgie, what an awful thing it
is to feel that the one you love above all
else in life is base and false!

Well! when I spoke to James like this
I seemed to startle him as if from a dream.

"Yes, Rose, I remember," he said, getting
up and pushing his dank fair hair from his
white face. " I will go and make it all right
with him. My poor little Rose! you have
had a nasty fright, dear, and you are quite
pale and trembling. Never mind now, it
will soon be all right."

He kissed me tenderly, and before I could
stop him, or even answer back his loving
words, he too had left the house, and left
me indeed alone.

I cannot tell you much more of what happened,
for I only remember things very confusedly.
I remember Mr. Hawes coming
to the house, and I remember his loud angry
voice and furious face; I remember a swarm
of policemen in the room—the place seemed
filled with them—and I remember Ashley's
grand bearing and noble look in the midst
of them. He seemed like a beautiful demon
to me—like Lucifer: a god, but a fallen
one. And then—oh, Georgie, do not let me
think of it!—I remember a noise, as of men's
feet, a tumult of voices, and a hustling at
the door, and Something was brought in
and laid tenderly on the bed. It was my
brother—all that was of him now!—found
dead in a lonely part of Kensington Gardens,
with an empty bottle of poison in his hand.
Proud and sensitive as he was, the shock
and horror had been too much for him, and
he chose to brave the wrath of God rather
than undergo the doubt, the accusation of
his fellow-men.

After this the newspaper reports can tell
you the story better than I. You know that
Ashley was arrested on suspicion, tried, and
acquitted for want of sufficient evidence;
acquitted but not cleared; for all that my
dear Jamie's death divided the suspicion.
The oddest part of it was that the hanaper
could not be traced in the remotest way.
It had apparently vanished off the face of
the earth, and how it had gone, or what had
become of it, was as much a mystery to the
police as to us. It looked as if Ashley had
taken it—and for my own part I never
doubted it; but what had he done with it?
who had he sold it to? and how was it that
the police could not trace it? And how was
it, too, that Ashley was suddenly so flush of
money if he had not stolen it? He said an
old aunt had died and left him a legacy. God
forgive me! I did not believe a word of it!

And yet I loved him, Georgie! Unworthy
as I believed him to be, and the cause of
that poor boy's death, I loved him with my
whole heart. I had grown into womanhood
loving him; and, if even I had wished it, I
could not have cut him out of my life now.
But I would not marry him. He asked me
more than once, and he pleaded passionately
—for he suddenly quite changed towards
me, as I have said, and from utter neglect
passed into the most intense love. But I
was firm. I could not have married him
then! So he went away to America, and
I came down here to Ambleside, as governess
to the rector's children; and here I
have been ever since—two years—two long,
painful, weary years! And now I am going
to America next week; my passage is
taken, and in a fortnight's time I shall be
standing on the quay at New York, with
Ashley Graham's hand in mine! If
you read this letter you will see what has
changed my life, and what has taken me as
a penitent to the feet of the man I love, and
have always loved.

She gave me an open letter written in a
faint and trembling hand, and signed A.
Thomson. It said that "he, the writer,
being now at the point of death, wished to
make confession, and reparation so far as
he could, of the evil he had caused. For it
was he who had taken the hanaper; and
he had it under his large cloak while he
stood by the open door of the room, and
nodded, and spoke to Rose Mantell of the
weather. It was a bold stroke," he said,
"and the idea occurred to him only when
he heard Ashley go out so early. Knowing
the habits of the Mantells, and their
lours, he had stolen down-stairs to James's
room and found the door ajar. Ashley had