The Secret of Wyvern Towers

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"The Secret of Wyvern Towers" in THE ARGOSY, VOLUME XXVI.
(DECEMBER, 1897), No. 1, pp. 1-78, published by Frank A. Munsey in 1898.

THE SECRET OF WYVERN TOWERS.*

[* Copyright, 1897, by T. W. Speight .]

BY T. W. SPEIGHT.

Being an account of the circumstances that shadowed the happiness of Felix Drelincourt--Why two persons proclaimed themselves guilty of a fearful crime, on account of which a vagabond's life was placed in jeopardy--The blotting out of an identity brought about by an unexpected legacy.

CHAPTER I.

VERY STRANGE TIDINGS.

On a certain sunny May morning, about forty years ago, the owner of Wyvern Towers stepped into a lovely glade of Barras Wood, which was a portion of his extensive property.

Felix Drelincourt was a man who stood a little over six feet in height. His black, silky hair had a careless wave in it, and his thin mustache, with its up curled tips, was the cause of his often being taken for a foreigner.

But his eyes were the most striking feature of a striking personality. They were black, and of an extraordinarily piercing quality, with a sort of veiled, somber glow in them at times, as it might be the glow thrown out from between the bars of some hidden furnace, the fire in which was eating its heart away in the flame of its own burning unrest. It was not easy to judge his age, but one might put it down as being somewhere between eight and twenty and four or five and thirty. This morning he was dressed in a velveteen shooting jacket, with cord breeches and leggings, and was wearing a low crowned felt hat.

"What has brought me here on this one morning of all mornings of the year?" he said. "Ah, what! Am I wrong in terming it a force--a magnetic attraction--I was powerless to resist? This is her birthday. Where is she? Does an English sun shine here on this morning, or that of some far off land? Vain questions, and idle as vain."

He took a couple of turns from end to end of the glade with compressed lips and bent brows. Then his thoughts again took articulate form.

"This is the spot--the forest temple--the grove sacred to the memory of that hour--where, only three short years ago, Madeline told me that she loved me! Only three little years ago, and yet I seem to have lived through a cycle since then. Yes, here our lips met in love's first kiss, and here we vowed that nothing on earth should divide us. Poor fools that we were! We did not dream of treachery; we hardly knew there was such a word."

"It was in the bark of this tree that I cut her initials and my own. Here they are still to convince me I am not dreaming of something which never happened. Time's obliterating fingers have dealt tenderly with them, as though the old graybeard knew they were a lover's handiwork, and remembered a far off eon when he was young himself."

At this moment the clock of a distant church began to strike the hour. Drelincourt stood listening till the last stroke had died into silence.

"Nine of them," he said. "It's time to think of going back to the Cot. At what hour did I leave it? There's the mystery. It must have been near midnight before I fell asleep, dog tired. The rest is an absolute blank till I---- Ah! Some one is calling me. It sounds like Rodd's voice. What can he want with me at this hour?"

Taking a silver whistle from his pocket, he put it to his lips and blew. Its keen, shrilly scream cut the silence, like a knife.

Two minutes later a man came brushing roughly through the underwood. At the edge of the glade he paused for a moment, while he took off his hat and mopped his brow.

Drelincourt stood motionless, his eyes turned upon him. Under his breath he said: "He has the look of one charged with a message of doom."

The newcomer, Roden Marsh by name, was Felix Drelincourt's foster brother. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a pronounced stoop of the shoulders which detracted considerably from his height. He had a long, thin face, a high ridged, prominent nose, thoughtful, deep set eyes, and a profusion of straw colored hair parted down the middle.

His clothes, generally more or less worn and threadbare--not from necessity, but because he was both indifferent to appearances and parsimoniously inclined--hung loosely on his lean and bony frame. By strangers he was often taken for the village schoolmaster.

As he advanced into the glade, any one familiar with his customary phlegmatic and unemotional manner would have seen at once that he was the bearer of no ordinary tidings.

"Thank Heaven I have found you!" were his first words, and there could be no doubt of the sincerity with which they were spoken.

"It is a small mercy to be thankful for," replied the other, with the ghost of a smile.

"Those are strong words, my dear Rodd, but they fail to convey any definite idea to my mind. They may mean much or they may mean very little."

"Murdered!" Drelincourt staggered back a pace or two, and then, putting forth his right hand, he caught hold of an oak sapling and gripped it hard. For a few seconds his body rocked like that of a man whose brain has been stunned and dizzied by some great shock.

"That is indeed a terrible discovery to have made," he went on, after a pause. "Kate dead! It seems incredible; altogether beyond belief."

"But what possible motive could any one have for the commission of such a crime?"

Roden's thin lips tightened. Evidently the question was one which he either would not or could not answer.

"When and by whom was the discovery made?" asked Mr. Drelincourt, after a brief pause.

"It was made by Lucille, nearly a couple of hours ago. She went as usual to take her mistress an early cup of chocolate, and--and found her dead in bed."

"Mrs. Drelincourt had been stabbed to the heart, most probably while she was asleep."

Drelincourt seated himself on the fallen trunk, and resting his elbows on his knees, he bent his eyes on the ground.

"As soon as the crime became known," resumed the other, "I sent off a groom on horseback to fetch Dr. Carew. On the way he met Mr. Ormsby and told him the news, and was ordered by him to at once communicate with the police."

"Mr. Ormsby, accompanied by another gentleman, a stranger, had just reached the Towers before I left it."

"Exactly. It has taken me nearly an hour to find you. I hurried, first of all, to the Cot, but you were not there. Margery Trant had not heard you leave the house, and was unable to tell me in which direction you had gone. I set out to look for you, and it must have been instinct which directed my steps to this place."

"Go on," said Drelincourt, without looking up. "You have something more to tell me."

"As I bent over Mrs. Drelincourt's dead body, I found this close by her pillow."

As he finished speaking, he drew from one of his pockets a white handkerchief bordered with a thin line of black, and having shaken it out, held it up to the light. On it were three or four crimson stains. "It is yours. Here are your initials in one corner," he said.

He had a softly modulated voice, but just now there was no more emotion either in it or his manner than if he had been discussing the state of the weather.

Drelincourt started to his feet, his face blanched to the lips. A moment or two he stared at the handkerchief as though it had for him a horrible fascination. Then the eyes of the two men met in a silence which seemed charged with hidden meaning.

"A dumb witness, but enough to hang a man," said Drelincourt at length, as he turned away with a shudder.

Marsh did not reply, but, after a keen glance round, as if to make sure there was no lurking onlooker, he let the handkerchief drop to the ground, and then, dropping on one knee, he set it alight with a match from his fusee box.

Drelincourt, his back supported by a tree, stood looking on in silence till the flame had burned itself out, and nothing was left save a little fine ash, which a wandering breeze presently caught up and frolicked off with into the depths of the wood.

"This also I found," resumed Roden. "It was lying open on the writing table in your dressing room at the Towers for anybody to see. It is in your writing, and is dated today."

As he spoke, he produced a letter from his breast pocket and handed it to Drelincourt, who took it mechanically and a half dazed man. It was without an envelope, and was simply folded in two. Opening it, he read it in silence and with growing amazement.

"An unfinished letter to my friend, Professor Ridsdale. And you say that you found it in my dressing room at the Towers?"

"It refers to certain chemical experiments in which my friend and I are interested. It is the very letter, almost word for word, which I made up my mind to write to him the first thing after breakfast this morning.. And yet I slept last night at the Cot, while you found this an hour or more ago at the Towers!"

"I have, Felix." "Yes, no other explanation is possible. Yet it seems monstrous--unbelievable. And by my hand! Oh!"

He ended with a groan, turned his face aside, and was silent. For once this man, usually so proudly self-centered, so stoically self-repressed, was moved to the depths of his soul as never in his life before.

"Felix, between you and me not a word more is needed--I comprehend. You have suffered. Your life has been made a burden almost too bitter to be borne. I have seen and known it for long. I have suffered with your sufferings; my heart has bled for you times without number. I can speak now; hitherto I have had to look on and be dumb."

"Yes, you have seen something--perchance much; but you know no more than your eyes have shown you, whatever you may have guessed. Of the details of her treachery-- hers , Rodd--which was black as hell, you know nothing. Sit you there and listen. The tale shall be told, now and here, from beginning to end."

Roden seated himself on the fallen trunk, while Drelincourt, pacing slowly back and forth, half a dozen yards this way and as many that, began his narrative.

"You will not have forgotten that about three years ago Colonel Fenwicke and his niece were staying with the Ormsbys at Denham Lodge, where I was an occasional visitor. I had met Madeline Fenwicke abroad in the course of the previous summer, and had fallen in love with her; but at that time I was comparatively a poor man, and marriage was not to be thought of. In the interim my father had died, and I had succeeded to the entail. There was no longer any reason why I should keep silent. It was in this very glade, Rodd--here--here--that I met my darling and told her my secret! It was here her lips touched mine in love's first kiss. O Heaven! To think of all that has happened between then and now!"

He took a turn or two in silence. Roden sat with crossed legs, nursing an elbow with one hand, his chin supported in the hollowed palm of the other.

