clasped hands. The time had been long in
rolling over her weary old head; for, though she
had passed the period of life in which feeling
is very keen, and sorrow has power to torture,
and constancy to last, Mrs. Brookes had no
other objects to divide her thoughts with Mrs.
Carruthers and her son, and day by day the old
woman had brooded upon the new trouble which
had come to those whom she loved so well.
Perplexity mingled with her grief, for she knew
not what to think. She had stoutly denied the
possibility of George's guilt, in the memorable
dialogue which had been the last she had held
with his mother; but the faint and fluttering
hope she entertained was very different from
the confidence she expressed, and now, in the
solitude and silence of the great house, in the
absence of the absorbing demand which Mrs.
Carruthers's condition had made upon all her
attention and self-command, her stout old heart
sank within her. His mother was gone away
from all the scenes and associations which had
come to have a terrible meaning. Would she
ever return? Ellen hardly knew how she wished
to answer this question. It were better and
happier perhaps that she never did, that her
tired heart should drowsily beat itself to rest in
a strange country, and lie hidden under another
soil than that her son had stained with blood.
Had he done this thing? What of him? Where
was he? The orderly house, the well-regulated
household, needed little of the old housekeeper's
supervision. The absence of the family made
little difference. No cleaning days interrupted
the decorous order of things in an establishment
in which it would have savoured of indecorum
to suppose that the rule of absolute cleanliness
was ever superseded. Alterations and repairs
were innovating interruptions altogether
incompatible with Poynings, and, in fact, there was
little or nothing to break the dead level to
which old Ellen had looked forward as that of
her days when she should be left alone in the
stately house, and which had begun to realise
itself at once.

Dixon had accompanied her mistress to foreign
parts; and it was Martha, housemaid, who
told Mrs. Brookes that a lady, who had been
shown into her own room, wanted to see her.

"Which, I dare say, she's come after Susan's
character," remarked Martha, parenthetically,
"for she ain't this side Hamherst, I know."

Mrs. Brookes rose from the chair that she
had placed opposite George's picture, took off
her spectacles, from which she wiped a
suspicious moisture, placed them carefully in her
pocket, arranged her cap and shawl, and, without
vouchsafing any answer to the speculations
of Martha, she took her way slowly to the
housekeeper's room. As she crossed the hall
she saw a fly standing at the open door, and
the driver, a man from Page's, touched his hat
to her as she passed.

"I don't know this lady," she thought.
"Nobody about here takes a fly to come to
Poynings."

Her visitor was seated on the heavy horse-
hair sofa, which, in the winter, flanked the fire,
but was now drawn close under the window
through which George had entered on that
memorable night, which came freshly into the
memory of the old woman at that moment. As
she looked sharply at the figure which rose to
greet her, Mrs. Brookes felt in a moment that
she was in the presence of a woman with some
purpose.

The fixedness of Harriet Routh's face, the
effort of a smile (for loneliness told upon her
nerves now with rapidity and power), a
something forced and painful in her voice, aroused
an instinctive fear in Mrs. Brookes, and put her
on her guard. She made a stiff bow and a
movement with her body, which, when she was
younger, would have been a curtsey, but was
now only a duck, aud asked her visitor's
pleasure.

"I have called upon you, Mrs. Brookes,"
said Harriet, in a sweet and winning tone, "in
consequence of a paragraph which I have seen
in a newspaper."

It was an unfortunate beginning, for it set
the old nurse instantly on her guard by arousing
her suspicions, and making her resolve that the
blue-eyed, sweet-spoken lady, who looked as if
she had a purpose, should get nothing out of
her.

"Indeed," she replied, very stiffly. "Please
to sit down, ma'am."

Harriet resumed her seat, and began to speak
rather quickly. Mrs. Brookes looked at her
steadily, immovably, having put on her
spectacles for the purpose, but gave her neither
encouragement nor assistance by so much as a
sound or a nod.

"I am Mrs. Routh," she said, "and a friend
of Mr. George Dallas, Mrs. Carruthers's son.
It is on his account and for his sake I have
come here."

Mrs. Brookes's black-mittened hands pressed
each other more closely as they lay clasped
together in her lap, but she made no sign.

"I am aware of the unfortunate
circumstances which keep Mr. Dallas and his mother
apart," continued Harriet, who maintained a
watch upon the old woman as steady as her
own, but more covert; "and I am afraid he
will be much distressed and alarmed if this
reaches him without any preparation."

She held out a newspaper as she spoke, a
newspaper she had procured at the inn at
Amherst, and pointed to the paragraph which
recorded the departure of Mr. and Mrs.
Carruthers of Poynings and suite for the Continent;
and, in addition, the regret with which "we"
had learned that the departure in question had
been occasioned by the dangerous illness of
Mrs. Carruthers. Mrs. Brookes was immensely
relieved, but not altogether reassured. She had
a vague idea that the business of detection was
sometimes entrusted to women, and she still
had her doubts of the blue-eyed, sweet-spoken
lady whose face indicated a purpose, without
betraying it.

"Mr. Dallas knows of his mother's illness,"