He looked up with a wan smile, such as might have broke from Lazarus when he found himself again in his body.

"I will take it to the young man," he answered.

"Please, let us go at once then, uncle! I cannot sit still."

He rose, and we went together to John's room.

He was much better—sitting up in bed, and eating the breakfast Penny had carried him.

"I have just had a letter from your mother, Day," said my uncle.

"Indeed!" returned John dryly.

"Will you read it, and tell me what answer you would like me to return."

"Hardly like her usual writing—though there's her own strange S!" remarked John as he looked at it.

"Does she always make an S like that?" asked my uncle, with something peculiar in his tone, I thought.

"Always—like a snake just going to strike."

My uncle's face grew ghastly pale. He almost snatched the letter from John's hand, looked at it, gave it back to him, and, to our dismay, left the room.

"What can be the matter, John?" I said, my heart sinking within me.

"Go to him," said John.

I dared not. I had often seen him like that before walking out into the night; but there was something in his face now which I had not seen there before. It looked as if some terrible suspicion were suddenly confirmed.

"You see what my mother is after!" said John. "You have now to believe her, that I am subject to fits of insanity, or to believe me, that there is nothing she will not do to get her way."

"Her object is clear," I replied. "But if she thinks to fool my uncle, she will find herself mistaken!"

"She hopes to fool both you and your uncle," he rejoined. "The only wise thing I could do, she will handle so as to convince any expert of my madness—I mean, my coming to you! My reasons will go for nothing—less than no-thing—with any one she chooses to bewitch. She will look at me with an anxious love no doctor could doubt. No one can know you do not know that I am not mad—or at least subject to attacks of madness!"

"Oh, John, don't frighten me!" I cried.

"There! you are not sure about it!"

It seemed cruel of him to tease me so; but I saw presently why he did it: he thought his mother's letter had waked a doubt in my uncle; and he wanted me not to be vexed with my uncle, even if he deserted him and went over to his mother's side.

"I love your uncle," he said. "I know he is a true man! I will not be angry with him if my mother do mislead him. The time will come when he will know the truth. It must appear at last! I shall have to fight her alone, that's all! The worst is, if he thinks with my mother I shall have to go at once!—If only somebody would sell my horse for me!"

I guessed that his mother kept him short of money, and remembered with gladness that I was not quite penniless at the moment.

"In the meantime, you must keep as quiet as you can, John," I said. "Where is the good of planning upon an if? To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight."

John required little such persuading. And indeed something very different was in my uncle's mind from what John feared.

Presently I caught a glimpse of him riding out of the yard. I ran to a window from which I could see the edge of the moor, and saw him cross it at an uphill gallop.

He was gone about four hours, and on his return went straight to his own room. Not until nine o'clock did I go to him, and then he came with me to supper.

He looked worn, but was kind and genial as usual. After supper he sent for Dick, and told him to ride to Rising, the first thing in the morning, with a letter he would find on the hall-table.

The letter he read to us before we parted for the night. It was all we could have wished. He wrote that he must not have any one in his house interfered with; so long as a man was his guest, he was his servant. Her ladyship had, however, a perfect right to see her son, and would be welcome; only the decision as to his going or remaining must rest with the young man himself. If he chose to accompany his mother, well and good! though he should be sorry to lose him. If he declined to return with her, he and his house continued at his service.



CHAPTER XXIV.

HAND TO HAND.

We looked for lady Cairnedge all the next day. John was up by noon, and ready to receive her in the drawing-room; he would not see her in his bedroom. But the hours passed, and she did not come.

In the evening, however, when the twilight was thickening, and already all was dark in the alleys of the garden, her carriage drove quietly up—with a startling scramble of arrest at the door. The same servants were outside, and a very handsome dame within. As she descended, I saw that she was tall, and, if rather stout, not stouter than suited her age and style. Her face was pale, but she seemed in perfect health. When I saw her closer, I found her features the most regular I had ever seen. Had the soul within it filled the mould of that face, it would have been beautiful. As it was, it was only handsome—to me repulsive. The moment I saw it, I knew myself in the presence of a masked battery.

My uncle had insisted that she should be received where we usually sat, and had given Penny orders to show her into the hall-kitchen.

I was alone there, preparing something for John. We were not expecting her, for it seemed now too late to look for her. My uncle was in the study, and Martha somewhere about the house. My heart sank as I turned from the window, and sank yet lower when she appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. But as I advanced, I caught sight of my uncle, and went boldly to meet the enemy. He had come down his stair, and had just stepped into a clear blaze of light, which that moment burst from the wood I had some time ago laid damp upon the fire. The next instant I saw the lady's countenance ghastly with terror, looking beyond me. I turned, but saw nothing, save that my uncle had disappeared. When I faced her again, only a shadow of her fright remained. I offered her my hand—for she was John's mother, but she did not take it. She stood scanning me from head to foot.

"I am lady Cairnedge," she said. "Where is my son?"

I turned yet again. My uncle had not come back. I was not prepared to take his part. I was bewildered. A dead silence fell. For the first time in my life, my uncle seemed to have deserted me, and at the moment when most I needed him! I turned once more to the lady, and said, hardly knowing what,

"You wish to see Mr. Day?"

She answered me with a cold stare.

"I will go and tell him you are here," I faltered; and passing her, I sped along the passage to the drawing-room.

"John!" I cried, bursting in, "she's come! Do you still mean to see her? Are you able? Uncle—"

There I stopped, for his eyes were stern, and not looking at me, but at something behind me. One moment I thought his fever had returned, but following his gaze I looked round:—there stood lady Cairnedge! John was face to face with his mother, and my uncle was not there to defend him!

"Are you ready?" she said, nor pretended greeting. She seemed slightly discomposed, and in haste.

I was by this time well aware of my lover's determination of character, but I was not prepared for the tone in which he addressed the icy woman calling herself his mother.

"I am ready to listen," he answered.

"John!" she returned, with mingled severity and sharpness, "let us have no masquerading! You are perfectly fit to come home, and you must come at once. The carriage is at the door."

"You are quite right, mother," answered John calmly; "I am fit to go home with you. But Rising does not quite agree with me. I dread such another attack, and do not mean to go."

The drawing-room had a rectangular bay-window, one of whose three sides commanded the door. The opposite side looked into a little grove of larches. Lady Cairnedge had already realized the position of the room. She darted to the window, and saw her carriage but a few yards away.

She would have thrown up the sash, but found she could not. She twisted her handkerchief round her gloved hand, and dashed it through a pane.

"Men!" she cried, in a loud, commanding voice, "come at once."

The moment she went to the window, I sprang to the door, locked it, put the key in my pocket, and set my back to the door.

I heard the men thundering at the hall-door. Lady Cairnedge turned as if she would herself go and open to them, but seeing me, she understood what I had done, and went back to the window.

"Come here! Come to me here—to the window!" she cried.

John had been watching with a calm, determined look. He came and stood between us.

"John," I said, "leave your mother to me."

"She will kill you!" he answered.

"You might kill her!" I replied.

I darted to the chimney, where a clear fire was burning, caught up the poker, and thrust it between the bars.

"That's for you!" I whispered. "They will not touch you with that in your hand! Never mind me. If your mother move hand or foot to help them, it will be my turn!"

He gave me a smile and a nod, and his eyes lightened. I saw that he trusted me, and I felt fearless as a bull-dog.

In the meantime, she had spoken to her servants, and was now trying to open the window, which had a peculiar catch. I saw that John could defend himself much better at the window than in the room. I went softly behind his mother, put my hands round her neck, and clasping them in front, pulled her backward with all my strength. We fell on the floor together, I under of course, but clutching as if all my soul were in my fingers. Neither should she meddle with John, nor should he lay hand on her! I did not mind much what I did to her myself.

"To the window, John," I cried, "and break their heads!"

He snatched the poker from the fire, and the next moment I heard a crashing of glass, but of course I could not see what was going on. Mine was no grand way of fighting, but what was dignity where John was in danger! For the moment I had the advantage, but, while determined to hold on to the last, I feared she would get the better of me, for she was much bigger and stronger, and crushed and kicked, and dug her elbows into me, struggling like a mad woman.

All at once the tug of her hands on mine ceased. She gave a great shriek, and I felt a shudder go through her. Then she lay still. I relaxed my hold cautiously, for I feared a trick. She did not move. Horror seized me; I thought I had killed her. I writhed from under her to see. As I did so, I caught sight of the pale face of my uncle, looking in at that part of the window next the larch-grove. Immediately I remembered lady Cairnedge's terror in the kitchen, and knew that the cause of it, and of her present cry, must be the same, to wit, the sight of my uncle. I had not hurt her! I was not yet on my feet when my uncle left the window, flew to the other side of it, and fell upon the men with a stick so furiously that he drove them to the carriage. The horses took fright, and went prancing about, rearing and jibbing. At the call of the coachman, two of the men flew to their heads. I saw no more of their assailant.

John, who had not got a fair blow at one of his besiegers, left the window, and came to me where I was trying to restore his mother. The third man, the butler, came back to the window, put his hand through, undid the catch, and flung the sash wide. John caught up the poker from the floor, and darted to it.

"Set foot within the window, Parker," he cried, "and I will break your head."

The man did not believe he would hurt him, and put foot and head through the window.

Now John had honestly threatened, but to perform he found harder than he had thought: it is one thing to raise a poker, and another to strike a head with it. The window was narrow, and the whole man was not yet in the room, when John raised his weapon; but he could not bring the horrid poker down upon the dumb blind back of the stooping man's head. He threw it from him, and casting his eyes about, spied a huge family-bible on a side-table. He sprang to it, and caught it up—just in time. The man had got one foot firm on the floor, and was slowly drawing in the other, when down came the bible on his head, with all the force John could add to its weight. The butler tumbled senseless on the floor.