"Madeline and Kate Ormsby had been schoolfellows, and the former had no secrets from her friend. The day following our interview I was called away to London by the illness of my aunt, Mrs. Gascoigne. At Denham Lodge there is a terrace with a stone balustrade, from which a flight of steps leads to the lower garden. As Madeline and Kate were leaning over this balustrade after dark a few evenings later, listening to a nightingale, two people came along the lower walk, a man and a woman, judging from their voices. Said the man, as they drew near:

"'The way Mr. Drelincourt has behaved to the girl is common talk in the village. Of course he can't marry her--she's too far beneath him for that--and now they say she's fit to break her heart because he refuses to have anything more to do with her.'

"'Perhaps he's grown tired of her and found somebody more to his liking. That's often the way you men have of treating us,' answered the woman.

"Oh, come! We're not all as bad as that,' said the man with a laugh, after which they passed out of earshot.

"An hour later Madeline wrote me that all was at an end between us. The letter, which should have reached me next morning, was kept back by Kate, and did not come to hand till three days later. Within four hours of receiving it I was at Denham Lodge, only to find that Madeline and her uncle had left there the day before.

"My aunt lingered on from week to week. I was her last living relative, and she would not hear of my leaving for longer than a few hours at a time. All I could do was to write a note to Madeline, begging for an explanation, and inclose it under cover to the colonel at his club. A week later my note was returned to me from Paris, together with a few lines from the colonel, stating that thenceforward all communication with me must cease, both on his part and that of his niece. What I had been guilty of which deserved such a sentence I was wholly at a loss to conceive. I could not comprehend the meaning of such an action.

"A month later my aunt died. As soon as I was at liberty, I set out for the continent, but nowhere could I come across a trace of those I was in search of. You know what followed a little later: how I was accidentally wounded while out shooting; how I was carried to Denham Lodge, and there nursed back to convalescence by Kate Ormsby."

"Some part of what you have now told me I know or guessed already," said Roden; "but not the whole of it."

"You did not know how, one day, Kate read to me a passage from a letter professedly written by her correspondent, Lady Linthorpe, in which it was stated that Madeline Fenwicke had been married a fortnight before at Rome. Within six weeks of that day Kate Ormsby had become my wife."

Seating himself on the tree by the side of Marsh, he began to manufacture a cigarette. By this time, to all outward seeming, he was thoroughly himself again.

The shock of the news brought him by his foster brother had stunned, and in a measure unmanned him for a little while, but his nature was too self-poised, and his nerves too thoroughly under control, to allow of his equanimity being seriously disturbed for any length of time. That which had happened, however much it was to be deplored, belonged to the past, and not all the powers of Heaven and earth combined could alter or undo it. The only thing left him was to face the consequences, and that he was prepared to do.

"It was not a fact, then, that Miss Fenwicke was married?" queried Roden, after a pause.

"The statement was false from beginning to end. No such letter was ever written by Lady Linthorpe; but not till about a month ago did that fact come to my knowledge, and not till then was I in a position to fathom the depths of my wife's treachery. It was she who arranged the conversation overheard by Madeline that evening on the terrace, the actors in it being the son of her father's bailiff and the governess to her two younger sisters. It was a damnable plot, but it succeeded."

He proceeded to light his cigarette, which done, he resumed his slow pacing to and fro.

"It was indeed a black business," said Roden. "Did you tell Mrs. Drelincourt of your discovery?"

"Laughed at me with that cold blooded laugh of hers which used to go through me like a knife. In those days, she said, she was such a simpleton as to fancy herself in love with me, and, in any case, she had vowed to herself that Miss Fenwicke should never be my wife. She will never laugh at me again."

"I am glad, Felix, you have told me this," said Roden presently. "It has served to make clear much that was obscure to me before."

Tossing away what was left of his cigarette, Drelincourt sat down again on the felled trunk.

CHAPTER II.

AFTER THE TELLING OF THE NEWS.

"When, soon after my marriage," resumed Mr. Drelincourt, "I furnished the Cot--which, some years before, had been tenanted by my father's gamekeeper--and fitted up a couple of its rooms as a laboratory, I had a double object in view. First of all, I wanted a place where I could prosecute my experiments free from the interruptions and annoyances to which I was subjected at the Towers; and, secondly, because it would be a haven of refuge to which I could escape at any time when matters at home had become so insupportable that I felt I must get away from them for a while lest I should go mad.

"Well, five days ago I left the Towers and took up my quarters at the Cot. It was after a scene with my wife of more than ordinary violence. As you know, I some time ago made old Margery Trant a fixture at the Cot, so that she might be on the spot to look after my meals and what not. On previous occasions when I have made the place my temporary home, I have always been able to plunge into my experiments with a vast feeling of relief. Grateful to me was the sense of solitude and of isolation from all my kind. Even you, Rodd, never intruded upon me at such times.

"This time, however, I could not settle down to anything. My mind was upset as it had never been before. The discovery of Kate's treachery weighed me down like a hideous nightmare from which I could not free myself. For the first time my experiments had become distasteful to me. My laboratory was as a temple of despair. I spent my days out of doors, sometimes on horseback, at other times on foot, keeping as far as possible from the haunts of men, and only returning to the Cot to eat and sleep when mind and body alike refused to hold out any longer.

"It had been dark some hours when I got back last night. I had taken Favorita for a twenty miles' stretch across the downs, and she was as tired as I was. After supping on a biscuit and a glass of Madeira, I lay down, without undressing, on the couch in my study, and a few minutes later fell asleep. The next thing I knew was that I was broad awake--but where, think you? In the library at the Towers! Yes, so far as regarded any waking consciousness on my part, there was no perceptible interval of time between the moment of my closing my eyes in sleep at the Cot and that of my opening them at the Towers. But you have already surmised the truth. I had been walking in my sleep; a habit to which, you know full well, I have been more or less subject from my youth upward.

"There, then, I was, suddenly brought back to conscious life by the merest accident. In my sleep, in obedience to some somnambulistic impulse, I had unlocked and opened the old secretaire in the library in which are stored a number of family papers. In shutting down the lid, I had accidentally trapped my finger, and the pain thereby caused me had been sufficient to awake me. I stared around in an effort to collect my amazed faculties. Then the truth dawned upon me. Very similar experiences had been mine before, although not oftener than once or twice since my marriage. Of all that must have happened up stairs prior to the moment of my awaking I retain no faintest shadow of recollection.

"Presently I turned and left the house by the way I had entered it--that is to say, by the little side door in the north wing, which the butler has orders to leave unbolted and merely locked when I am from home, so that I can let myself in at any hour of the day or night by means of my pass key. So far as I am aware, not a creature saw me either enter the house or leave it. And then, after a while, I found myself here."

"I wholly fail to see how, in the eye of the law, a man can be held to be even partially accountable for anything that may happen, or any deed he may commit, while in a state of somnambulism."

Drelincourt lighted another cigarette before speaking. Then he said: "But where are my witnesses to prove I was in that state when this morning's tragedy took place?"

"For the matter of that, where are the witnesses to prove you had any hand at all in the affair?"

"Then, as it seems to me, all you and I have to do is simply to keep our own counsel, and let the affair work itself out as best it may."

"No," he said, after a pause, with a shake of his head, "neither legally nor morally can you be held accountable for this morning's work."

"And I am just as convinced that if the crime is brought home to me, the law will find me guilty and hang me in due course. What judge or jury would for one moment give credence to my plea of somnambulism? It would be brushed aside as an attempt, at once foolish and futile, to escape the consequences of my act. Pray disabuse your mind on that point, my dear Rodd. And now, as regards the moral guilt of the act. If the notion of my wife's death, and of the vast difference such an event would make to me, had not been a factor--embryonic, if you will--in my mind, if it had not found receptivity there, would it ever have evolved itself in action in the way it has done?"

"For all that, a man who, while sleep walking, kills another cannot be deemed guilty of murder," protested Rodd dogmatically.

"Undoubtedly he can, and ought to be so deemed morally; because, believe me, he must already have been guilty in thought--although not necessarily in intention--and, under such circumstances as we are considering, the deed itself is merely the natural outcome of the rudimentary idea."

"Had we not better make our way to the Towers without further delay?" he asked. "It is known that I came in search of you, and your prolonged absence may excite suspicion."

"Why hurry ourselves, my dear Rodd? Let the first scare get itself over; we shall be in excellent time for the sequel. What a lovely nook is this! I could linger here for hours. Look how that shaft of sunlight quivers through the crowns of yonder elms. But thou hast no eye for such effects, Rodd; thou art woefully lacking in artistic insight. See! a squirrel. What a pretty rascal it is?"

Roden had risen. "I am waiting for you, Felix," he said coldly. "But perhaps you wish me to leave you here and go back alone."

Although Roden Marsh addressed his foster brother as "Felix" when they were alone, in the presence of others he always spoke of and to him as "Mr. Drelincourt."

"What a restless, weariful mortal thou art," said the latter. "Come, then, let us go!"

But scarcely had they taken half a dozen steps before they both came to a stand. Some one in the distance was calling Mr. Drelincourt by name.

"Unless I'm mistaken, that is the voice of Dixon, the groom," said Rodd. "He has probably been sent in search of you. Let me go to him while you wait here, and ascertain whether he's the bearer of any fresh news."

"I am afraid that in no case will the next few days prove pleasant ones for the master of Wyvern Towers," murmured Drelincourt, as he stood where the other had left him. " Eh, bien! the first act of the drama is over; soon the curtain will rise on the second. I am as curious as if I were merely a looker on to know how the plot will develop itself, and to what extent it will involve F. D. Will it prove to be merely a nine days' wonder and there end? By this time next year it may be merely an old wife's tale, to tell o' nights by the chimney corner. Or the dénouement may be something altogether different; a tolling bell, a crossbeam, and a dangling rope. Those who live will see."

