respective fashions, considering the position and gathering their forces.

At length he spoke :

a matter of precaution, repeated his question.

'Come here,' she insisted.

'I will come,' he declared, ad

letter.'

She did not answer.

'Or tell me where I can find it, and I will get it for myself.'

If she had been possessed by a dumb spirit, she could not have taken less notice of his remark.

He hesitated for a short time; then he stepped across to where she sat, and said, with exceeding gentleness,

'Mira dear, don't be childish; we cannot disassociate our interests now. Fetch me that letter, I entreat of you—will you?' and he laid his hand imploringly on hers.

She threw it off angrily.

'I will not,' she declared; 'I would not if you went down on your knees and begged for a sight of it.'

O, very well,' he said; and without uttering another word he took up his hat, which he had laid on a table near the fireplace, and walked towards the door.

This time he neither paused nor hesitated, neither did he look back. She turned her head and watched him curiously. No doubt she expected him to return; but he did not waver or, what would have been equivalent, speak.

He opened the door, he was in the hall; he would have left the house in another minute, when she started up, and cried,

'John.'

He did not come back; he stood still, and asked,

'What do you want?' 'To speak to you.' 'What have you got to say?' he asked.

'Come here, and I will tell you.'

He stepped back within the doorway, and, closing the door as

reluctance; but for your own sake I hope you are not trifling with me.'

She stood with her long dress trailing behind her, and her ornaments-ah, where was the goldsmith, cunning though he might be in his craft, who could tell the price that had been paid for those baubles-glittering in the dancing firelight, with her beautiful face looking upon him bitterly and scornfully, and her hands nervously tearing at the fastenings of her dress.

'You insist on seeing that letter?' she asked, in a low distinct voice the listener felt placed a restraint on every word.

I wish to see it, certainly,' he answered.

Take it, then,' she retorted; and drawing a paper from her bosom, tore it across, and then flung the pieces at his feet.

He did not make a remark; he stooped and picked up the fragments; then he stirred the fire into a blaze, and, pulling a low chair close to the hearth, read the letter through slowly and deliberately twice.

When he had finished, quite finished, he placed the letter in his pocket-book, and then said,

'I thought you told me you parted on bad terms.'

'So we did.'

'And that he never wrote to you nor took the slightest notice of your existence beyond sending that money which is accumulating in the bank,'

'Neither he did.'

And that he never expressed the slightest desire for you to join him in Australia, or sent one single message which you could

construe into regret for your separation.'

"Neither he did.'

'And yet in this letter, which, indeed,' and his voice wavered as he spoke, is as touching a letter as I ever read in all my life, he speaks of others which have preceded it, of the coldness and brevity of your replies, of his own unabated affection, of his grief that the poverty into which he dragged you, and the trouble he caused at the time of his accident, should have changed the love he believed you once bore him into something almost dislike; and then he goes on to hope-O Mira, how can I repeat his words!'

'There is no necessity for you to try, surely,' she remarked as he stopped.

That the day is not far distant when you will be able to tell him you are pleased to see him back in England; when you will be glad to pack up and return with him to a country where he can now manage to give you a beautiful home and provide you, though not with luxuries, with every comfort.'

That is what he says,' she agreed defiantly.

'Then you have been deceiving me all the time,' summed up Mr. Hay; 'you have deliberately been telling me what was not the truth.'

'You have always been so truthful yourself,' she retorted; it is, of course, quite right you should reproach me.'

I do not know what you mean or what you are trying to imply,' he said; but in any case it is no answer to my statement. Your husband never cast you off; never ceased writing to you; never entertained the idea of remaining in Australia without his wife. It was all false, Mira; all untrue from beginning to end.'

Nothing could well be more

sad, more hopeless, than his tone. Even she felt that, for she remarked,

'I said you had better not read the letter; but you would take your own way. I would have kept it from your sight if you had let me.'

He did not answer her. What need was there of speech between them? As she had sat looking intently at the fire, so he now remained with his eyes fixed on the glowing coals, and his thoughts wandering over the irrevocable past, and shadowing faintly out the uncertain future.