"Here, Orbie!" cried John; "help me to bundle him out before he comes to himself—Take what you would have!" he said, as between us we shoved him out on the gravel.

I fetched smelling-salts and brandy, and everything I could think of—fetched Martha too, and between us we got her on the sofa, but lady Cairnedge lay motionless. She breathed indeed, but did not open her eyes. John stood ready to do anything for her, but his countenance revealed little compassion. Whatever the cause of his mother's swoon—he had never seen her in one before—he was certain it had to do with some bad passage in her life. He said so to me that same evening. "But what could the sight of my uncle have to do with it?" I asked. "Probably he knows something, or she thinks he does," he answered.

"Wouldn't it be better to put her to bed, and send for the doctor, John?" I suggested at last.

Perhaps the sound of my voice calling her son by his Christian name, stung her proud ear, for the same moment she sat up, passed her hands over her eyes, and cast a scared gaze about the room.

"Where am I? Is it gone?" she murmured, looking ghastly.

No one answered her.

"Call Parker," she said, feebly, yet imperiously.

Still no one spoke.

She kept glancing sideways at the window, where nothing was to be seen but the gathering night. In a few moments she rose and walked straight from the room, erect, but white as a corpse. I followed, passed her, and opened the hall-door. There stood the carriage, waiting, as if nothing unusual had happened, Parker seated in the rumble, with one of the footmen beside him. The other man stood by the carriage-door. He opened it immediately; her ladyship stepped in, and dropped on the seat; the carriage rolled away.

I went back to John.

"I must leave you, darling!" he said. "I cannot subject you to the risk of such another outrage! I fear sometimes my mother may be what she would have you think me. I ought to have said, I hope she is. It would be the only possible excuse for her behaviour. The natural end of loving one's own way, is to go mad. If you don't get it, you go mad; if you do get it, you go madder—that's all the difference!—I must go!"

I tried to expostulate with him, but it was of no use.

"Where will you go?" I said. "You cannot go home!"

"I would at once," he answered, "if I could take the reins in my own hands. But I will go to London, and see the family-lawyer. He will tell me what I had better do."

"You have no money!" I said.

"How do you know that?" he returned with a smile. "Have you been searching my pockets?"

"John!" I cried.

He broke into a merry laugh.

"Your uncle will lend me a five-pound-note," he said.

"He will lend you as much as you want; but I don't think he's in the house," I answered. "I have two myself, though! I'll run and fetch them."

I bounded away to get the notes. It was like having a common purse already, to lend John ten pounds! But I had no intention of letting him leave the house the same day he was first out of his room after such an illness—that was, if I could help it.

My uncle had given me the use of a drawer in that same cabinet in which were the precious stones; and there, partly, I think, from the pride of sharing the cabinet with my uncle, I had long kept everything I counted precious: I should have kept Zoe there if she had not been alive and too big!



CHAPTER XXV.

A VERY STRANGE THING.

The moment I opened the door of the study, I saw my uncle—in his think-chair, his head against the back of it, his face turned to the ceiling. I ran to his side and dropped on my knees, thinking he was dead. He opened his eyes and looked at me, but with such a wan, woe-begone countenance, that I burst into a passion of tears.

"What is it, uncle dear?" I gasped and sobbed.

"Nothing very new, little one," he answered.

"It is something terrible, uncle," I cried, "or you would not look like that! Did those horrid men hurt you? You did give it them well! You came down on them like the angel on the Assyrians!"

"I don't know what you're talking about, little one!" he returned. "What men?"

"The men that came with John's mother to carry him off. If it hadn't been for my beautiful uncle, they would have done it too! How I wondered what had become of you! I was almost in despair. I thought you had left us to ourselves—and you only waiting, like God, for the right moment!"

He sat up, and stared at me, bewildered.

"I had forgotten all about John!" he said.

"As to what you think I did, I know nothing about it. I haven't been out of this room since I saw—that spectre in the kitchen."

"John's mother, you mean, uncle?"

"Ah! she's John's mother, is she? Yes, I thought as much—and it was more than my poor brain could stand! It was too terrible!—My little one, this is death to you and me!"

My heart sank within me. One thought only went through my head—that, come what might, I would no more give up John, than if I were already married to him in the church.

"But why—what is it, uncle?" I said, hardly able to get the words out.

"I will tell you another time," he answered, and rising, went to the door.

"John is going to London," I said, following him.

"Is he?" he returned listlessly.

"He wants to see his lawyer, and try to get things on a footing of some sort between his mother and him."

"That is very proper," he replied, with his hand on the lock.

"But you don't think it would be safe for him to travel to-night—do you, uncle—so soon after his illness?" I asked.

"No, I cannot say I do. It would not be safe. He is welcome to stop till to-morrow."

"Will you not tell him so, uncle? He is bent on going!"

"I would rather not see him! There is no occasion. It will be a great relief to me when he is able—quite able, I mean—to go home to his mother—or where it may suit him best."

It was indeed like death to hear my uncle talk so differently about John. What had he done to be treated in this way—taken up and made a friend of, and then cast off without reason given! My dear uncle was not at all like himself! To say he forgot our trouble and danger, and never came near us in our sore peril, when we owed our deliverance to him! and now to speak like this concerning John! Something was terribly wrong with him! I dared hardly think what it could be.

I stood speechless.

My uncle opened the door, and went down the steps. The sound of his feet along the corridor and down the stair to the kitchen, died away in my ears. My life seemed to go ebbing with it. I was stranded on a desert shore, and he in whom I had trusted was leaving me there!

I came to myself a little, got the two five-pound-notes, and returned to John.

When I reached the door of the room, I found my heart in my throat, and my brains upside down. What was I to say to him? How could I let him go away so late? and how could I let him stay where his departure would be a relief? Even I would have him gone from where he was not wanted! I saw, however, that my uncle must not have John's death at his door—that I must persuade him to stay the night. I went in, and gave him the notes, but begged him, for my love, to go to bed. In the morning, I said, I would drive him to the station.

He yielded with difficulty—but with how little suspicion that all the time I wished him gone! I went to bed only to lie listening for my uncle's return. It was long past midnight ere he came.

In the morning I sent Penny to order the phaeton, and then ran to my uncle's room, in the hope he would want to see John before he left: I was not sure he had realized that he was going.

He was neither in his bed-room nor in the study. I went to the stable. Dick was putting the horse to the phaeton. He told me he had heard his master, two hours before, saddle Thanatos, and ride away. This made me yet more anxious about him. He did not often ride out early—seldom indeed after coming home late! Things seemed to threaten complication!

John looked so much better, and was so eager after the projected interview with his lawyer, that I felt comforted concerning him. I did not tell him what my uncle had said the night before. It would, I felt, be wrong to mention what my uncle might wish forgotten; and as I did not know what he meant, it could serve no end. We parted at the station very much as if we had been married half a century, and I returned home to brood over the strange things that had happened. But before long I found myself in a weltering swamp of futile speculation, and turned my thoughts perforce into other channels, lest I should lose the power of thinking, and be drowned in reverie: my uncle had taught me that reverie is Phaeton in the chariot of Apollo.

The weary hours passed, and my uncle did not come. I had never before been really uneasy at his longest absence; but now I was far more anxious about him than about John. Alas, through me fresh trouble had befallen my uncle as well as John! When the night came, I went to bed, for I was very tired: I must keep myself strong, for something unfriendly was on its way, and I must be able to meet it! I knew well I should not sleep until I heard the sounds of his arrival: those came about one o'clock, and in a moment I was dreaming.

In my dream I was still awake, and still watching for my uncle's return. I heard the sound of Death's hoofs, not on the stones of the yard, but on the gravel before the house, and coming round the house till under my window. There he stopped, and I heard my uncle call to me to come down: he wanted me. In my dream I was a child; I sprang out of bed, ran from the house on my bare feet, jumped into his down-stretched arms, and was in a moment seated in front of him. Death gave a great plunge, and went off like the wind, cleared the gate in a flying stride, and rushed up the hill to the heath. The wind was blowing behind us furiously: I could hear it roaring, but did not feel it, for it could not overtake us; we out-stripped and kept ahead of it; if for a moment we slackened speed, it fell upon us raging.

We came at length to the pool near the heart of the heath, and I wondered that, at the speed we were making, we had been such a time in reaching it. It was the dismalest spot, with its crumbling peaty banks, and its water brown as tea. Tradition declared it had no bottom—went down into nowhere.

"Here," said my uncle, bringing his horse to a sudden halt, "we had a terrible battle once, Death and I, with the worm that lives in this hole. You know what worm it is, do you not?"

I had heard of the worm, and any time I happened, in galloping about the heath, to find myself near the pool, the thought would always come back with a fresh shudder—what if the legend were a true one, and the worm was down there biding his time! but anything more about the worm I had never heard.

"No, uncle," I answered; "I don't know what worm it is."

"Ah," he answered, with a sigh, "if you do not take the more care, little one, you will some day learn, not what the worm is called, but what it is! The worm that lives there, is the worm that never dies."

I gave a shriek; I had never heard of the horrible creature before—so it seemed in my dream. To think of its being so near us, and never dying, was too terrible.

"Don't be frightened, little one," he said, pressing me closer to his bosom. "Death and I killed it. Come with me to the other side, and you will see it lying there, stiff and stark."

"But, uncle," I said, "how can it be dead—how can you have killed it, if it never dies?"

"Ah, that is the mystery!" he returned.

"But come and see. It was a terrible fight. I never had such a fight—or dear old Death either. But she's dead now! It was worth living for, to make away with such a monster!"

We rode round the pool, cautiously because of the crumbling banks, to see the worm lie dead. On and on we rode. I began to think we must have ridden many times round the hole.

"I wonder where it can be, uncle!" I said at length.