He turned and began to pace the glade slowly, his hands crossed behind his back. As he walked, his lips moved.

"Oh Madeline, Madeline, could I but bring back the hour I met you here, when, soft and low, with many a blush, you told me that you loved me! If I could but wake up and find the time between then and now nothing more than a hideous nightmare fancy of my own! In vain! It is no wild imagining of a disordered brain, but a baleful reality, with far reaching consequences which no human eye can foresee. But here comes Rodd, red faced and out of breath. What a pity it is--and how futile--to take things so seriously as he does."

"It was Dixon, as I thought," exclaimed the other as he came up. "Much has happened since I left the Towers. It has been discovered that Mrs. Drelincourt's jewel case has been rifled, and, by Mr. Ormsby's orders, Gumley has been arrested on suspicion of being both the thief and--and----"

"The murderer. Why fight shy of the word, my dear Rodd? 'Tis always best to call things by their right names. But who is this Gumley that you speak of?"

"An ill conditioned, saucy sort of fellow who was taken on about a fortnight ago to help in the gardens. He and Mrs. Drelincourt had some words the other day, when she lashed him across the face with her riding whip."

"Just the sort of thing Kate would do. But this rifling of the jewel case--and last night, too! The coincidence, if one may call it such, is somewhat remarkable."

"Under the circumstances, it may perhaps be as well to do so. And so this fellow--this Gumley--has been arrested by James Ormsby's orders! I have always regarded Ormsby as a meddlesome fool; now I'm sure he's one."

"True for you, my youthful Solomon. Well, let us be gone. But the coincidence, Rodd, the coincidence--the strangeness of the two things happening together!"

Roden Marsh did not reply, but led the way out of the glade. Drelincourt, who was following him, on reaching the edge of it, turned, and lifting his hat, said softly: "Adieu, Madeline!"

CHAPTER III.

SIR JOHN CONDUCTS THE INQUIRY.

The middle of the library at the Towers was occupied by a large oblong oaken table, with a number of leather seated chairs ranged around it. At the upper end of this sat Sir John Musgrave, who had lately bought the mansion and estate of Grovelands, and was as yet a comparative stranger in the neighborhood. Mr. Ormsby, brother-in-law to Mr. Drelincourt, took the chair on the right of the baronet.

Roden Marsh was the first to enter, and, by the baronet's request, he took a seat about half way down the table to the left of the latter. He had brought his writing materials with him.

Next came in Chief Constable Draycot and the man Gumley, while a constable in uniform took up a position near the door. By Sir John's direction, Draycot and his prisoner took possession of a couple of chairs somewhat removed from the lower end of the table. Gumley, who was dressed like an ordinary laboring man, cast a comprehensive scowl around, and then, having subsided into his chair, he crossed his legs and stretched them out in front of him, as he might have done in a tap room, and seemed intent on examining the lining of his old felt hat.

Sir John, addressing himself to him, said: "Attend to me, Gumley, if you please. Although the evidence I am about to take down this morning is merely preliminary to the fuller inquiry which will have to be held later on, when the same evidence will have to be sworn to a second time, I have deemed it right that you should be present in order that you may have a clear understanding from the first of what you are charged with, and may thereby have every opportunity afforded you of disproving the same when the time for doing so shall have arrived."

"All right, guv'nor," answered Gumley, in the sullen way which seemed natural to him. "I can onny say, as I said afore, that I'm as innercent of the charge as the babby onborn."

Drelincourt crossed from the window and sat down on a chair a little withdrawn from the table and apart from the others.

"This fellow's face is an indictment of itself," he said under his breath, "and with nine people out of every dozen would go far to convict him."

"Inform Mrs. Drelincourt's maid that she is wanted," said Sir John to the constable at the door.

"A faithful, good hearted creature. My poor sister was much attached to her," remarked Mr. Ormsby, sotto voce , to the baronet.

Enter Lucille, a rather attractive looking young woman, not in the least shy or embarrassed by the unfamiliar surroundings among which she finds herself. She favored the two gentlemen at the head of the table with a graceful courtesy as soon as the door was shut behind her, and then went slowly forward.

Here a momentary hitch occurred, which was got over by Roden Marsh's production of a Greek Testament from one of the bookshelves. The witness was then sworn in the usual way by the constable in waiting, who had been so often called upon to take the oath in his own person that he had the formula at his tongue's end.

When the witness had stated that her name was Lucille Fretin, and that she had filled the position of maid to the late Mrs. Drelincourt from the time of that lady's marriage, Sir John said to her: "You have already, I believe, had some conversation with Mr. Ormsby about this most shocking affair; be good enough to tell us here, on your oath, all that you know about it."

"Monsieur and gentlemen," began Lucille, standing with a hand thrust into each pocket of her coquettish looking apron, and speaking with a pronounced French accent, "yesterday madame, my mistress, gave me permission to go to London to see my sister, who is ill. She had the bonté to say that I might stay all night, but that I must return by the first train this morning. That is what I do. I come back by the early train, and I reach the house just as the clocks are about to strike seven. Five minutes later I enter madame's room. I call her softly. I say, ' Madame, je suis arrivée .' She does not reply. I say to myself, 'She sleeps. I will not disturb her.' Then I go a little nearer, and then-- mon Dieu! --I see something which frightens me. It is one big drop liKe blood on the pillow! Then I bend over her, and I see that her eyes are not shut, but open and staring; and then something tells me that they are the eyes of a dead woman."

Drelincourt rose abruptly, and going to the side table, he poured out a glass of wine and drank it. Then he went back to his chair.

"After that," said Sir John to Lucille, "you were just able to arouse the household, and then you fainted and knew nothing more for some time?"

"How long was it after you came to your senses before you discovered that your mistress' jewel case had been rifled?"

"Madame's jewel case was kept in the top drawer of the bureau in her dressing room. This morning I found the case on the floor near the window. It was empty."

"You have furnished the chief constable with a description and list of the missing articles as far as your memory serves you?"

"And at the proper time you will be prepared to swear that you saw the articles in question in your mistress' jewel case yesterday afternoon before you left home?"

"Had not your mistress, a few days ago, a difference or disagreement of some kind with one of the people in Mr. Drelincourt's employ?"

" Cet homme lá ," replied Lucille, without a moment's hesitation, pointing a rigid forefinger at Gumley.

"It was on Saturday last. Madame was dressed to go out riding, and was waiting for her horse to be brought round. That man was in the flower garden close by the long window which opens out of her boudoir. Madame had given him some instructions in the morning which he had not attended to, and she stepped out of the window to speak to him. Madame was a lady who would not have her slightest order neglected. She was very angry. She said something to him in her quick, haughty way, and he answered her back--insolently."

"No, monsieur, I was not near enough to hear; but I could tell from the way the man looked up at madame--he was kneeling on one knee at the time--that his words were insolent."

"Madame lifted her riding whip and lashed him with it three or four times across the head and shoulders."

Before anybody could stop him, Gumley started to his feet, and pointing to a livid whelt across his cheek, exclaimed in hoarse accents, "Ay, and here's the mark to bear witness to it--curse her!"

Sir John turned on him with an admonitory frown. "Silence, man, or it will be worse for you!"

Then Draycot whispered sternly to him, and he resumed his seat, sullenly enough.

"Madame turned and came back indoors, while he--the polisson! --sprang to his feet and shook his clenched hand, and called after her, 'You will live to be sorry for this day's work, my fine Madam, for I'll have my revenge if I swing for it!' The same evening he was discharged by madame's orders."

Again Gumley started to his feet. "That's a lie!" he called out. "What I said was, 'If you was my wife, my fine madam, dash my limbs if I wouldn't break every bone in your body, though I had to swing for it!'

"Shut up, you fool," said Draycot in a fierce whisper, as he pulled him down into his seat.

" Will you be quiet, fellow?" snarled Sir John. Then to Lucille: "You recognize the locket found in this man's possession as having been the property of Mrs. Drelincourt?"

Addressing himself to Drelincourt, Sir John said: "The prisoner's statement is that he found the locket in question a few days ago in a summer house in which Mrs. Drelincourt was in the habit of sitting on fine afternoons, and that he pocketed it with the intention of subsequently disposing of it for his own benefit. In so far he admits his guilt, but he persists in asserting that he had no hand in the robbery, or in the commission of the far more serious crime with which we are more especially concerned at present."

Once more he turned to Lucille. "As I am led to understand, you are not prepared to assert positively that you saw the locket in your mistress' jewel case yesterday or the day before?"

Having favored Sir John with an elaborate courtesy, she left the room. "There is still one point on which I am not clear," remarked Sir John. "What gave rise, in the first instance, to this man's arrest?"

"The onus of that rests with me," replied Mr. Ormsby. "It was in answer to certain questions put by me and Draycot to Lucille that we were told of the threats this scoundrel had made use of towards my poor sister."

Once more Gumley could not restrain himself. "Scoundrel, eh?" he said with a scowl. "I wish you had this acrost your face instead o' me!"

"Gumley, you are unbearable," said Sir John, in his most severe accents. "The next time you attempt to interrupt the proceedings I will have you removed."

"Then it was," resumed Mr. Ormsby, "that I suggested to Draycot that this man should be found--we were given to understand that he had not yet left the village--and that both he and his lodgings should be searched. The result was that one of the missing articles--a locket--was found on his person."