Before him there arose, as in a vision, a frank handsome face; handsome, though worn with illness, wasted by pain. A pair of honest blue eyes were raised to his thankfully; a faint voice spoke of gratitude; and now-and now

He had never thought of wrong; and yet this was the end, or rather, for him, the beginning of the end. The man had trusted him; the idea of not trusting had not entered into his mind. What a home-coming! what a tale to greet one who had been striving and struggling in a distant land!

Had tears of blood availed, he would have shed them. O terrible awakening from the slothful sleep of sin! O woful dawn after the dark night of wrong! Dead Sea fruit! He had held it in his hand, all fair without, all foul within; sweet to the lips, sour to the teeth, pleasant to the sense, death to the soul !

If the man he wronged had seen him then he must have been avenged. Gloomier than the gathering night were the thoughts and memories crowding through his mind; keener than the cutting wind the pang which shot through his heart as he read the words of that letter, which could never be forgotten; louder than

the roaring blasts, which at times beat against the windows, the upbraidings of his conscience; more dreary than the winter darkness the prospect his future presented.

He sat silent, looking into the fire; and she sat silent also, watching him furtively.

For her, and such as her, there is no remorse, and no repentance. She dreaded, but she did not regret; she feared, but she would not have retraced a single step of the road she had travelled.

Here lay the difference between them. The difference there is between the sirens who sing on the rocks, and the men who, plunging in to reach them, are engulfed in depths, over the darkness of which there lies a glamour of moonlight, that can never penetrate the darkness where they lie dishonoured and dead.

CHAPTER XIII.

HE IS DEAD.

FINE spring weather; green leaves and white blossoms everywhere, in the London suburbs as in the far-away country; a pleasant scent of rural odours pervading even the City thoroughfares, as itinerant vendors pushed their trucks laden with sweet-smelling flowers over streets still wet after refreshing showers from vanished water-carts.

Lilacs and laburnums in full bloom, hawthorn perfuming all the land, fruit-trees snowy with blossom; Nature as fair as she could look, Nature as busy as she could be.

Warm weather for the time of year, bright sunshine chilled by no east wind. The breezes that spring came from the west; it was a pleasant May alike for invalids and the robust on shore, and it

seemed propitious also for those returning to England by sea. No stormy nights, no tempestuous days; the Atlantic like a millpond, so sailors just off the ocean declared in figurative language; the Channel as smooth and clear as glass.

A joyous season for any one to come home, if he were likely to find anything joyful awaiting him on the threshold. English birds singing in the woods, English meadows green and fair stretching beside dreamy rivers, red-tiled barns, comfortable farmhouses, picturesque cottages, sleepy villages, old churches surrounded by moss-covered tombstones, all dotting the quiet landscape. beautiful country, the memory of which has haunted many a wanderer sleeping and waking, and brought him over thousands of miles to look upon its face once

more.

A

Mr. Palthorpe had not yet arrived, but the person who was called Mrs. Hay knew when she might expect him. She had been told the name of the vessel by which he meant to sail and the probable date when it would reach England; so that whatever delights the lovely spring-time brought to others, to her it only proved a weary watch, a long dread.

If she could have run away, The Aspens had beheld her no more; but she knew nowhere to run to. She was not the woman to cast herself desolate and penniless upon the world, to leave a warm fireside and a comfortable home, and go out into the biting cold to face an uncertain future.

But she was afraid-horribly. She awoke at night in an agony of dread. In the very slightest degree she did not understand the nature of the man she had married and wronged, and she feared his

vengeance as she had never feared anything before in her life.

She grew thin and worn; her face lost its former expression of calm indifference, and acquired one entirely fresh-that of sharp anxiety. She could not rest, she could settle to nothing. She could not bear to leave the house, and yet she did not like to remain in it. She suffered as only an intensely selfish woman entirely absorbed in the contemplation of her own danger could suffer, and her agony was all the keener because she dared not give expression to it. Even to her own soul she scarcely ventured to whisper,

'If both cast me off, what is to become of me?'

For she feared poverty more than sin. She loved ease and comfort, to lie soft, to eat well, to be clothed in rich raiment, better than virtue. Sin, virtue; they were words that had no meaning to her.

Conventionally she was aware certain ideas were attached to them; but that those ideas should really influence the conduct of any human being seemed to her ridiculous.

There was, however, nothing ridiculous to her in the idea that she might have to leave The Aspens, and be compelled to return to an even worse poverty than that endured due east.