"We shall come to it very soon," he answered.

"But," I said, "mayn't we have ridden past it without seeing it?"

He laughed a loud and terrible laugh.

"When once you have seen it, little one," he replied, "you too will laugh at the notion of having ridden past it without seeing it. The worm that never dies is hardly a thing to escape notice!"

We rode on and on. All at once my uncle threw up his hands, dropping the reins, and with a fearful cry covered his face.

"It is gone! I have not killed it! No, I have not! It is here! it is here!" he cried, pressing his hand to his heart. "It is here, and it was here all the time I thought it dead! What will become of me! I am lost, lost!"

At the word, old Death gave a scream, and laying himself out, flew with all the might of his swift limbs to get away from the place. But the wind, which was behind us as we came, now stormed in our faces; and presently I saw we should never reach home, for, with all Death's fierce endeavour, we moved but an inch or two in the minute, and that with a killing struggle.

"Little one," said my uncle, "if you don't get down we shall all be lost. I feel the worm rising. It is your weight that keeps poor Death from making any progress."

I turned my head, leaning past my uncle, so as to see behind him. A long neck, surmounted by a head of indescribable horror, was slowly rising straight up out of the middle of the pool. It should not catch them! I slid down by my uncle's leg. The moment I touched the ground and let go, away went Death, and in an instant was out of sight. I was not afraid. My heart was lifted up with the thought that I was going to die for my uncle and old Death. The red worm was on the bank. It was crawling toward me. I went to meet it. It sprang from the ground, threw itself upon me, and twisted itself about me. It was a human embrace, the embrace of some one unknown that loved me!

I awoke and left the dream. But the dream never left me.



CHAPTER XXVI.

THE EVIL DRAWS NIGHER.

I rose early, and went to my uncle's room. He was awake, but complained of headache. I took him a cup of tea, and at his request left him.

About noon Martha brought me a letter where I sat alone in the drawing-room. I carried it to my uncle. He took it with a trembling hand, read it, and fell back with his eyes closed. I ran for brandy.

"Don't be frightened, little one," he called after me. "I don't want anything."

"Won't you tell me what is the matter, uncle?" I said, returning. "Is it necessary I should be kept ignorant?"

"Not at all, my little one."

"Don't you think, uncle," I dared to continue, forgetting in my love all difference of years, "that, whatever it be that troubles us, it must be better those who love us should know it? Is there some good in a secret after all?"

"None, my darling," he answered. "The thing that made me talk to you so against secrets when you were a child, was, that I had one myself—one that was, and is, eating the heart out of me. But that woman shall not know and you be ignorant! I will not have a secret with her!—Leave me now, please, little one."

I rose at once.

"May I take the letter with me, uncle?" I asked.

He rubbed his forehead with a still trembling hand. The trembling of that beloved hand filled me with such a divine sense of pity, that for the first time I seemed to know God, causing in me that consciousness! The whole human mother was roused in me for my uncle. I would die, I would kill to save him! The worm was welcome to swallow me! My very being was a well of loving pity, pouring itself out over that trembling hand.

He took up the letter, gave it to me, and turned his face away with a groan. I left the room in strange exaltation—the exaltation of merest love.

I went to the study, and there read the hateful letter.

Here it is. Having transcribed it, I shall destroy it.

"Sir,—For one who persists in coming between a woman and her son, who will blame the mother if she cast aside forbearance! I would have spared you as hitherto; I will spare you no longer. You little thought when you crossed me who I was—the one in the world in whose power you lay! I would perish ever-lastingly rather than permit one of my blood to marry one of yours. My words are strong; you are welcome to call them unladylike; but you shall not doubt what I mean. You know perfectly that, if I denounce you as a murderer, I can prove what I say; and as to my silence for so many years, I am able thoroughly to account for it. I shall give you no further warning. You know where my son is: if he is not in my house within two days, I shall have you arrested. I have made up my mind.

"Lucretia Cairnedge.

"Rising-Manor, July 15, 18—."

"Whoever be the father, she's the mother of lies!" I exclaimed.—"My uncle—the best and gentlest of men, a murderer!"

I laughed aloud in my indignation and wrath.

But, though the woman was a liar, she must have something to say with a show of truth! How else would she dare intimidation with such a man? How else could her threat have so wrought upon my uncle? What did she know, or imagine she knew? What could be the something on which she founded her lie?—That my uncle was going to tell me, nor did I dread hearing his story. No revelation would lower him in my eyes! Of that I was confident. But I little thought how long it would be before it came, or what a terrible tale it would prove.

I ran down the stair with the vile paper in my hand.

"The wicked woman!" I cried. "If she be John's mother, I don't care: she's a devil and a liar!"

"Hush, hush, little one!" said my uncle, with a smile in which the sadness seemed to intensify the sweetness; "you do not know anything against her! You do not know she is a liar!"

"There are things, uncle, one knows without knowing!"

"What if I said she told no lie?"

"I should say she was a liar although she told no lie. My uncle is not what she threatens to say he is!"

"But men have repented, and grown so different you would not know them: how can you tell it has not been so with me? I may have been a bad man once, and grown better!"

"I know you are trying to prepare me for what you think will be a shock, uncle!" I answered; "but I want no preparing. Out with your worst! I defy you!"

Ah me, confident! But I had not to repent of my confidence!

My uncle gave a great sigh. He looked as if there was nothing for him now but tell all. Evidently he shrank from the task.

He put his hand over his eyes, and said slowly,—

"You belong to a world, little one, of which you know next to nothing. More than Satan have fallen as lightning from heaven!"

He lay silent so long that I was constrained to speak again.

"Well, uncle dear," I said, "are you not going to tell me?"

"I cannot," he answered.

There was absolute silence for, I should think, about twenty minutes. I could not and would not urge him to speak. What right had I to rouse a killing effort! He was not bound to tell me anything! But I mourned the impossibility of doing my best for him, poor as that best might be.

"Do not think, my darling," he said at last, and laid his hand on my head as I knelt beside him, "that I have the least difficulty in trusting you; it is only in telling you. I would trust you with my eternal soul. You can see well enough there is something terrible to tell, for would I not otherwise laugh to scorn the threat of that bad woman? No one on the earth has so little right to say what she knows of me. Yet I do share a secret with her which feels as if it would burst my heart. I wish it would. That would open the one way out of all my trouble. Believe me, little one, if any ever needed God, I need him. I need the pardon that goes hand in hand with righteous judgment, the pardon of him who alone can make lawful excuse."

"May God be your judge, uncle, and neither man nor woman!"

"I do not think you would altogether condemn me, little one, much as I loathe myself—terribly as I deserve condemnation."

"Condemn you, uncle! I want to know all, just to show you that nothing can make the least difference. If you were as bad as that bad woman says, you should find there was one of your own blood who knew what love meant. But I know you are good, uncle, whatever you may have done."

"Little one, you comfort me," sighed my uncle. "I cannot tell you this thing, for when I had told it, I should want to kill myself more than ever. But neither can I bear that you should not know it. I will not have a secret with that woman! I have always intended to tell you everything. I have the whole fearful story set down for your eyes—and those of any you may wish to see it: I cannot speak the words into your ears. The paper I will give you now; but you will not open it until I give you leave."

"Certainly not, uncle."

"If I should die before you have read it, I permit and desire you to read it. I know your loyalty so well, that I believe you would not look at it even after my death, if I had not given you permission. There are those who treat the dead as if they had no more rights of any kind. 'Get away to Hades,' they say; 'you are nothing now.' But you will not behave so to your uncle, little one! When the time comes for you to read my story, remember that I now, in preparation for the knowledge that will give you, ask you to pardon me then for all the pain it will cause you and your husband—John being that husband. I have tried to do my best for you, Orbie: how much better I might have done had I had a clear conscience, God only knows. It may be that I was the tenderer uncle that I could not be a better one."

He hid his face in his hands, and burst into a tempest of weeping.

It was terrible to see the man to whom I had all my life looked with a reverence that prepared me for knowing the great father, weeping like a bitterly repentant and self-abhorrent child. It seemed sacrilege to be present. I felt as if my eyes, only for seeing him thus, deserved the ravens to pick them out.

I could not contain myself. I rose and threw my arms about him, got close to him as a child to her mother, and, as soon as the passion of my love would let me, sobbed out,

"Uncle! darling uncle! I love you more than ever! I did not know before that I could love so much! I could kill that woman with my own hands! I wish I had killed her when I pulled her down that day! It is right to kill poisonous creatures: she is worse than any snake!"

He smiled a sad little smile, and shook his head. Then first I seemed to understand a little. A dull flash went through me.

I stood up, drew back, and gazed at him. My eyes fixed themselves on his. I stared into them. He had ceased to weep, and lay regarding me with calm response.

"You don't mean, uncle,—?"

"Yes, little one, I do. That woman was the cause of the action for which she threatens to denounce me as a murderer. I do not say she intended to bring it about; but none the less was she the consciously wicked and wilful cause of it.—And you will marry her son, and be her daughter!" he added, with a groan as of one in unutterable despair.

I sprang back from him. My very proximity was a pollution to him while he believed such a thing of me!

"Never, uncle, never!" I cried. "How can you think so ill of one who loves you as I do! I will denounce her! She will be hanged, and we shall be at peace!"

"And John?" said my uncle.

"John must look after himself!" I answered fiercely. "Because he chooses to have such a mother, am I to bring her a hair's-breadth nearer to my uncle! Not for any man that ever was born! John must discard his mother, or he and I are as we were! A mother! She is a hyena, a shark, a monster! Uncle, she is a devil!—I don't care! It is true; and what is true is the right thing to say. I will go to her, and tell her to her face what she is!"

I turned and made for the door. My heart felt as big as the biggest man's.

"If she kill you, little one," said my uncle quietly, "I shall be left with nobody to take care of me!"