"But nothing else has been found?" It was Mr. Drelincourt who asked the question.

Draycot took on himself to answer it. "Not yet, sir. His lodgings will be thoroughly searched in the course of the next hour."

Gumley felt compelled to make another protest. "As I said afore, and as I say agen, I know nothen about the murder and nothen about the robbery. I found the locket in the----"

"Silence, fellow!" Almost yelled Sir John. "Once for all, let me caution you to hold your tongue."

But Gumley was determined to have the last word. "All I wants is to speak the truth," he growled sullenly.

"As it happens," resumed Mr. Drelincourt, "I am in a position to confirm at least one portion of this man's statement. Some time in the course of last week my wife spoke to me about having missed the locket now in question, which was rather a favorite with her, and which she was afraid she had lost a day or two previously somewhere in the grounds. Such being the case, I fail to see how the locket could have formed part of the missing jewels."

Gumley pricked up his ears. The sort of sullen apathy which had hitherto marked his demeanor vanished. From that moment he became a different man.

"Your statement, Mr. Drelincourt, is certainly a strong point in the prisoner's favor," remarked Sir John, after a few moments' cogitation. "Still, bearing in mind the threats made use of by him towards Mrs. Drelincourt, I do not feel myself justified in sanctioning his release. The coroner's inquest will take place at the earliest possible moment, and I have decided to remand the prisoner till tomorrow, when he will be brought up before the bench of magistrates at Sunbridge."

Gumley stood up, and addressing himself to Mr. Drelincourt, said: "God-bless you, sir, for helpin' to get a pore, innercent cove out of a scrape wot he's got into through no fault of his'n." Then, as he followed Draycot, he said to himself, "It was a lie, though, wot he told about the locket. Now, wot's his little game, I wonder?"

The baronet, having filled up and signed the necessary commitment order, handed it to Roden Marsh to give to the superintendent. Rodd then gathered up his papers and followed the others out of the room.

Sir John stood up and stretched himself. "In spite of your evidence about the locket, Mr. Drelincourt," he said, "I am strongly of opinion that in Gumley we have got hold of the real criminal."

"My own opinion exactly," responded Ormsby. "The scoundrel's countenance is enough of itself to proclaim him guilty."

"If we were all judged by our looks, how few of us would escape condemnation," remarked Drelincourt dryly. "For my part, I am strongly inclined to believe in the fellow's innocence."

"My dear Drelincourt, you surprise me," remarked his brother-in-law, as he crossed to the side table.

"It is possible, Mr. Drelincourt," suggested the baronet, "That your suspicions point in some other direction."

"No, I have no suspicions--none whatever. For all that, I have a sort of intuitive belief in Gumley's innocence."

"My experience as a magistrate convinces me that they are few and far between. You remember what old Chaucer says: 'Murder will out, that see we day by day'--words as true now as they were five hundred years ago."

Sir John consulted his watch. "Later than I thought. I have an appointment at Sunbridge, and am already overdue."

"And I, too, must be off," remarked Ormsby. "I quite expect to find my wife in hysterics when I get home. She was awfully attached to poor Kitty."

"For the present, then, goodby," said Sir John to Drelincourt, as he proffered his hand. "To attempt to condole with you under such a terrible blow would be an impertinence on my part; but this I must say--that you have my heartfelt sympathy."

They shook hands cordially, and then Drelincourt crossed and rang the bell. "Ormsby, I shall see you in Sunbridge later in the day," said Sir John. Three seconds later he was gone, shown out by Simmons.

"Now to get rid of this pompous fool," said Drelincourt to himself as he came forward.

"Felix," he began, "I am at a loss for words wherewith to express a tithe of what I feel on this most heartrending occasion."

"Then I wouldn't try to find any, if I were you. There are some things which won't bear talking about, and this is one of them."

"Are one's feelings to be gauged by the amount of talk one may give utterance to? Are there not occasions when silence may be the heart's most eloquent tribute?"

"Possibly--possibly," replied Mr. Ormsby, with a little cough behind his hand. "I dare say you are right--from your point of view. If you would like Octavia to come and look after matters at the Towers for the next week or two, I am sure that she----"

"Not for the world! I am a strange fellow, Ormsby, as I dare say you have found out before today. The more I am left to myself just at present, the better I shall be pleased."

"Well, well, as you will. Still, I cannot but feel sure that my wife would have been a great comfort to you in your affliction. She is so truly sympathetic."

"Good day, Ormsby," said the other abruptly. "I know you mean well, and I thank you. But I'm all on edge just now and I can't talk any more."

"I can sympathize with you, my dear fellow. I have something of the same feeling myself." With that he held out his hand.

"Ah, excuse me, but I sprained my wrist this morning." He crossed to the fireplace and rang the bell, and then stood grasping his right wrist with his left hand.

"That's unfortunate. Well, au revoir ," said Ormsby, as he took possession of his hat and gloves.

"I'm nearly sure he shook hands with Sir John," muttered Ormsby, as he made his exit. "What a queer, ill-conditioned beggar he is! Still, I wish he would have had Octavia here. She would have been just in her element on an occasion like this. And then, she is so truly sympathetic."

No sooner did Drelincourt find himself alone than he strode to one of the windows and flung open the casement.

"At last I can breathe! For a little while the torture is relaxed, but only for a little while. What would I not give if the next few days were well over! This fellow Gumley must be saved at all risks. Of course, it was he who stole the jewels; and yet for the sake of a wretch like this I shall have to lie and perjure myself again and again. To me such a necessity is more hateful than I can express. The mere thought of such comradeship in crime sends a shudder down my spine. For all that, he must be saved! All may go well if only the rest of the jewels remain undiscovered. In that case, my lie about the locket ought to be enough to clear him. Faugh! Let me try to get this greasy smelling knave out of my thoughts for a while."

There was a box of cigars on the top of one of the low bookcases, from which he now proceeded to select one and light it.

"'Murder will out'--so quotes Sir John. But does that follow as a matter of course? Facts--indisputable facts--prove the contrary. Though Nemesis may dog the footsteps of a man for years, yet oftener than we wot of she fails to overtake him. In any case, the man who, after having incurred a penalty--whether with wide open eyes or as the result of circumstances outside his control--shrinks from facing the consequences when they are brought home to him, is both a fool and a coward. That is not the stuff, I trust, of which Felix Drelincourt is made."

CHAPTER IV.

A BACKWARD GLANCE.

Presently Mr. Drelincourt quitted the library, and, traversing the entrance hall, went up the fine old oaken staircase at the farther end. But on reaching the spacious landing at the top, instead of turning to the right in the direction of his own and his late wife's apartments, he turned to the left, and after going some way down a corridor which gave access to sundry rooms, he came to a red baize covered door--the others were all of oak or walnut--with a bell pull pendent at one side of it. At this he gave a tug, which was responded to by a faint tinkle somewhere inside.

Half a minute later a little wicket in the door was drawn back, and a woman's face appeared at the opening. On perceiving who it was that had rung the bell, the face, an unusually grave one, for the most part, brightened perceptibly.

"Will you be kind enough to open the door," said Mr. Drelincourt. Sometimes he contented himself with asking a question or two at the wicket, and did not enter.

The woman nodded, and shut the wicket. Then from the bunch of keys at her waist she selected one, and with it opened the door, which was shut and relocked as soon as Mr. Drelincourt had crossed the threshold.

But at this point it may be as well to take leave of the master of Wyvern Towers for a while, and in order that the reader may have a due comprehension of what has yet to be told, make him acquainted, in as brief terms as may be, with certain particulars having reference to that person's family history, and to the relations which had existed between his father and himself.

The late Colonel Drelincourt had been twice married, and had left behind him two children--Felix, his son by his first wife, and Anna, his daughter by his second. At the time of the colonel's death the former was twenty three years old, and the latter thirteen. His second wife had predeceased him by a few years.

As a young man, Felix had serious differences with his father, whose pet project it was that his son should follow his own profession. This, however, Felix resolutely declined to do.

He had no taste whatever for soldiering; nor, on the other hand, did a political career hold out any attractions for him. He was a studious and bookishly inclined man, addicted to experimental chemistry, and with a strong liking for travel and exploration. Of sport, in the common acceptance of the term, he knew nothing and cared as little; but he had a fondness for horses, and was an intrepid rider.

The colonel, a military martinet of the old school, who held a blind obedience to one's superiors to be one of the main rules of conduct, never forgave his son's refusal to follow in the course he had prescribed for him. At his death it was found that, outside the entailed property, he had left everything he was possessed of to his daughter, to whom he had been passionately attached.

He had married her mother for love (like many another man, he had never touched even the fringe of romance till he was past his fortieth year), whereas he had married his first wife for her dowry. Thanks to certain arrangements made by his mother, Felix was in a measure independent of his father even before he became of age.

About three years prior to the colonel's death a terrible mischance befell his daughter, at that time in her tenth year.

It was Christmas week, at which season a certain amount of license is often winked at among the servants in country houses. In the dusk of afternoon, and in the gallery at the head of the stairs, Anna encountered what she took for an apparition, but which, in point of fact, was merely one of the servants dressed up in a sheet, and having her face whitened, on her way to join in some mummeries below stairs.

The child, who from her birth had been of a highly excitable temperament, with hysterical tendencies, gave one piercing scream, and fell to the ground in a fit, which was followed by several others, and for some days her life was despaired of.