For as she had no gratitude, she had no faith in man's justice, or generosity, or remorse. She could not understand any one of these qualities-gratitude, faith, justice, generosity, remorse. She was as free from all such sentiments as though she had been made of marble instead of flesh and blood.

How the man, tender of conscience, soft of heart, strong of purpose, weak in temptation, a merciless judge where himself

was concerned, too ready with excuses for the short-comings of his fellows, bore the days and the weeks and the months of that long ordeal, I could never hope to tell.

There are things no writer ever can tell, as for instance the passage of the hours between sentence and execution, between arrest and trial, between crime and arrest.

What he passed through whilst awaiting the arrival of that homeward-bound vessel left its mark for life on his outward man, and branded words known only to himself upon his inmost soul.

In that fair spring time he aged years-mentally, morally, physically. When the summer came, it was not the same man who stood in the sunshine as had looked at the snow. Sin deals very heavily with some people. Like smallpox, it is partial in its rayages; it pits and sears and marks most souls, but it passes lightly over others. He took the disease badly, and it struck deep into his very vitals. Never, truly it may be said, were the wounds it inflicted closed, the scars it left quite healed. He was very quiet, and very patient, and very repentant; but he never drank of any water of Lethe; he found no antidote powerful enough to undo the effect of the poison he wittingly swallowed, and which destroyed the peace and the happiness and the hope and the comfort of every hour of the future, that might have been so bright.

It was drawing very near: the days went by, the days full of actual sunshine, filled with beauty and perfume. It was time the vessel arrived; any hour, any minute he might return. Nay, even then the good ship might be in harbour, the injured husband hastening to meet the wife he might never greet more !

Mr. Hay sat in his office in the City, looking at the shipping intelligence; there was none that affected him. Well, the evil could only be considered as deferred.

He laid aside the Times and opened his letters; there was nothing in the letters which interested him. Alas, there was nothing in those days which could really interest him, save the return of the man he had wronged.

He pushed his letters away, and sat with hands folded on his desk, and head turned towards the window, lost in thought. Sunshine streaming into the room where he sat, moths dancing in the sunbeams. A stillness more complete than ever reigned in wood or meadow; for his office was situated at the back of his place of business, and gave only on an old City graveyard hemmed in by warehouses. Not a sound breaking the silence, not a person to intrude upon his reverie. For any stir or bustle of life, he might have been in his grave instead of in the heart of the City.

After a time the quiet seemed to affect him, for he started and drew the letters nearer to his hand, and was about to touch the bell, when his eye fell on a paragraph in the discarded Times, headed 'Loss of the North Wales.'

Something to interest him in that; something to cause the sunbeams to flicker and fade, and the room to reel round, and the light of day to go out and be replaced by darkness.

It did not last long. When the mental swoon-for the faintness was more mental than physicalpassed away, he was still sitting in his accustomed chair, and quite alone; the paper before him, the sun streaming in at the window, the silence still unbroken.

'Loss of the North Wales.'

Ay, there it was in black and white. No delusion of the fancy; no illusion of the senses. Loss of the North Wales; the vessel in which Mr. Palthorpe was returning home. What had happened? what did the paragraph say? Left on such a date; encountered a gale in latitude so-andso.' What did that signify? He passed it over, and read on: Would not answer to the helm ; drifted before the wind; sprang a leak; made signals of distress, and the steamer Adrian came to their assistance. Most of the passengers and crew saved. All might have been got off; but the sea ran so high two boats were swamped. Some of the rescued were transferred to a sailing vessel they fell in with a few days later. A list of the saved was appended. In it there appeared no such name as Palthorpe.'

A minute later, one of the clerks entering the room found his principal lying back in his chair white and trembling.

'Are you ill, sir?' he asked, hurrying to his assistance.

'Give me some water, quick,' was the answer feebly spoken.

A carafe and tumbler stood on the table, and after swallowing a little he seemed to revive.

'Shall I go for a doctor, sir?' asked the clerk.

'No; I shall be well in a few minutes.'

More than half an hour passed, however, before he recovered sufficiently to rise and walk across the room. When he did so, it Iwas with the manner of a man who felt dazed and bewildered. He went to the window and looked out on the dreary burying-ground, on the slanting headstones and ruined monuments, encrusted with soot and grime and dust, and the inscriptions they had once borne almost obliterated.