I burst into fresh tears. I saw that I was a fool, and could do nothing.

"Poor John!—To have such a mother!" I sobbed. Then in a rage of rebellion I cried, "I don't believe she is his mother! Is it possible now, uncle—does it stand to reason, that such a pestilence of a woman should ever have borne such a child as my John? I don't, I can't, I won't believe it!"

"I am afraid there are mysteries in the world quite as hard to explain!" replied my uncle.

"I confess, if I had known who was his mother, I should have been far from ready to yield my consent to your engagement."

"What does it matter?" I said. "Of course I shall not marry him!"

"Not marry him, child!" returned my uncle. "What are you thinking of? Is the poor fellow to suffer for, as well as by the sins of his mother?"

"If you think, uncle, that I will bring you into any kind of relation with that horrible woman, if the worst of it were only that you would have to see her once because she was my husband's mother, you are mistaken. She to threaten you if you did not send back her son, as if John were a horse you had stolen! You have been the angel of God about me all the days of my life, but even to please you, I cannot consent to despise myself. Besides, you know what she threatens!"

"She shall not hurt me. I will take care of myself for your sakes. Your life shall not be clouded by scandal about your uncle."

"How are you to prevent it, uncle dear? Fulfil her threat or not, she would be sure to talk!"

"When she sees it can serve no purpose, she will hardly risk reprisals."

"She will certainly not risk them when she finds we have said good-bye."

"But how would that serve me, little one? What! would you heap on your uncle's conscience, already overburdened, the misery of keeping two lovely lovers apart? I will tell you what I have resolved upon. I will have no more secrets from you, Orba. Oh, how I thank you, dearest, for not casting me off!"

Again I threw myself on my knees by his bed.

"Uncle," I cried, my heart ready to break with the effort to show itself, "if I did not now love you more than ever, I should deserve to be cast out, and trodden under foot!—What do you think of doing?"

"I shall leave the country, not to return while the woman lives."

"I'm ready, uncle," I said, springing to my feet; "—at least I shall be in a few minutes!"

"But hear me out, little one," he rejoined, with a smile of genuine pleasure; "you don't know half my plan yet. How am I to live abroad, if my property go to rack and ruin? Listen, and don't say anything till I have done; I have no time to lose; I must get up at once.—As soon as I am on board at Dover for Paris, you and John must get yourselves married the first possible moment, and settle down here—to make the best of the farm you can, and send me what you can spare. I shall not want much, and John will have his own soon. I know you will be good to Martha!"

"John may take the farm if he will. It would be immeasurably better than living with his mother. For me, I am going with my uncle. Why, uncle, I should be miserable in John's very arms and you out of the country for our sakes! Is there to be nobody in the world but husbands, forsooth! I should love John ever so much more away with you and my duty, than if I had him with me, and you a wanderer. How happy I shall be, thinking of John, and taking care of you!"

He let me run on. When I stopped at length—

"In any case," he said with a smile, "we cannot do much till I am dressed!"



CHAPTER XXVII.

AN ENCOUNTER.

I left my uncle's room, and went to my own, to make what preparation I could for going abroad with him. I got out my biggest box, and put in all my best things, and all the trifles I thought I could not do without. Then, as there was room, I put in things I could do without, which yet would be useful. Still there was room; the content would shake about on the continent! So I began to put in things I should like to have, but which were neither necessary nor useful. Before I had got these in, the box was more than full, and some of them had to be taken out again. In choosing which were to go and which to be left, I lost time; but I did not know anything about the trains, and expected to be ready before my uncle, who would call me when he thought fit.

My thoughts also hindered my hands. Very likely I should never marry John; I would not heed that; he would be mine all the same! but to promise that I would not marry him, because it suited such a mother's plans to marry him to some one else—that I would not do to save my life! I would have done it to save my uncle's, but our exile would render it unnecessary!

At last I was ready, and went to find my uncle, reproaching myself that I had been so long away from him. Besides, I ought to have been helping him to pack, for neither he nor his arm was quite strong yet. With a heartful of apology, I sought his room. He was not there. Neither was he in the study. I went all over the house, and then to the stable; but he was nowhere, neither had anyone seen him. And Death was gone too!

The truth burst upon me: I was to see him no more while that terrible woman lived! No one was to know whither he had gone! He had given himself for my happiness! Vain intention! I should never be happy! To be in Paradise without him, would not be to be in Heaven!

John was in London; I could do nothing! I threw myself on my uncle's bed, and lay lost in despair! Even if John were with me, and we found him, what could we do? I knew it now as impossible for him to separate us that he might be unmolested, as it was for us to accept the sacrifice of his life that we might be happy. I knew that John's way would be to leave everything and go with me and my uncle, only we could not live upon nothing—least of all in a strange land! Martha, to be sure, could manage well enough with the bailiff, but John could not burden my uncle, and could not lay his hands on his own! In the mean time my uncle was gone we knew not whither! I was like one lost on the dark mountains.—If only John would come to take part in my despair!

With a sudden agony, I reproached myself that I had made no attempt to overtake my uncle. It was true I did not know, for nobody could tell me, in what direction he had gone; but Zoe's instinct might have sufficed where mine was useless! Zoe might have followed and found Thanatos! It was hopeless now!

But I could no longer be still. I got Zoe, and fled to the moor. All the rest of the day I rode hither and thither, nor saw a single soul on its wide expanse. The very life seemed to have gone out of it. When most we take comfort in loneliness, it is because there is some one behind it.

The sun was set and the twilight deepening toward night when I turned to ride home. I had eaten nothing since breakfast, and though not hungry, was thoroughly tired. Through the great dark hush, where was no sound of water, though here and there, like lurking live thing, it lay about me, I rode slowly back. My fasting and the dusk made everything in turn take a shape that was not its own. I seemed to be haunted by things unknown. I have sometimes thought whether the spirits that love solitary places, may not delight in appropriating, for embodiment momentary and partial, such a present shape as may happen to fit one of their passing moods; whether it is always the mere gnarled, crone-like hawthorn, or misshapen rock, that, between the wanderer and the pale sky, suddenly appals him with the sense of another. The hawthorn, the rock, the dead pine, is indeed there, but is it alone there?

Some such thought was, I remember, in my mind, when, about halfway from home, I grew aware of something a little way in front that rose between me and a dark part of the sky. It seemed a figure on a huge horse. My first thought, very naturally, was of my uncle; the next, of the great gray horse and his rider that John and I had both seen on the moor. I confess to a little awe at the thought of the latter; but I am somehow made so as to be capable of awe without terror, and of the latter I felt nothing. The composite figure drew nearer: it was a woman on horseback. Immediately I recalled the adventure of my childhood; and then remembered that John had said his mother always rode the biggest horse she could find: could that shape, towering in the half-dark before me, be indeed my deadly enemy—she who, my uncle had warned me, would kill me if she had the chance? A fear far other than ghostly invaded me, and for a moment I hesitated whether to ride on, or turn and make for some covert, until she should have passed from between me and my home. I hope it was something better than pride that made me hold on my way. If the wicked, I thought, flee when no man pursueth, it ill becomes the righteous to flee before the wicked. By this time it was all but dark night, and I had a vague hope of passing unquestioned: there had been a good deal of rain, and we were in a very marshy part of the heath, so that I did not care to leave the track. But, just ere we met, the lady turned her great animal right across the way, and there made him stand.

"Ah," thought I, "what could Zoe do in a race with that terrible horse!"

He seemed made of the darkness, and rose like the figurehead of a frigate above a yacht.

"Show me the way to Rising," said his rider.

The hard bell-voice was unmistakable.

"When you come where the track forks," I began.

She interrupted me.

"How can I distinguish in the dark?" she returned angrily. "Go on before, and show me the way."

Now I had good reason for thinking she knew the way perfectly well; and still better reason for declining to go on in front of her.

"You must excuse me," I said, "for it is time I were at home; but if you will turn and ride on in front of me, I will show you a better, though rather longer way to Rising."

"Go on, or I will ride you down" she cried, turning her horse's head toward me, and making her whip hiss through the air.

The sound of it so startled Zoe, that she sprang aside, and was off the road a few yards before I could pull her up. Then I saw the woman urging her horse to follow. I knew the danger she was in, and, though tempted to be silent, called to her with a loud warning.

"Mind what you are doing, lady Cairnedge!" I cried. "The ground here will not carry the weight of a horse like yours."

But as I spoke he gave in, and sprang across the ditch at the way-side. There, however, he stood.

"You think to escape me," she answered, in a low, yet clear voice, with a cat-like growl in it.

"You make a mistake!"

"Your ladyship will make a worse mistake if you follow me here," I replied.

Her only rejoinder was a cut with her whip to her horse, which had stood motionless since taking his unwilling jump. I spoke to Zoe; she bounded off like a fawn. I pulled her up, and looked back.

Lady Cairnedge continued urging her horse. I heard and saw her whipping him furiously. She had lost her temper.

I warned her once more, but she persisted.

"Then you must take the consequences!" I said; and Zoe and I made for the road, but at a point nearer home.

Had she not been in a passion, she would have seen that her better way was to return to the road, and intercept us; but her anger blinded her both to that and to the danger of the spot she was in.

We had not gone far when we heard behind us the soft plunging and sucking of the big hoofs through the boggy ground. I looked over my shoulder. There was the huge bulk, like Wordsworth's peak, towering betwixt us and the stars!

"Go, Zoe!" I shrieked.

She bounded away. The next moment, a cry came from the horse behind us, and I heard the woman say "Good God!" I stopped, and peered through the dark. I saw something, but it was no higher above the ground than myself. Terror seized me. I turned and rode back.

"My stupid animal has bogged himself!" said lady Cairnedge quietly.

