—Although incessantly, as I believe, tormented
by phantom shapes and such delusions
as are common to disordered minds, a strange
instinct kept all speech about them from our
poor night-porter's tongue. He lived alone
with his ghost world; and, it is only by
chance, or upon the strength of a rare confidence,
that any one or two of his experiences
were revealed. I may here state that there
was one especial reason for preserving silence
with Daft John upon the present matter. For
the market-garden, in which he found
summer-employment, lay between the inn and
the town. Fifty paces down the road—measured
from the gate of the garden, going
town-ward—is the spot where Phoebe and
her child were found; and against the very
bank near which he had been told that she
lay covered by the snow-drift,Thomas Halston,
when he had tracked her destroyer, stood to
shoot him down.

Happily ignorant of this, Pearmaine
worked at his summer duties among nectarines
and roses; gaunt as ever. He planted,
pruned, and gathered, with the same unearthly
shimmer on his face. February long since
gone, July was come, and John was capering
in his uncouth way down a gravel-walk
pursued by little Tabby Foll his master's
youngest girl, and a few other olive-branches.
The children were all dancing to the tune of
wedding bells that rung through the pure
morning air from more than one of the
town-steeples.

They were arrayed in muslin, very clean,
except Tabby, who had twice been on
her knees, embroidering herself with gravel.
All in good time, came more little girls in
white; and one or two girls of a middling-size
appeared by ones and twos, and threes,
to swell the group. Finally, in the very nick
Mr. James Foll, the master-gardener, in
a white waistcoat, established himself as a
telegraph-station at his gate, and began working
in a lively manner.

Obedient to signal, all the fairies disappeared
within the great conservatory, each
quickly to re-appear with a bouquet. Mr.
Foll, in his character of Generalissimo, then
formed his troop, and animated them with this
harangue: "Now, girls, the happy pair are
coming. Show yourselves worthy of your
fathers and mothers. Honour the brave
and fair, your dear companion. Mary Philips
—Mrs. Robert Earlby, now—wife to our
noble and courageous friend—shall—the
wheels, ladies; they are coming. Now's
your time; form line across the road, hand-
in-hand, and advance. Pearmaine, take this
bouquet my token of affection to the bride
—tell her so, when you give it through the
carriage- window."

The damsels, bent upon their wedding-
freak,formed a white chain, like a living
wreath of snow across the road: then marched
forward some fifty paces before meeting the
carriage that contained the bridegroom and
his bride. Of course, the postilions stopped
and straightway there appeared at either
window a group of smiling eyes and lips
speaking confusedly a babel of sweet language,
while dimpled hands were raining bouquets
down upon the laps of the much-honoured pair.
The bridegroom leaned forward, laughed, then
looked for half a minute stern; and in the
mind of Dowsie John, who stood aside under
the hedge, with the great nosegay of the
morning in his hand, a wild memory was
startled into life. Unconsciously, his lips
uttered the cry that had been wafted to him
on the night of his great terror. He moaned
it faintly just as it had floated to him through
the February night, but struck its very note
upon the bridegroom's ear: "Heaven
avenge!" Earlby sank back in the carriage.
It was not the voice of a gardener's man in a
gaberdine; it was the voice of a dead man,
as he believed, or of his blood, crying aloud
from the place where he had fallen.

The girls and the bride in their glee had
not noticed this. Their happy riot was nearly
done, and it was now time for John to do his
master's bidding. He stepped, therefore, to
the carriage-window, and, leaning with his
weird face before Mr. Earlby to present the
flowers to the bride, who sat upon the other
side, said, true to his text:

"I am bidden to present these to you as a
token."

"Beautiful!" cried the bride. "O do
tell me who sent them?"

"As a token from—— " Between bride
and bridegroom suddenly appeared to his sick
fancy a spectral face,—"from Phoebe
Halston!" he screamed, and recoiled as
a man who had been stung. A blow from
the bridegroom, who had risen in wild
fury, overtook him as he shrunk away; and
the poor creature, staggering back, fell under
the hedge.

He rose almost directly. Earlby was coughing
violently, with a wedding handkerchief
before his mouth. It was drenched with
blood.

The horses' heads' were turned, and the
bridegroom was conveyed without loss of time
to the sick-chamber. The ball that had not
been extracted, had indeed glanced against
one rib; but it had been only so diverted as
to lodge behind another rib. The wound,
healed externally, had made only the more
certain way within. Sudden emotion, and
the strong exertion of the chest necessary to
strike Dowsie John, had caused the ball to
make a fatal plunge into the lung and to set
the red blood flowing.

Hopeless illness, which endured for months,
intervened, as you might suppose, between
this accident and death. Those months were
not ill-spent by Robert Earlby. So fully did
he take upon himself the shame due to his
crimes, that while unable to restore, even by
his fervent prayers and ardent repentance,
the brother and sister and the innocent