Gradually, however, she regained her health, and everybody hoped--her father, of course, most of all--that the shock her system had undergone had left no ill effects behind it.

One of the colonel's first acts after his daughter's seizure had been to send for Mrs. Jenwyn, with whose services, only a little while before, he had seen fit to dispense. It was Mrs. Jenwyn who had nursed his wife through the long illness which had preceded her death, and it was in fulfilment of Mrs. Drelincourt's dying request that he had installed her in the dual position of nurse and governess to his motherless girl, who, in the course of time, had learned to love her almost, if not quite, as well as the parent she had lost.

Whether it was a feeling of jealousy that his child should care so much for any one but himself, or some other whim, which caused him to give Mrs. Jenwyn notice to leave, was known only to himself. In any case, Anna took the separation greatly to heart, far more so than her father was aware of, for the child's deepest moods were silent ones; of what she felt most she talked least, and the colonel was not skilled in reading below the surface.

Now, however, he blamed himself with undue severity for having sent Mrs. Jenwyn about her business. Again and again he told himself, most unreasonably, that had she been on the spot the mischance would never have happened. It was some consolation to him to witness the naïve and touching delight with which Anna welcomed Mrs. Jenwyn's return.

For all that, as he quitted the room, leaving them together, he could not help saying to himself, with a touch of bitterness, "She loves that woman better than she loves me."

Unfortunately, the colonel's fondly cherished hope that the shock to his daughter's system would entail no after consequences was not destined to be fulfilled. To all appearance, Anna had regained her health and strength in full measure, and her fright was a matter six months old, when, without any warning, so to speak, an unaccountable change came over her which found its physical expression in a state of irritability and low fever, supplemented by insomnia. Dr. Carew was called in, and prescribed, but declined to commit himself to any expression of opinion.

On the fifth day from the beginning of her attack, Anna fell into a deep, trance-like sleep which lasted eighteen hours. When at length she awoke, everything that had happened to her during the six months which had intervened since the date of her fright was lost to her memory. She went back and took up her life again at the point where consciousness had left her at the moment of her scare in the gallery.

All Mrs. Jenwyn had taught her in the interim was clean gone. A book half read at the time she now began afresh and finished, and she resumed the practice of a piece of music on which she had been engaged during the forenoon of that unfortunate day. The break in her memory was absolute and complete.

By Dr. Carew's recommendation, no attempt was made to enlighten her. Everybody about her accommodated themselves to circumstances as she believed them to be. The doctor trusted to time. It was all he could do.

Any attempt at a cure on his part, as he was not slow to recognize, might have been productive of more harm than good, and possibly have entailed consequences he would have been loath to face. He watched the case with the deepest interest, but beyond prescribing a harmless draft or two, he left nature to work after her own fashion.

At the end of a fortnight Anna fell into another trance-like sleep, and awoke from it her proper self. The two preceding weeks were blotted from her memory. She had merely had a longer and sounder sleep than ordinary, from which she had awaked feeling strangely refreshed.

From that time forward the same thing had happened to her, at irregular intervals, every three or four months. After certain preliminary symptoms, which hardly ever varied, she would fall into a deep sleep, always to awake at that moment of her life which preceded her meeting with the supposed apparition in the gallery. At the end of ten days or a fortnight, and after another sleep, she would become her normal self again.

She had been ten years old at the time of her first attack, and she was now eighteen. A lovely girl (but with no touch of resemblance to Felix), and of an affectionate and amiable disposition; bright and cheerful enough at times, but, for the most part, with a vague shadow of melancholy brooding over her, as of one who realized in all its bitterness the fact that there was about her a something which set her apart from her fellows; for long before now the full measure of her affliction had become known to her.

Mrs. Jenwyn had given Colonel Drelincourt her promise on his deathbed that she would never leave Anna while it was the latter's wish that she should stay with her. In order, however, to make assurance doubly sure, the colonel had left instructions in his will that the sum of two hundred guineas per annum should be paid to Mrs. Jenwyn out of his estate so long as she should retain her position by his daughter's side.

As already remarked, the colonel had bequeathed to Anna all that it was in his power to leave her. An ample sum was settled on her, under the control of trustees, during her minority, and when she should come of age she would find herself mistress of an income of twelve hundred a year, with absolute power over ten thousand pounds of the gross sum capitalized by her father.

About a year before his death, and when he had no prevision of that event being so near, Colonel Drelincourt had caused to be set aside, and specially arranged for their use, a suite of rooms in the left wing of the Towers, to which his daughter and Mrs. Jenwyn could retire whenever Anna's symptoms gave warning that one of her periodical attacks was imminent.

He had also caused a considerable space or ground on the same side of the house to be walled in, so as to form a private garden in which the two could obtain a sufficiency of fresh air and exercise without being overlooked or spied upon by any visitors at the house, or by any casual outsiders, there being a right of public footway through the park at the back of the Towers, as a consequence of which stragglers were sometimes found in those parts of the grounds where they had no business to be.

When, at his father's death, Felix Drelincourt came into the property, matters, so far as they related to his half sister, were in no wise changed. All he did was to cut down the staff of servants, and to request Mrs. Jenwyn to take upon herself the control of the establishment, he himself having no intention at that time of settling permanently at the Towers. Not till after his marriage, some three years later, did he make it his home.

When talking over future arrangements with his prospective wife, he had given Miss Ormsby clearly to understand that his marriage was to alter nothing so far as his half sister was concerned. Anna's home, as heretofore, would still be at the Towers, and the special suite of rooms in the left wing still be reserved for the occupancy of herself and Mrs. Jenwyn at certain seasons.

CHAPTER V.

IN THE LEFT WING.

And now to revert to Mr. Drelincourt's visit to the left wing of the Towers on the day his wife came by her tragic end.

His first question, in a low voice, to Mrs. Jenwyn, after the baize covered door had been locked behind him, was: "You have heard the news?"

"I have, sir, and I need not tell you what a dreadful shock it was to me. Poor lady! Poor unhappy lady!"

Drelincourt bit his lip for a moment. Then, "You have not breathed a word about it to Anna?"

"Certainly not, sir. I should not dream of doing so without your permission. Indeed, I am far from sure that just now it would be advisable to say anything to her about it."

"My own opinion exactly. The news must be kept carefully from her while she is as she is. It will be time enough to break it to her when she is herself again. Of course, her present attack has not yet run its course?"

"Oh, no, sir; it is only five days since she was taken. We may calculate on another week at the least."

"So much the better. By that time the funeral and other matters will be over and done with."

Drelincourt sat for a few moments without speaking, toying with his watch-guard. Mrs. Jenwyn knew better than to break the silence.

At this time, judging from appearances, she was somewhere about forty years of age. Her features were regular and refined, and she would still have been accounted a very handsome woman but for the abnormal pallor of her complexion, her sunken cheeks, and a certain worn and tired look about her keenly watchful eyes, with their slightly contracted lids, which might be the result of insomnia.

Like her hair, her eyes were of a brown so dark as in some lights to be hardly distinguishable from black. Although her face was essentially feminine in certain of its aspects, its dominant expression was one of innate resolution, and of an amount of will power rather unusual in one of her sex. "A woman of great force of character, who would do and dare much to gain her ends, whatever they might be," was Mr. Drelincourt's pithy summing up of her.

For all that, there must have been a sunny corner hidden somewhere under the husk of her almost frozen reserve, or Anna Drelincourt--so susceptible to chills of every kind--would not have learned to love her and cling to her as she did. Scarcely less dear had Anna's mother held her.

Beyond the fact that she was a widow, Drelincourt knew nothing of her history or antecedents, and did not seek to know anything. He had accepted her, so to speak, as a legacy from his father, and had soon learned to like and respect her for herself.

There was something about her self-contained character, with its reserve of quiet force, which appealed specially to him. She was the very woman--one out of a thousand--he told himself, for the peculiar post she occupied, and he was careful to treat her with every consideration.

Some little time passed before Mr. Drelincourt spoke again. To Mrs. Jenwyn he seemed to be debating some point with himself. At length he said:

"Contrary to what I had ventured to hope before they came together, my wife always seemed to be very fond of Anna, and to make much of her. That, at least, is how matters presented themselves to me. What is your opinion, Mrs. Jenwyn? You were in a position to observe things from a far more intimate point of view than I was."

His eyes were fixed on the matron; she could not choose but answer him. Her dark, prominent brows came together for a moment; a little wave of color tinged her pale cheeks for a second or two.

"A question so plainly put, Mr. Drelincourt, ought to be met by a plain answer. Is not that so?"

"Now that Mrs. Drelincourt is unhappily no more, there seems to me no reason why I should any longer refrain from mentioning to you a certain conclusion which I could not help arriving at on the occasion of Mr. Guy Ormsby's visit at the Towers a few months ago."

"To such an extent and so openly did Mrs. Drelincourt make it her business to throw Miss Anna and Mr. Guy together, that at length I could not help having my eyes opened to the ulterior object she had in view. What at first had been nothing more than suspicion was turned into certainty by a few words between brother and sister which I accidentally happened to overhear."

"The marriage--not just now, but after Miss Anna shall have come of age--of the two young people."

It was not often that Drelincourt was betrayed into an expression of surprise, but he was on this occasion.

"What!" he exclaimed. "Scheme to wed her brother to a girl mentally afflicted as my poor sister is? It would be nothing less than monstrous."

"Mrs. Drelincourt, sir, professed to believe, with Dr. Pounceby, the London specialist, that Miss Anna would grow out of her affliction in the course of a few years."