Deep in the dark watery peat, as thick as porridge, her horse gave a fruitless plunge or two, and sank lower.

"For God's sake," I cried, "get off! Your weight is sinking the poor animal! You will smother him!"

"It will serve him right," she said venomously, and gave the helpless creature a cut across the ears.

"You will go down with him, if you do not make haste," I insisted.

Another moment and she stood erect on the back of the slowly sinking horse.

"Come and give me your hand," she cried.

"You want to smother me with him! I think I will not," I answered. "You can get on the solid well enough. I will ride home and bring help for your horse, poor fellow! Stay by him, talk to him, and keep him as quiet as you can. If he go on struggling, nothing will save him."

She replied with a contemptuous laugh.

I got to the road as quickly as possible, and galloped home as fast as Zoe could touch and lift. Ere I reached the stable-yard, I shouted so as to bring out all the men. When I told them a lady had her horse fast in the bog, they bustled and coiled ropes, put collars and chains on four draught-horses, lighted several lanterns, and set out with me. I knew the spot perfectly. No moment was lost either in getting ready, or in reaching the place.

Neither the lady nor her horse was to be seen.

A great horror wrapt me round. I felt a murderess. She might have failed to spring to the bank of the hole for lack of the hand she had asked me to reach out! Or her habit might have been entangled, so that she fell short, and went to the bottom—to be found, one day, hardly changed, by the side of her peat-embalmed steed!—no ill fitting fate for her, but a ghastly thing to have a hand in!

She might, however, be on her way to Rising on foot! I told two of the men to mount a pair of the horses, and go with me on the chance of rendering her assistance.

We took the way to Rising, and had gone about two miles, when we saw her, through the starlight, walking steadily along the track. I rode up to her, and offered her one of the cart-horses: I would not have trusted my Zoe with her any more than with an American lion that lives upon horses. She declined the proffer with quiet scorn. I offered her one or both men to see her home, but the way in which she refused their service, made them glad they had not to go with her. We had no choice, therefore turned and left her to get home as she might.

Not until we were on the way back, did it occur to me that I had not asked Martha whether she knew anything about my uncle's departure. She was never one to volunteer news, and, besides, would naturally think me in his confidence!

I found she knew nothing of our expedition, as no one had gone into the house—had only heard the horses and voices, and wondered. I was able to tell her what had happened; but the moment I began to question her as to any knowledge of my uncle's intentions, my strength gave way, and I burst into tears.

"Don't be silly, Belorba!" cried Martha, almost severely. "You an engaged young lady, and tied so to your uncle's apron-strings that you cry the minute he's out of your sight! You didn't cry when Mr. Day left you!"

"No," I answered; "he was going only for a day or two!"

"And for how many is your uncle gone?"

"That is what I want to know. He means to be away a long time, I fear."

"Then it's nothing but your fancy sets you crying!—But I'll just see!" she returned. "I shall know by the money he left for the house-keeping! Only I won't budge till I see you eat."

Faint for want of food, I had no appetite. But I began at once to eat, and she left me to fetch the money he had given her as he went.

She came back with a pocket-book, opened it, and looked into it. Then she looked at me. Her expression was of unmistakable dismay. I took the pocket-book from her hand: it was full of notes!

I learned afterward, that it was his habit to have money in the house, in readiness for some possible sudden need of it.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

ANOTHER VISION.

That same night, within an hour, to my unspeakable relief, John came home—at least he came to me, who he always said was his home. It was rather late, but we went out to the wilderness, where I had a good cry on his shoulder; after which I felt better, and hope began to show signs of life in me. I never asked him how he had got on in London, but told him all that had happened since he went. It was worse than painful to tell him about his mother's letter, and what my uncle told me in consequence of it, also my personal adventure with her so lately; but I felt I must hide nothing. If a man's mother is a devil, it is well he should know it.

He sat like a sleeping hurricane while I spoke, saying never a word. When I had ended,—

"Is that all?" he asked.

"It is all, John: is it not enough?" I answered.

"It is enough," he cried, with an oath that frightened me, and started to his feet. The hurricane was awake.

I threw my arms round him.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"To her" he answered.

"What for?"

"To kill her," he said—then threw himself on the ground, and lay motionless at my feet.

I kept silence. I thought with myself he was fighting the nature his mother had given him.

He lay still for about two minutes, then quietly rose.

"Good night, dearest!" he said; "—no; good-bye! It is not fit the son of such a mother should marry any honest woman."

"I beg your pardon, John!" I returned; "I hope I may have a word in the matter! If I choose to marry you, what right have you to draw back? Let us leave alone the thing that has to be, and remember that my uncle must not be denounced as a murderer! Something must be done. That he is beyond personal danger for the present is something; but is he to be the talk of the country?"

"No harm shall come to him," said John. "If I don't throttle the tigress, I'll muzzle her. I know how to deal with her. She has learned at least, that what her stupid son says, he does! I shall make her understand that, on her slightest movement to disgrace your uncle, I will marry you right off, come what may; and if she goes on, I shall get myself summoned for the defence, that, if I can say nothing for him, I may say something against her. Besides, I will tell her that, when my time comes, if I find anything amiss with her accounts, I will give her no quarter.—But, Orbie," he continued, "as I will not threaten what I may not be able to perform, you must promise not to prevent me from carrying it out."

"I promise," I said, "that, if it be necessary for your truth, I will marry you at once. I only hope she may not already have taken steps!"

"Her two days are not yet expired. I shall present myself in good time.—But I wonder you are not afraid to trust yourself alone with the son of such a mother!"

"To be what I know you, John," I answered, "and the son of that woman, shows a good angel was not far off at your birth. But why talk of angels? Whoever was your mother, God is your father!"

He made no reply beyond a loving pressure of my hand. Then he asked me whether I could lend him something to ride home upon. I told him there was an old horse the bailiff rode sometimes; I was very sorry he could not have Zoe: she had been out all day and was too tired! He said Zoe was much too precious for a hulking fellow like him to ride, but he would be glad of the old horse.

I went to the stable with him, and saw him mount. What a determined look there was on his face! He seemed quite a middle-aged man.

I have now to tell how he fared on the moor as he rode.

It had turned gusty and rather cold, and was still a dark night. The moon would be up by and by however, and giving light enough, he thought, before he came to the spot where his way parted company with that to Dumbleton. The moon, however, did not see fit to rise so soon as John expected her: he was not at that time quite up in moons, any more than in the paths across that moor.

Now as he had not an idea where his rider wanted to be carried, and as John did for a while—he confessed it—fall into a reverie or something worse, old Sturdy had to choose for himself where to go, and took a path he had often had to take some years before; nor did John discover that he was out of the way, until he felt him going steep clown, and thought of Sleipner bearing Hermod to the realm of Hela. But he let him keep on, wishing to know, as he said, what the old fellow was up to. Presently, he came to a dead halt.

John had not the least notion where they were, but I knew the spot the moment he began to describe it. By the removal of the peat on the side of a slope, the skeleton of the hill had been a little exposed, and had for a good many years been blasted for building-stones. Nothing was going on in the quarry at present. Above, it was rather a dangerous place; there was a legend of man and horse having fallen into it, and both being killed. John had never seen or heard of it.

When his horse stopped, he became aware of an indefinite sensation which inclined him to await the expected moon before attempting either to advance or return. He thought afterward it might have been some feeling of the stone about him, but at the time he took the place for an abrupt natural dip of the surface of the moor, in the bottom of which might be a pool. Sturdy stood as still as if he had been part of the quarry, stood as if never of himself would he move again.

The light slowly grew, or rather, the darkness slowly thinned. All at once John became aware that, some yards away from him, there was something whitish. A moment, and it began to move like a flitting mist through the darkness. The same instant Sturdy began to pull his feet from the ground, and move after the mist, which rose and rose until it came for a second or two between John and the sky: it was a big white horse, with my uncle on his back: Death and he, John concluded, were out on one of their dark wanderings! His impulse, of course, was to follow them. But, as they went up the steep way, Sturdy came down on his old knees, and John got off his back to let him recover himself the easier. When they reached the level, where the moon, showing a blunt horn above the horizon, made it possible to see a little, the white horse and his rider had disappeared—in some shadow, or behind some knoll, I fancy; and John, having not the least notion in what part of the moor he was, or in which direction he ought to go, threw the reins on the horse's neck. Sturdy brought him back almost to his stable, before he knew where he was. Then he turned into the road, for he had had enough of the moor, and took the long way home.



CHAPTER XXIX.

MOTHER AND SON.

In the morning he breakfasted alone. A son with a different sort of mother, might then have sought her in her bedroom; but John had never within his memory seen his mother in her bedroom, and after what lie had heard the night before, could hardly be inclined to go there to her now. Within half an hour, however, a message was brought him, requesting his presence in her ladyship's dressing-room.

He went with his teeth set.

"Whose horse is that in the stable, John?" she said, the moment their eyes met.

"Mr. Whichcote's, madam," answered John: mother he could not say.

"You intend to keep up your late relations with those persons?"

"I do."

"You mean to marry the hussy?"

"I mean to marry the lady to whom you give that epithet. There are those who think it not quite safe for you to call other people names!"

She rose and came at him as if she would strike him. John stood motionless. Except a woman had a knife in her hand, he said, he would not even avoid a blow from her. "A woman can't hurt you much; she can only break your heart!" he said. "My mother would not know a heart when she had broken it!" he added.

He stood and looked at her.

She turned away, and sat down again. I think she felt the term of her power at hand.

"The man told you then, that, if you did not return immediately, I would get him into trouble?"

"He has told me nothing. I have not seen him for some days. I have been to London."

"You should have contrived your story better: you contradict yourself."

"I am not aware that I do."

"You have the man's horse!"

"His horse is in my stable; he is not himself at home."

"Fled from justice! It shall not avail him!"

"It may avail you though, madam! It is sometimes prudent to let well alone. May I not suggest that a hostile attempt on your part, might lead to awkward revelations?"

"Ah, where could the seed of slander find fitter soil than the heart of a son with whom the prayer of his mother is powerless!"

To all appearance she had thoroughly regained her composure, and looked at him with a quite artistic reproach.

"The prayer of a mother that never prayed in her life!" returned John; "—of a woman that never had an anxiety but for herself!—I don't believe you are my mother. If I was born of you, there must have been some juggling with my soul in antenatal regions! I disown you!" cried John with indignation that grew as he gave it issue.

Her face turned ashy white; but whether it was from conscience or fear, or only with rage, who could tell!

She was silent for a moment. Then again recovering herself,—

"And what, pray, would you make of me?" she said coolly. "Your slave?"

"I would have you an honest woman! I would die for that!—Oh, mother! mother!" he cried bitterly.

"That being apparently impossible, what else does my dutiful son demand of his mother?"

"That she should leave me unmolested in my choice of a wife. It does not seem to me an unreasonable demand!"

"Nor does it seem to me an unreasonable reply, that any mother would object to her son's marrying a girl whose father she could throw into a felon's-prison with a word!"

"That the girl does not happen to be the daughter of the gentleman you mean, signifies nothing: I am very willing she should pass for such. But take care. He is ready to meet whatever you have to say. He is not gone for his own sake, but to be out of the way of our happiness—to prevent you from blasting us with a public scandal. If you proceed in your purpose, we shall marry at once, and make your scheme futile."

"How are you to live, pray?"

"Madam, that is my business," answered John.

"Are you aware of the penalty on your marrying without my consent?" pursued his mother.

"I am not. I do not believe there is any such penalty."

"You dare me?"

"I do."

"Marry, then, and take the consequences."

"If there were any, you would not thus warn me of them."

"John Day, you are no gentleman!"

"I shall not ask your definition of a gentleman, madam."

"Your father was a clown!"

"If my father were present, he would show himself a gentleman by making you no answer. If you say a word more against him, I will leave the room."

"I tell you your father was a clown and a fool—like yourself!"

John turned and went to the stable, had old Sturdy saddled, and came to me.

On his way over the heath, he spent an hour trying to find the place where he had been the night before, but without success. I presume that Sturdy, with his nose in that direction, preferred his stall, and did not choose to find the quarry. As often as John left him to himself, he went homeward. When John turned his head in another direction, he would set out in that direction, but gradually work round for the farm.

John told me all I have just set down, and then we talked.

"I have already begun to learn farming," I said.

"You are the right sort, Orbie!" returned John. "I shall be glad to teach you anything I know."

"If you will show me how a farmer keeps his books," I answered, "that I may understand the bailiff's, I shall be greatly obliged to you. As to the dairy, and poultry-yard, and that kind of thing, Martha can teach me as well as any."

"I'll do my best," said John.

"Come along then, and have a talk with Simmons! I feel as if I could bear anything after what you saw last night. My uncle is not far off! He is somewhere about with the rest of the angels!"



CHAPTER XXX.

ONCE MORE, AND YET AGAIN.

From that hour I set myself to look after my uncle's affairs. It was the only way to endure his absence. Working for him, thinking what he would like, trying to carry it out, referring every perplexity to him and imagining his answer, he grew so much dearer to me, that his absence was filled with hope. My heart being in it, I had soon learned enough of the management to perceive where, in more than one quarter, improvement, generally in the way of saving, was possible: I do not mean by any lowering of wages; my uncle would have conned me small thanks for such improvement as that! Neither was it long before I began to delight in the feeling that I was in partnership with the powers of life; that I had to do with the operation and government and preservation of things created; that I was doing a work to which I was set by the Highest; that I was at least a floor-sweeper in the house of God, a servant for the good of his world. Existence had grown fuller and richer; I had come, like a toad out of a rock, into a larger, therefore truer universe, in which I had work to do that was wanted. Had I not been thus expanded and strengthened, how should I have patiently waited while hearing nothing of my uncle!

It was not many days before John began to press me to let my uncle have his way: where was the good any longer, he said, in our not being married? But I could not endure the thought of being married without my uncle: it would not seem real marriage without his giving me to my husband. And when John was convinced that I could not be prevailed upon, I found him think the more of me because of my resolve, and my persistency in it. For John was always reasonable, and that is more than can be said of most men. Some, indeed, who are reasonable enough with men, are often unreasonable with women. If in course of time the management of affairs be taken from men and given to women—which may God for our sakes forbid—it will be because men have made it necessary by their arrogance. But when they have been kept down long enough to learn that they are not the lords of creation one bit more than the weakest woman, I hope they will be allowed to take the lead again, lest women should become what men were, and go strutting in their importance. Only the true man knows the true woman; only the true woman knows the true man: the difficulty between men and women comes all from the prevailing selfishness, that is, untruth, of both. Who, while such is their character, would be judge or divider between them, save one of their own kind? When such ceases to be their character, they will call for no umpire.

John lived in his own house with his mother, but they did not meet. His mother managed his affairs, to whose advantage I need hardly say; and John helped me to manage my uncle's, to the advantage of all concerned. Every morning he came to see me, and every night rode back to his worse than dreary home. At my earnest request, he had a strong bolt put on his bedroom-door, the use of which he promised me never to neglect. At my suggestion too, he let it be known that he had always a brace of loaded pistols within his reach, and showed himself well practiced in shooting with them. I feared much for John.

After I no longer only believed, but knew the bailiff trustworthy, and had got some few points in his management bettered, I ceased giving so much attention to details, and allowed myself more time to read and walk and ride with John. I laid myself out to make up to him, as much as ever I could, for the miserable lack of any home-life. At Rising he had not the least sense of comfort or even security. He could never tell what his mother might not be plotting against him. He had a very strong close box made for Leander, and always locked him up in it at night, never allowing one of the men there to touch him. The horse had all the attention any master could desire, when, having locked his box behind him, he brought him over to us in the morning.

One lovely, cold day, in the month of March, with ice on some of the pools, and the wind blowing from the north, I mounted Zoe to meet John midway on the moor, and had gone about two-thirds of the distance, when I saw him, as I thought, a long way to my right, and concluded he had not expected me so soon, and had gone exploring. I turned aside therefore to join him; but had gone only a few yards when, from some shift in a shadow, or some change in his position with regard to the light, I saw that the horse was not John's; it was a gray, or rather, a white horse. Could the rider be my uncle? Even at that distance I almost thought I recognized him. It must indeed have been he John saw at the quarry! He was not gone abroad! He had been all this long time lingering about the place, lest ill should befall us! "Just like him!" said my heart, as I gave Zoe the rein, and she sprang off at her best speed. But after riding some distance, I lost sight of the horseman, whoever he was, and then saw that, if I did not turn at once, I should not keep my appointment with John. Of course had I believed it was my uncle, I should have followed and followed; and the incident would not have been worth mentioning, for gray horses are not so uncommon that there might not be one upon the heath at any moment, but for something more I saw the same night.

It was bright moonlight. I had taken down a curtain of my window to mend, and the moon shone in so that I could not sleep. My thoughts were all with my uncle—wondering what he was about; whether he was very dull; whether he wanted me much; whether he was going about Paris, or haunting the moor that stretched far into the distance from where I lay. Perhaps at that moment he was out there in the moonlight, would be there alone, in the cold, wide night, while I slept! The thought made me feel lonely myself: one is indeed apt to feel lonely when sleepless; and as the moon was having a night of it, or rather making a day of it, all alone with herself, why should we not keep each other a little company? I rose, drew the other curtain of my window aside, and looked out.

I have said that the house lay on the slope of a hollow: from whichever window of it you glanced, you saw the line of your private horizon either close to you, or but a little way off. If you wanted an outlook, you must climb; and then you were on the moor.

From my window I could see the more distant edge of the hollow: looking thitherward, I saw against the sky the shape of a man on horseback. Not for a moment could I doubt it was my uncle. The figure was plainly his. My heart seemed to stand still with awe, or was it with intensity of gladness? Perhaps every night he was thus near me while I slept—a heavenly sentinel patrolling the house—the visible one of a whole camp unseen, of horses of fire and chariots of fire. So entrancing was the notion, that I stood there a little child, a mere incarnate love, the tears running down my checks for very bliss.

But presently my mood changed: what had befallen him? When first I saw him, horse and man were standing still, and I noted nothing strange, blinded perhaps by the tears of my gladness. But presently they moved on, keeping so to the horizon-line that it was plain my uncle's object was to have the house full in view; and as thus they skirted the edge of heaven, oh, how changed he seemed! His tall figure hung bent over the pommel, his neck drooped heavily. And the horse was so thin that I seemed to see, almost to feel his bones. Poor Thanatos! he looked tired to death, and I fancied his bent knees quivering, each short slow step he took. Ah, how unlike the happy old horse that had been! I thought of Death returning home weary from the slaughter of many kings, and cast the thought away. I thought of Death returning home on the eve of the great dawn, worn with his age-long work, pleased that at last it was over, and no more need of him: I kept that thought. Along the sky-line they held their slow way, toilsome through weakness, the rider with weary swing in the saddle, the horse with long gray neck hanging low to his hoofs, as if picking his path with purblind eyes. When his rider should collapse and fall from his back, not a step further would he take, but stand there till he fell to pieces!

Fancy gave way to reality. I woke up, called myself hard names, and hurried on a few of my clothes. My blessed uncle out in the night and weary to dissolution, and I at a window, contemplating him like a picture! I was an evil, heartless brute!