"An opinion, I am grieved to say, wholly opposed to that of an equally eminent man--Dr. Ferrers."

"And then, sir, it behooves Mr. Guy Ormsby, as a younger son without expectations, to look out for a wife with money."

"So!" Then to himself he added: "Evidently between my wife and this woman there was no love lost."

He seemed to consider for a few moments, and then he said: "But tell me this, Mrs. Jenwyn: Did Anna seem to take to young Ormsby in the way you think my wife would have liked her to do--that is to say, did he succeed in entangling her affections? For I have no doubt he was ready enough to follow up his sister's precious scheme."

"That is more than I can say, sir, with any degree of certainty. Sometimes I am inclined to think one thing, and sometimes another. Miss Anna is not an easy person to read."

"Not an easy person to read? One of the most transparent and simple minded girls in existence."

A thin smile flickered for a moment over Mrs. Jenwyn's bloodless features. She had a soft, level voice, which, while it fell soothingly on the ear, was not without a certain penetrative quality of its own.

"Excuse me, sir, but you don't know so much of her as I do, or you would scarcely say that. You think her transparent and easy to read, whereas there are depths in her character which not even I, who am with her every day and all day, have yet succeeded in sounding. You can never make sure beforehand of what she will either say or do in reference to any given subject. In short, Miss Anna is a law unto herself."

Drelincourt looked puzzled and only half convinced. It was not pleasant to him to be told that he had so completely misread the character of his seeming simple minded sister.

"It's a pity you did not give me a hint at the time of what was going forward," he remarked, after a momentary pause.

"Young Mr. Ormsby's visit had nearly come to an end before I had anything more than vague suspicions to go upon. And the next thing I heard was that his regiment was presently going abroad. After that it seemed to me all further danger was at an end, and I came to the conclusion that my wisest plan would be to keep my discovery to myself."

"I presume you have satisfied yourself that no correspondence has passed between Lieutenant Ormsby and Anna?"

"Then I suppose all there is left me to do is to hope for the best, and to trust that no real harm has been done?"

"If signs go for anything, sir, I am certainly inclined to believe that Miss Anna is still heart whole and fancy free. But, as I have already remarked, her character is not an easy one to read. Of course, if Mr. Guy were to appear again on the scene, I could not answer for what might happen."

"There is not much fear of that--now," said Mr. Drelincourt significantly. "It is not at all likely that he and Anna will ever set eyes on each other again."

"Will you not see Anna for a few minutes, sir, while you are here?" queried the matron. "She always seems brighter and better for some time after one of your visits; indeed, except myself, you are the only person from whose presence at these times she does not shrink with a sort of nervous dread, as though doubtful whether they might not be about to do her some bodily harm. It was rather singular, was it not, sir, that Mrs. Drelincourt's presence at these times always had a peculiarly disturbing effect upon her?"

If Drelincourt heard the question, he did not care to answer it. He was cogitating, with a finger pressed to his lips.

"Yes," he said presently. "I will see her. I have much to do, but I can spare her a few minutes."

Thereupon Mrs. Jenwyn at once led the way to an inner room, which opened out of the first one. It was a large and sunny apartment, lighted by three windows, from which there was a view beyond the surrounding park of some miles of rolling, well timbered country. In the middle window hung a brass cage containing a couple of canaries. On a soft cushion reposed a Persian cat. From a brace of hooks in the ceiling was suspended a swing. Near at hand was a big rocking horse fitted with a side saddle. On the floor lay a pair of Indian clubs, a battledore and shuttlecock, and a hoop. In one corner was a small bookcase.

On a low chair near one of the windows sat Anna Drelincourt, busily engaged in sewing some lace on one of several dresses composing the wardrobe of a big wax doll which, seated limply on an opposite chair, its arms dangling loosely by its sides, seemed with its glassy, unwinking eyes to be watching every movement of her needle.

Occasionally Anna would look up from her work for a moment to nod her head and chirrup at Ninon, which was the doll's name; and possibly to her imaginative eyes that young person's fixed, vacuous smirk became endued, for a second or two, with a responsive meaning.

At this time, as already stated, Anna was eighteen years old. She had a slender figure of medium height, with glossy chestnut hair, and eyes of the darkest blue. Her face might have been called insignificant had not her features been so perfectly formed, and her complexion so almost dazzlingly fair.

Never was there a more April day face than Anna's, one liable to more swift changes of expression or that betrayed more ingenuously the thoughts and emotions--which sometimes ranged over a wide gamut--at work below.

This morning she was wearing a simple white frock, with her unbound hair, confined by a bit of blue ribbon, falling nearly to her waist. A tiny foot, on which dangled a bronze slipper, peeped from under the hem of her frock. She was humming softly to herself as she plied her needle.

As the door opened she glanced up, and at sight of Drelincourt sprang to her feet with a little cry of pleasure. Then running to meet him, she caught both his hands in hers, and held up her face to be kissed.

"I knew you would come and see me this morning," she said brightly. "The Voices told me so, and they never deceive. You don't know what a number of secrets they whisper to me, and whatever they bid me do that I am bound to do. It is not only that, if I were to refuse, I should run the risk of their displeasure, but because I cannot help myself. Oh, to disobey them would be terrible! The mere thought----"

Merely her name pronounced by Mrs. Jenwyn, but its effect on the girl was instantaneous. She still had hold of Drelincourt's hands, and he was conscious of a momentary spasmodic twitching of her fingers, such as might have been caused by a slight electric shock. Then his hands were released; something seemed to catch her breath for a second or two, her eyes opened and shut quickly several times, and therewith her mood changed.

"What have I been rambling on about?" she asked, with a rippling, childlike laugh. "How silly of me! But whatever it was, it's all gone--all gone. And now, Felix, you must come and say 'Good morning' to Ninon, and ask her how she is. She is a good little thing on the whole, but sometimes I feel her temper rather trying." With that she drew him forward by the lapel of his coat. "Sit down," she said, "and nurse her for a little while. I fancy she looks slightly feverish this morning. I hope I shall not have to call in Dr. Carew."

Drelincourt did as he was told. The doll was placed in his arms, and was held by him as awkwardly as might be expected. A smile, which had in it as much of pathos as of humor, played round his lips, but the expression of his eyes was one of grave tenderness and pity for the unhappy girl.

Mrs. Jenwyn sat a little way apart, busy with her favorite crochet work, seeing everything without seeming to do so. It was evident that her presence acted powerfully on Anna as a restraining influence.

Drelincourt stayed a quarter of an hour longer, chatting as lightly and pleasantly with Anna as though he had not a thought or a care beyond those of the passing moment, although all the while that dread Object lying cold and stark in another room framed itself like a ghastly picture on the background of his consciousness.

It was a month later, when, on a certain afternoon, as Mr. James Ormsby was walking down the platform of one of the London terminal stations on his way to the train, he was startled by a tap on his shoulder.

On turning in his touchy way to ascertain who had ventured on such a liberty with him, he was pleasurably surprised to find that the offender was none other than Tom Thornswade, son of Squire Thornswade of Highcroft, whom he had known from the time he was short coated.

"Thought I couldn't be mistaken in your back, Mr. Ormsby, as you marched along in front of me," said Master Tom, with a merry laugh, as his hand met that of the elder man in a cordial clasp. "I must say I'm awfully glad to see you. Yours is the first face known to me that I've set eyes on since I landed at Southampton four days ago."

"Glad you've got back safe and sound, Tom. Your father told me all about your having to go out to the States to look after some property which has been left him there."

The two had many topics in common, and found much to say to each other, and it was not till the train was fairly under way that young Tom, with a sudden change of tone and manner, said: "I must really crave your pardon, Mr. Ormsby, for having omitted to give expression to my sincere regrets at the great and irreparable loss you have recently sustained. Poor dear Mrs. Drelincourt! I cannot tell you how shocked I was when I read the account of her terrible end in one of the newspapers sent me by my mother."

"Yes, it was indeed a tragical affair," replied Mr. Ormsby, with what he meant for a heartfelt sigh, and a sudden elongation of his visage. "I was her favorite brother, Torn--her favorite brother! What I have suffered God alone knows. I don't think I shall ever be quite my own man again. Poor Kate! Poor Kate!"

"And the sad affair is still wrapped in mystery, is it not?" asked Tom, after a pause.

"In the paper sent me there was an account of some man having been arrested on suspicion and examined before the magistrates, but who was afterwards set at liberty for want of sufficient evidence to bring the crime home to him."

"That is so. Gumley, the fellow in question, had been temporarily engaged as under gardner at the Towers, and although, thanks to the evidence of my brother in law, who--and I can't help saying so--acted very strangely throughout the affair, he was released, nothing will persuade me that in him we had not got hold of the murderer of my sister. Unfortunately there was a link wanting in the chain of evidence--only one, mind you. But some day it may be found. I do not despair. Time solves many mysteries and brings many a clue to light."

"Um"--with a pursing out of his under lip. "That is a question which he could best answer--if he chose to do so. At any rate, it's one I don't feel called upon to answer for him."

"Not an ordinary sort of man, by any means, I should imagine, nor one easily bottomed, judging from what little I saw of him from time to time," remarked Tom, who was not without some grains of shrewdness.

"That's as it may be. A shallow fool is often mistaken for a deep one by those who don't know better. In any case, we are not likely to see much of Drelincourt for a considerable time to come. He has shut up the Towers, putting in a man and his wife as caretakers, and has gone abroad for an indefinite period."