By the time I had my shoes on, and went again to the window, he had passed out of its range. I ran to one on the stair that looked at right angles to mine: he had not yet come within its field. I stood and waited. Presently he appeared, crawling along, a gray mounted ghost, in the light that so strangely befits lovers wandering in the May of hope, and the wasted spectre no less, whose imagination of the past reveals him to the eyes of men. For an instant I almost wished him dead and at rest; the next I was out of the house—then up on the moor, looking eagerly this way and that, poised on the swift feet of love, ready to spring to his bosom. How I longed to lead him to his own warm bed, and watch by him as he slept, while the great father kept watch over every heart in his universe. I gazed and gazed, but nowhere could I see the death-jaded horseman.

I bounded down the hill, through the wilderness and the dark alleys, and hurried to the stable. Trembling with haste I led Zoe out, sprang on her bare back, and darted off to scout the moor. Not a man or a horse or a live thing was to be seen in any direction! Once more I all but concluded I had looked on an apparition. Was my uncle dead? Had he come back thus to let me know? And was he now gone home indeed? Cold and disappointed, I returned to bed, full of the conviction that I had seen my uncle, but whether in the body or out of the body, I could not tell.

When John came, the notion of my having been out alone on the moor in the middle of the night, did not please him. He would have me promise not again, for any vision or apparition whatever, to leave the house without his company. But he could not persuade me. He asked what I would have done, if, having overtaken the horseman, I had found neither my uncle nor Death. I told him I would have given Zoe the use of her heels, when that horse would soon have seen the last of her. At the same time, he was inclined to believe with me, that I had seen my uncle. His intended proximity would account, he said, for his making no arrangement to hear from me; and if he continued to haunt the moor in such fashion, we could not fail to encounter him before long. In the meantime he thought it well to show no sign of suspecting his neighbourhood.

That I had seen my uncle, John was for a moment convinced when, the very next day, having gone to Wittenage, he saw Thanatos carrying Dr. Southwell, my uncle's friend. On the other hand, Thanatos looked very much alive, and in lovely condition! The doctor would not confess to knowing anything about my uncle, and expressed wonder that he had not yet returned, but said he did not mind how long he had the loan of such a horse.

Things went on as before for a while.

John began again to press me to marry him. I think it was mainly, I am sure it was in part, that I might never again ride the midnight moor—"like a witch out on her own mischievous hook," as he had once said. He knew that, if I caught sight of anything like my uncle anywhere, John or no John, I would go after it.

There was another good reason, however, besides the absence of my uncle, for our not marrying: John was not yet of legal age, and who could tell what might not lurk in his mother's threat! Who could tell what such a woman might not have prevailed on her husband to set down in his will! I was ready enough to marry a poor man, but I was not ready to let my lover become a poor man by marrying me a few months sooner. Were we not happy enough, seeing each other everyday, and mostly all day long? No doubt people talked, but why not let them talk? The mind of the many is not the mind of God! As to society, John called it an oyster of a divinity. He argued, however, that probably my uncle was keeping close until he saw us married. I answered that, if we were married, his mother would only be the more eager to have her revenge on us all, and my uncle the more careful of himself for our sakes. Anyhow, I said, I would not consent to be happier than we were, until we found him. The greater happiness I would receive only from his hand.



CHAPTER XXXI.

MY UNCLE COMES HOME.

Time went on, and it was now the depth of a cold, miserable winter. I remember the day to which I have now come so well! It was a black day. There was such a thickness of snow in the air, that what light got through had a lost look. It was almost more like a London fog than an honest darkness of the atmosphere, bred in its own bounds. But while the light lasted, the snow did not fall. I went about the house doing what I could find to do, and wondering John did not come.

His horse had again fallen lame—this time through an accident which made it necessary for him to stay with the poor animal long after his usual time of starting to come to me. When he did start, it was on foot, with the short winter afternoon closing in. But he knew the moor by this time nearly as well as I did.

It was quite dark when he drew near the house, which he generally entered through the wilderness and the garden. The snow had begun at last, and was coming down in deliberate earnest. It would lie feet deep over the moor before the morning! He was thinking what a dreary tramp home it would be by the road—for the wind was threatening to wake, and in a snow-wind the moor was a place to be avoided—when he struck his foot against something soft, in the path his own feet had worn to the wilderness, and fell over it. A groan followed, and John rose with the miserable feeling of having hurt some creature. Dropping on his knees to discover what it was, he found a man almost covered with snow, and nearly insensible. He swept the snow off him, contrived to get him on his back, and brought him round to the door, for the fence would have been awkward to cross with him. Just as I began to be really uneasy at his prolonged absence, there he was, with a man on his back apparently lifeless!

I did not stop to stare or question, but made haste to help him. His burden was slipping sideways, so we lowered it on a chair, and then carried it between us into the kitchen, I holding the legs. The moment a ray of light fell upon the face, I saw it was my uncle.

I just saved myself from a scream. My heart stopped, then bumped as if it would break through. I turned sick and cold. We laid him on the sofa, but I still held on to the legs; I was half unconscious. Martha set me on a chair, and in a moment or two I came to myself, and was able to help her. She said never a word, but was quite collected, looking every now and then in the face of her cousin with a doglike devotion, but never stopping an instant to gaze. We got him some brandy first, then some hot milk, and then some soup. He took a little of everything we offered him. We did not ask him a single question, but, the moment he revived, carried him up the stair, and laid him in bed. Once he cast his eyes about, and gave a sigh as of relief to find himself in his own room, then went off into a light doze, which, broken with starts and half-wakings, lasted until next day about noon. Either John or Martha or I was by his bedside all the time, so that he should not wake without seeing one of us near him.

But the sad thing was, that, when he did wake, he did not seem to come to himself. He never spoke, but just lay and looked out of his eyes, if indeed it was more than his eyes that looked, if indeed he looked out of them at all!

"He has overdone his strength!" we said to each other. "He has not been taking care of himself!—And then to have lain perhaps hours in the snow! It's a wonder he's alive!"

"He's nothing but skin and bone!" said Martha. "It will take weeks to get him up again!—And just look at his clothes! How ever did he come nigh such! They're fit only for a beggar! They must have knocked him down and stripped him!—Look at his poor boots!" she said pitifully, taking up one of them, and stroking it with her hand. "He'll never recover it!"

"He will," I said. "Here are three of us to give him of our life! He'll soon be himself again, now that we have him!"

But my heart was like to break at the sad sight. I cannot put in words what I felt.

"He would get well much quicker," said John, "if only we could tell him we were married!"

"It will do just as well to invite him to the wedding," I answered.

"I do hope he will give you away," said Martha.

"He will never give me away," I returned; "but he will give me to John. And I will not have the wedding until he is able to do that."

"You are right," said John. "And we mustn't ask him anything, or even refer to anything, till he wants to hear."

Days went and came, and still he did not seem to know quite where he was; if he did know, he seemed so content with knowing it, that he did not want to know anything more in heaven or earth. We grew very anxious about him. He did not heed a word that Dr. Southwell said. His mind seemed as exhausted as his body. The doctor justified John's resolve, saying he must not be troubled with questions, or the least attempt to rouse his memory.

John was now almost constantly with us. One day I asked him whether his mother took any notice of his being now so seldom home at night. He answered she did not; and, but for being up to her ways, he would imagine she knew nothing at all about his doings.

"What does she do herself all day long?" I asked.

"Goes over her books, I imagine," he answered. "She knows the hour is at hand when she must render account of her stewardship, and I suppose she is getting ready to meet it;—how, I would rather not conjecture. She gives me no trouble now, and I have no wish to trouble her."

"Have you no hope of ever being on filial terms with her again?" I said.

"There can be few things more unlikely," he replied.

I was a little troubled, notwithstanding my knowledge of her and my feeling toward her, that he should regard a complete alienation from his mother with such indifference. I could not, however, balance the account between them! If she had a strong claim in the sole fact that she was his mother, how much had she not injured him simply by not being lovable! Love unpaid is the worst possible debt; and to make it impossible to pay it, is the worst of wrongs.

But, oh, what a heart-oppression it was, that my uncle had returned so different! We were glad to have him, but how gladly would we not have let him go again to restore him to himself, even were it never more to rest our eyes upon him in this world! Dearly as I loved John, it seemed as if nothing could make me happy while my uncle remained as he was. It was a kind of cold despair to know him such impassable miles from me. I could not get near him! I went about all day with a sense—not merely of loss, but of a loss that gnawed at me with a sickening pain. He never spoke. He never said little one to me now! he never looked in my eyes as if he loved me! He was very gentle, never complained, never even frowned, but lay there with a dead question in his eyes. We feared his mind was utterly gone.

By degrees his health returned, but apparently neither his memory, nor his interest in life. Yet he had a far-away look in his eyes, as if he remembered something, and started and turned at every opening of the door, as if he expected something. He took to wandering about the yard and the stable and the cow-house; would gaze for an hour at some animal in its stall; would watch the men threshing the corn, or twisting straw-ropes. When Dr. Southwell sent back his horse, it was in great hope that the sight of Death would wake him up; that he would recognize his old companion, jump on his back, and be well again; but my uncle only looked at him with a faint admiration, went round him and examined him as if he were a horse he thought of buying, then turned away and left him. Death was troubled at his treatment of him. He on his part showed him all the old attention, using every equine blandishment he knew; but having met with no response, he too turned slowly away, and walked to his stable, Dr. Southwell would gladly have bought him, but neither John nor I would hear of parting with him: he was almost a portion of his master! My uncle might come to himself any moment: how could we look him in the face if Death was gone from us! Besides, we loved the horse for his own sake as well as my uncle's, and John would be but too glad to ride him!

My uncle would wander over the house, up and down, but seemed to prefer the little drawing-room: I made it my special business to keep a good fire there. He never went to the study; never opened the door in the chimney-corner. He very seldom spoke, and seldomer to me than to any other. It was a dreary time! Our very souls had longed for him back, and thus he came to us!

Sorely I wept over the change that had passed upon the good man. He must have received some terrible shock! It was just as if his mother, John said, had got hold of him, and put a knife in his heart! It was well, however, that he was not wandering about the heath, exposed to the elements! and there was yet time for many a good thing to come! Where one must wait, one can wait.

John had to learn this, for, say what he would, the idea of marrying while my uncle remained in such plight, was to me unendurable.



CHAPTER XXXII.

TWICE TWO IS ONE.

The spring came, but brought little change in the condition of my uncle. In the month of May, Dr. Southwell advised our taking him abroad. When we proposed it to him, he passed his hand wearily over his forehead, as if he felt something wrong there, and gave us no reply. We made our preparations, and when the day arrived, he did not object to go.

We were an odd party: John and I, bachelor and spinster; my uncle, a silent, moody man, who did whatever we asked him; and the still, open-eyed Martha Moon, who, I sometimes think, understood more about it all than any of us. I could talk a little French, John a good deal of German. When we got to Paris, we found my uncle considerably at home there. When he cared to speak, he spoke like a native, and was never at a loss for word or phrase.

It was he, indeed, who took us to a quiet little hotel he knew; and when we were comfortably settled in it, he began to take the lead in all our plans. By degrees he assumed the care and guidance of the whole party; and so well did he carry out what he had silently, perhaps almost unconsciously undertaken, that we conceived the greatest hopes of the result to himself. A mind might lie quiescent so long as it was ministered to, and hedged from cares and duties, but wake up when something was required of it! No one would have thought anything amiss with my uncle, that heard him giving his orders for the day, or acting cicerone to the little company—there for his sake, though he did not know it. How often John and I looked at each other, and how glad were our hearts! My uncle was fast coming to himself! It was like watching the dead grow alive.

One day he proposed taking a carriage and a good pair of horses, and driving to Versailles to see the palace. We agreed, and all went well. I had not, in my wildest dreams, imagined a place so grand and beautiful. We wandered about it for hours, and were just tired enough to begin thinking with pleasure of the start homeward, when we found ourselves in a very long, straight corridor. I was walking alone, a little ahead of the rest; my uncle was coming along next, but a good way behind me; a few paces behind my uncle, came John with Martha, to whom he was more scrupulously attentive than to myself.

In front of me was a door, dividing the corridor in two, apparently filled with plain plate-glass, to break the draught without obscuring the effect of the great length of the corridor, which stretched away as far on the other side as we had come on this. I paused and stood aside, leaning against the wall to wait for my uncle, and gazing listlessly out of a window opposite me. But as my uncle came nearer to open the door for us, I happened to cast my eyes again upon it, and saw, as it seemed, my uncle coming in the opposite direction; whence I concluded of course, that I had made a mistake, and that what I had taken for a clear plate of glass, was a mirror, reflecting the corridor behind me. I looked back at my uncle with a little anxiety. My reader may remember that, when he came to fetch me from Rising, the day after I was lost on the moor, encountering a mirror at unawares, he started and nearly fell: from this occurrence, and from the absence of mirrors about the house, I had imagined in his life some painful story connected with a mirror.

Once again I saw him start, and then stand like stone. Almost immediately a marvellous light overspread his countenance, and with a cry he bounded forward. I looked again at the mirror, and there I saw the self-same light-irradiated countenance coming straight, as was natural, to meet that of which it was the reflection. Then all at once the solid foundations of fact seemed to melt into vaporous dream, for as I saw the two figures come together, the one in the mirror, the other in the world, and was starting forward to prevent my uncle from shattering the mirror and wounding himself, the figures fell into each other's arms, and I heard two voices weeping and sobbing, as the substance and the shadow embraced.

Two men had for a moment been deceived like myself: neither glass nor mirror was there—only the frame from which a swing-door had been removed. They walked each into the arms of the other, whom they had at first each taken for himself.

They paused in their weeping, held each other at arm's-length, and gazed as in mute appeal for yet better assurance; then, smiling like two suns from opposing rain-clouds, fell again each on the other's neck, and wept anew. Neither had killed the other! Neither had lost the other! The world had been a graveyard; it was a paradise!

We stood aside in reverence. Martha Moon's eyes glowed, but she manifested no surprise. John and I stared in utter bewilderment. The two embraced each other, kissed and hugged and patted each other, wept and murmured and laughed, then all at once, with one great sigh between them, grew aware of witnesses. They were too happy to blush, yet indeed they could not have blushed, so red were they with the fire of heaven's own delight. Utterly unembarrassed they turned toward us—and then came a fresh astonishment, an old and new joy together out of the treasure of the divine house-holder: the uncle of the mirror, radiant with a joy such as I had never before beheld upon human countenance, came straight to me, cried; "Ah, little one!" took me in his arms, and embraced me with all the old tenderness. Then I knew that my own old uncle was the same as ever I had known him, the same as when I used to go to sleep in his arms.

The jubilation that followed, it is impossible for me to describe; and my husband, who approves of all I have yet written, begs me not to attempt an adumbration of it.

"It would be a pity," he says, "to end a won race with a tumble down at the post!"



CHAPTER XXXIII.

HALF ONE IS ONE.

I am going to give you the whole story, but not this moment; I want to talk a little first. I need not say that I had twin uncles. They were but one man to the world; to themselves only were they a veritable two. The word twin means one of two that once were one. To twin means to divide, they tell me. The opposite action is, of twain to make one. To me as well as the world, I believe, but for the close individual contact of all my life with my uncle Edward, the two would have been but as one man. I hardly know that I felt any richer at first for having two uncles; it was long before I should have felt much poorer for the loss of uncle Edmund. Uncle Edward was to me the substance of which uncle Edmund was the shadow. But at length I learned to love him dearly through perceiving how dearly my own uncle loved him. I loved the one because he was what he was, the other because he was not that one. Creative Love commonly differentiates that it may unite; in the case of my uncles it seemed only to have divided that it might unite. I am hardly intelligible to myself; in my mind at least I have got into a bog of confused metaphysics, out of which it is time I scrambled. What I would say is this—that what made the world not care there should be two of them, made the earth a heaven to those two. By their not being one, they were able to love, and so were one. Like twin planets they revolved around each other, and in a common orbit around God their sun. It was a beautiful thing to see how uncle Edmund revived and expanded in the light of his brother's presence, until he grew plainly himself. He had suffered more than my own uncle, and had not had an orphan child to love and be loved by.

What a drive home that was! Paris, anywhere seemed home now! I had John and my uncles; John had me and my uncle; my uncles had each other; and I suspect, if we could have looked into Martha, we should have seen that she, through her lovely unselfishness, possessed us all more than any one of us another. Oh the outbursts of gladness on the way!—the talks!—the silences! The past fell off like an ugly veil from the true face of things; the present was sunshine; the future a rosy cloud.

When we reached our hotel, it was dinner-time, and John ordered champagne. He and I were hungry as two happy children; the brothers ate little, and scarcely drank. They were too full of each other to have room for any animal need. A strange solemnity crowned and dominated their gladness. Each was to the other a Lazarus given back from the grave. But to understand the depth of their rapture, you must know their story. That of Martha and Mary and Lazarus could not have equalled it but for the presence of the Master, for neither sisters nor brother had done each other any wrong. They looked to me like men walking in a luminous mist—a mist of unspeakable suffering radiant with a joy as unspeakable—the very stuff to fashion into glorious dreams.

When we drew round the fire, for the evenings were chilly, they laid their whole history open to us. What a tale it was! and what a telling of it! My own uncle, Edward, was the principal narrator, but was occasionally helped out by my newer uncle, Edmund. I had the story already, my reader will remember, in my uncle's writing, at home: when we returned I read it—not with the same absorption as if it had come first, but with as much interest, and certainly with the more thorough comprehension that I had listened to it before. That same written story I shall presently give, supplemented by what, necessarily, my uncle Edmund had to supply, and with some elucidation from the spoken narrative of my uncle Edward.

As the story proceeded, overcome with the horror of the revelation I foresaw, I forgot myself, and cried out—

"And that woman is John's mother!"

"Whose mother?" asked uncle Edmund, with scornful curiosity.

"John Day's," I answered.

"It cannot be!" he cried, blazing up. "Are you sure of it?"

"I have always been given so to understand," replied John for me; "but I am by no means sure of it. I have doubted it a thousand times."

"No wonder! Then we may go on! But, indeed, to believe you her son, would be to doubt you! I don't believe it."

"You could not help doubting me!" responded John. "—I might be true, though, even if I were her son!" he added.

"Ed," said Edmund to Edward, "let us lay our heads together!"

"Ready Ed!" said Edward to Edmund.

Thereupon they began comparing memories and recollections,—to find, however, that they had by no means data enough. One thing was clear to me—that nothing would be too bad for them to believe of her.

"She would pick out the eye of a corpse if she thought a sovereign lay behind it!" said uncle Edmund.

"To have the turning over of his rents,—" said uncle Edward, and checked himself.

"Yes—it would be just one of her devil-tricks!" agreed uncle Edmund.

"I beg your pardon, John," said uncle Edward, as if it were he that had used the phrase, and uncle Edmund nodded to John, as if he had himself made the apology.

John said nothing. His eyes looked wild with hope. He felt like one who, having been taught that he is a child of the devil, begins to know that God is his father—the one discovery worth making by son of man.

Then, at my request, they went on with their story, which I had interrupted.

When it was at length all poured out, and the last drops shaken from the memory of each, there fell a long silence, which my own uncle broke.

"When shall we start, Ed?" he said.

"To-morrow, Ed."

"This business of John's must come first, Ed!"

"It shall, Ed!"

"You know where you were born, John?"

"On my father's estate of Rubworth in Gloucestershire, I believe" answered John.