"Her chest is said to be delicate, and she and the person who has charge of her have gone to live for a time in Devonshire. She's a charming girl--leaving her mental affliction out of question--and my poor sister was greatly attached to her."

CHAPTER VI.

RECREANT LOVER.

Anna and Mrs. Jenwyn were still at Combe Fenton, the Devonshire village to which they had retired shortly after the death of the mistress of Wyvern Towers.

On the particular morning to which we have now come, Anna set off for her customary after breakfast constitutional on the sands. It was her favorite walk, and one which she rarely missed in fine weather. She was accompanied by Fanny, a demure looking but rather pretty girl, and a native of Combe Fenton, who filled the post of maid and attendant to both the younger and the elder lady.

About a fortnight before this, Mrs. Jenwyn, while gathering ferns, had slipped and sprained her ankle so severely that she had not yet been able to use it for longer than a few minutes at a time for walking purposes. As a consequence, she had been under the necessity of substituting Fanny for herself as Anna's companion during the latter's outdoor rambles. In so doing no faintest suspicion entered her mind that she might be exposing her charge to a risk.

After Anna's departure the housemaid wheeled her in her bath chair to a favorite spot in the grounds under a spreading beech, where she was in the habit of reading and working the time away till the girl's return. Here she had been some time engaged with her tatting, when she was startled by the appearance of a man who came suddenly from behind a thick clump of laurels and rhodendrons, and halting a few yards from her, took off his soft felt hat and made her a low bow.

He was young, and looked what he was, a superior mechanic. Before Mrs. Jenwyn could find her tongue he spoke.

"I crave your pardon, ma'am, for intruding upon you in this way," he began, "but I couldn't very well call upon you at the house, because the servants there all know me. And now, ma'am, I must ask you to excuse me if I put a certain question to you. Are you aware that the young lady who lives here with you is in the habit, morning after morning, of meeting a young gentleman on the sands of Carthew Bay?"

Then she said, a little faintly, "No, I am certainly not aware of anything of the kind."

"That, however, is what takes place. The young gentleman is always there, waiting for her, and they walk up and down the sands together, or sit side by side on some of the big stones which are strewn about, for an hour at a time. Yesterday--excuse me, ma'am, for mentioning it--he kissed her twice before they parted."

"You seem to have done your spying to some purpose to be able to tell me all this."

"He's not so tall as I am by half a foot, but rather stiffly built; with sandy hair and a light mustache. In one eye he carries a glass."

"Guy Ormsby!" exclaimed Mrs. Jenwyn under her breath. "I felt nearly sure it must be he; and yet not eighteen months ago I heard him tell his sister that his regiment was ordered abroad." Aloud she said, "But how is it, I should like to know, that Fanny Davis has never said a word to me about these meetings at Carthew Bay?"

"Because, ma'am, she has no doubt been bribed not to tell. She just perches herself on a bit of rock out of the way of the others, and reads novelettes all the time they are together. Oh, she's a deep un, is Fan, and not to be trusted further than one can see her!" He spoke with a touch of bitterness not observable before.

Like most women, Mrs. Jenwyn was certainly not without her occasional intuitions.

Looking the young fellow straight in the eyes, she said: "You either are or have been in love with Fanny Davis, and she has jilted you."

He looked first amazed and then sulky, while his face turned the color of a peony. "Whether that's so or not," he said, after a brief pause, "I don't see that it has anything to do with what I came here to tell you."

"You are quite right," replied Mrs. Jenwyn pleasantly. "One thing has nothing whatever to do with the other. It was merely a guess on my part. By the way, what is your name? You need not be afraid of telling it me, because I shall not speak to any one about our interview."

"Thank you. Then, Mr. Clisby, there are two more items of information which I should feel obliged by your obtaining for me. First of all, I should like to know the address of our young friend with the eyeglass--that is to say, at what place he has taken up his quarters for the time being; and, secondly, what name he is passing under."

"He's staying at the Golden Swan, at the other end of the village, and has been since he came here, nearly three weeks since. As for his name, I'll engage to find that out for you by tomorrow."

After a little further talk the young carpenter went his way, fully satisfied with his morning's work. He told himself that he had merely been playing a game of tit for tat. After leading him on and trifling with him for six months, Fanny had finally sent him about his business, and now he had done his best to be even with her.

"She'll get the sack as sure as her name's Fan D., and serve her jolly well right," he said to himself with a chuckle, as he took his way through the shrubbery.

Miss Drelincourt and her maid were back from the bay in time for luncheon; indeed, Anna's punctuality could always be depended on.

"How innocent and good they both look," said Mrs. Jenwyn to herself, as they entered the house. "As for the girl, I always misdoubted that demure face of hers--but Anna! And yet, why wonder? Did I not say to Mr. Drelincourt that she was a hard one to read? And now, I suppose, a new factor has come to complicate matters, and will have to be reckoned with. Oh, what a pity!--what a pity! I would rather Guy Ormsby were dead and buried than he should have found his way here."

But nothing of what she felt or thought was visible to the others. Anna was conscious of no change in her, and the day passed over as quietly and uneventfully as hundreds before it had done.

Next morning Anna and her attendant set out for their usual forenoon ramble, utterly unsuspicious that Mrs. Jenwyn had any knowledge of the magnet which drew the former's footsteps unerringly in the direction of Carthew Bay.

Half an hour later a note, which had been brought to the house by a boy, was put into Mrs. Jenwyn's hands. It contained two lines only:

When Miss Drelincourt, accompanied by Fanny, got back from her forenoon walk on the day following that of John Clisby's visit to Rosemount, she found that Mrs. Jenwyn had gone for a drive in the pony chaise they were in the habit of hiring from a jobmaster in the village; and, further, that she had left word Anna was not to wait luncheon for her, as she might possibly be rather late in returning.

It was such an unusual thing for Mrs. Jenwyn to drive out without her that the girl could not help speculating as to the nature of the errand which had taken her from home (why had she said no word of her intention at breakfast?), but no faintest suspicion of the truth entered her mind.

Mrs. Jenwyn went for a long country drive, and it was close upon two o'clock before Combe Fenton was reached on her return, by which time she felt pretty sure Guy Ormsby would be back from his usual appointment with Anna. Nor was she mistaken. She had requested her driver to stop at the Golden Swan Hotel, and on inquiring whether "Mr. Harold Vince" was indoors, she was told, to her satisfaction, that he was.

By this time her sprain was very much better, and with the driver's help, and that of a walking stick, she managed to alight and limp indoors. A minute later there was a tap at the door of "Mr. Vince's" sitting' room, and in response to his "Come in," it was opened by the landlady, who the same moment announced, "A lady to see you, sir."

Guy, who, with one leg thrown over the arm of his easy chair, was indulging in an after luncheon cigar, sprang to his feet, and on recognizing his visitor, which he did at the first glance, he stood staring at her for some seconds with a dropped jaw and a face which had faded to the color of an unripe lemon.

Mrs. Jenwyn waited till the door was shut behind the landlady before she spoke. Then she said pleasantly:

"Good afternoon, Mr. Ormsby. My intrusion upon you seems to have taken you a little by surprise, which, perhaps, is hardly to be wondered at. Still, although your natural timidity has hindered you from calling upon us at Rosemount, I have no wish to appear unneighborly, and I know of no reason why I should not call upon you. I trust that you left them all well at Denham Lodge."

Guy's smile was not a pleasant one to see. Flinging away what was left of his cigar, he said: "Will you not be seated, Mrs. Jenwyn? I may at once confess that your visit is a surprise, but not, let me add, an unwelcome one. May I be permitted to hope that Miss Drelincourt is quite well?"

He felt that he must talk, but he hardly knew what to say. One of his first thoughts at sight of her had been, "Can Anna have been such a fool as to tell this woman that she has agreed to a secret marriage?" It was a disquieting question.

"As you have had the pleasure of seeing Miss Drelincourt within the last two or three hours, you are in a better position to judge of the state of her health than I am, who have not seen her since breakfast time."

This was not a very promising beginning, as Guy could not but admit. "Hang it all!" he said to himself. "Where's the good of beating about the bush? Some specific purpose has brought her here. What is it? The sooner I find out the better."

After a brief pause, he said aloud: "I perceive, Mrs. Jenwyn, that you are not unaware that Miss Drelincourt and I have seen each other?"

"We have met more than once--several times, in point of fact--at Carthew Bay. I have no wish to deny that such is the case."

"Am I right in assuming that your call upon me today is in reference to those meetings?"

"You are quite right in your assumption. As you are aware, Miss Drelincourt is here under my sole charge, and it rests with me to safeguard her by every means in my power. That being the case, I am fully justified in demanding of you with what purpose you have been at the trouble of tracing her to this remote village, and then of contriving stealthy meetings with her at a time when you knew I was laid up and not there to look after her. That, Mr. Guy Ormsby, is what I am justified in demanding to know."

There was no trace of excitement either in her voice or manner, but the very quietude of her demeanor lent her words an added impressiveness. Evidently Mrs. Jenwyn was not a woman to be trifled with.

Guy cleared his voice before replying. "Your demand, as you term it, Mrs. Jenwyn, certainly lacks nothing on the score of frankness," he said, "and I will endeavor to be equally frank in my reply to it. I have been at the pains of tracing Miss Drelincourt, and of following her to this place, because I am deeply and sincerely in love with her, and because it is my dearest hope to be able to win her for my wife."

This was probably no more than Mrs. Jenwyn had expected to be told; indeed, on the assumption that he was a man of honor, no other plea of justification was open to him.

"You know, as you must have known from the date of your visit to Wyvern Towers, if not before then, all about poor Anna's mental affliction, and yet in the face of this terrible visitation you tell me that you love her and would fain make her your wife! To me such a thing seems inconceivable. You must be very differently constituted from others of your sex, Mr. Ormsby--very differently indeed."

"Say what you please, Mrs. Jenwyn, think what you choose--I am perfectly sincere in what I have told you. I love Anna, and I am here with the purpose of winning her for my wife. Besides, I believe, with my poor dead and gone sister, that Anna will grow out of her affliction, as you call it. If I am not mistaken, that was the opinion of Dr. Pounceby, the celebrated specialist."

Mrs. Jenwyn shook her head sadly. "I wish I could discern any grounds for such a belief," she said, "but at present I see none whatever." Then, after a pause, "Tell me this, Mr. Ormsby: Seeing you were so bent on making love to Anna, why, after you had discovered her retreat, did you not come direct to Rosemount, send in your card, and ask to see her?"

A faint tinge of color flushed his cheeks for a moment, but he answered quite coolly, "I will tell you why, Mrs. Jenwyn. Because, if I had presented myself at Rosemount, I should not have been allowed to see Miss Drelincourt--at least, not alone. I should have had no opportunity afforded me of pressing my suit, or of saying a twentieth part of what I wanted to say to her. You, my dear madam, would have taken jolly good care of that. Such being the state of affairs, no course was open to me save to act as I did."

Mrs. Jenwyn's thin lips came together for a moment. "You are quite right, Mr. Ormsby. I should have opposed your suit by every means in my power. It would have been my duty to do so. Before coming near Rosemount, you ought to have gone to Mr. Drelincourt, or, at any rate, have written to him, asking him to sanction your suit with his sister."

"A sanction I should never have succeeded in obtaining--of that I am quite sure. Besides, Anna is only his half sister, and there's nothing in her father's will which gives him the least control over either her or her property."

"But surely, as her nearest living relative, he has a right to be consulted in so important a matter, more especially as Anna is still considerably under age."

"I fail to recognize any such right on his part. Besides, he would only flout me. I know him--curse him! The things he sometimes said to me at the Towers used to make me wild with rage, only there was never anything to lay hold of. He was too cunning for that."

"There are Miss Drelincourt's trustees, through whom her income is paid her while she is under age."

"SO there are. But why should I go near them? I suppose the old colonel had got it into his head that his daughter would never marry. At any rate, there's no clause in his will which empowers her trustees to alienate a shilling of her income, even should she marry under age and without their consent. On that point I've satisfied myself."

The hot color surged up to the roots of his hair. He half rose to his feet, and then sat down again as if remembering himself. "Faith, you're right there, Mrs. Jenwyn," he said, with a short laugh. "I am a poverty stricken beggar, and no mistake. I freely admit it."

"And of course it would be great pecuniary gain to you to marry any one with Anna's prospective income?"

"To be sure it would. I should be a fool to deny it. If I marry at all, I must marry money; that's absolutely essential. So, why should I not wed Anna? She is, or will be, fairly well off; and then she's a lovely girl and I'm awfully gone on her."

He finished with a self satisfied smirk and a twist of his mustache, and then sat staring at Mrs. Jenwyn through his monocle, with his other eye half shut, as implying that, so far as he was concerned, the last word had been said, and that the interview might be considered as at an end.

"Then, am I to understand, Mr. Ormsby, that it is your intention to persist in your suit, despite anything I can say or urge to the contrary?"

"What is there to hinder me from taking Anna away and placing her directly under the charge of Mr. Drelincourt? That is a possibility you seem to have lost sight of."

"Not at all. The question is, if you were to propose any such measure, would Anna agree to it? I affirm distinctly that she would not. The time has gone by, my dear madam, when your wishes were a law to her. Allow me to tell you this: I have Anna's distinct promise to marry me."

Under the circumstances, he might perhaps be excused the smile of exultation and gratified vanity which overspread his features; but, for all that, Mrs. Jenwyn felt a strong desire to slap his face vigorously with both hands.

What he had just told her did not surprise her greatly. From the moment John Clisby stated that he had seen Ormsby kiss Anna she had known that matters must have come to a serious pass between them.

She sat for a few moments as if considering. Then she said: "If Anna has indeed given you such a promise as you say she has, the matter at once assumes a very different complexion. All the more needful is it that Mr. Drelincourt should at once be communicated with, in order that either he or her trustees may be in a position to decide where and with whom Anna's home shall be during the remaining term of her minority."

"Pardon me, my dear madam, but there will be no need whatever for either you or any one else to enter into any such arrangements with regard to Miss Drelincourt's future. In less than a month from now her home will be with me. The dear girl has consented to make me the happiest of men as soon as the needful arrangements for our marriage can be concluded."

There was a touch of bluster in his way of asking the question, as though he anticipated some further opposition on Mrs. Jenwyn's part.

Not without a little dismay did that lady learn that matters had gone so far between the young people.

"It is all the fault of my accident," she said to herself. "But for that, I should have had her constantly under my eye, and he would have had no opportunity of meeting her except in my presence, which would not have suited his purpose at all. But the harm is done, and I am driven to my last intrenchment. Oh, Anna, Anna, where are your eyes, that you cannot see through this shallow, selfish pretender--a cad at heart, if ever there was one--who cares no more for you than for the flower in his buttonhole, who seeks you only for your money, and who would break your heart when once he had made you his wife, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning! But you shall be saved in your own despite, my poor darling, even if your foolish little heart should be cracked in the process. There is no help for it--none!"

She had ample time for these and other thoughts while Ormsby crossed to a corner cupboard, from a decanter in which he poured out a "Thimbleful" of neat spirits and drank it off, wondering to himself meanwhile how much longer his unwelcome visitor was going to intrude her presence upon him. But Mrs. Jenwyn had not done with him.

"Sit down in that chair, Mr. Ormsby," she said, as he turned from the cupboard, speaking in a tone so peremptory that he could not repress a start. After staring at her for a second or two, he did as he was told.

It was not the chair he had occupied before, but one drawn up close to the narrow table on the opposite side of which she was seated. Leaning forward, with her arms resting on the table, and her face within a yard of his, she said: "Listen, Guy Ormsby. I have something to say to you, the telling of which you have brought on yourself by your own persistent folly."

Then, after a backward glance, as if to assure herself that the door was really shut, with lowered voice, and eyes which compelled his to confront them whether they would or no, she went on to speak to him for the next five minutes without a break or ever hesitating for a word. It was evident that she spoke from a heart fully charged, and while her utterance was so impressive, that which she had to tell him was of a nature so singular that when she had come to an end Guy might be excused if for a few seconds he felt rather uncertain whether he was standing on his head or his heels.

Various emotions had chased themselves across his face during the telling--simple surprise deepening into wide eyed amazement, and lurking incredulity ripening into a conviction of the truth of what he was being told, which for a little space left his cheeks nearly as bloodless as those of the woman opposite him, whose cold, incisive tones seemed to cut into his consciousness like a surgeon's knife.

Presently he drew a long, deep breath, like that of a person coming round after an operation. Then, in a voice as guarded as Mrs. Jenwyn's own, he said: "And you are prepared to swear that what you have just told me is the truth?"

"And now, Mr. Ormsby, may I ask whether you are still in the same mind with regard to Miss Drelincourt? Are you still as firmly determined as before to persist in your suit?"

"No, that I am not," responded Guy, with some emphasis. "What I have just learned has put that notion wholly out of the question. I'm sorry for poor dear Anna that matters have gone so far between us; but what can I do, Mrs. Jenwyn? Tell me that. It's not altogether my fault--now, is it?--that things have come to the pass they have."

"Certainly not, Mr. Ormsby. You are merely one more victim to the force of circumstances. You have already admitted that pecuniarily your position is not a very flourishing one. Of course, you have your regimental pay, but am I right in assuming that outside that your income is--what shall I call it?"

"Call it strictly limited, Mrs. Jenwyn, and then you will be absolutely right," replied Guy, with a little jarring laugh. "In point of fact, as you have seen fit to tell me so much, I don't mind admitting to you that I haven't even my regimental pay to fall back upon. In other words, I've thrown up my commission, and am now a private gentleman at large, with empty pockets, and a hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt which I have no longer the means of gratifying."

"Well, now, I have a certain proposition to make to you," said Mrs. Jenwyn. Guy pricked up his ears and became all attention. "In the first place, you shall give me your solemn promise never to reveal to any one the secret which I have just confided to your keeping; and, in the second place, you shall write Anna a couple of notes which I will dictate to you. That is all. In return, if you care to accept of a little present of a hundred pounds, you will be very welcome to it."

"If I care to accept it! My dear--my very dear--Mrs. Jenwyn! In the present state of my finances a hundred pounds will be like---- But never mind that. I am yours to command. There are writing materials on the side table, so that----"

It was arranged that this note should be delivered to Anna by messenger next morning, after she and Fanny should have left the house for their usual forenoon ramble.

Dear Miss Drelincourt :

After what occurred between us at our last few meetings on the sands of Carthew Bay, you probably think it due to you that I should have written you before now; and, indeed, my omission to do so would have been unpardonable had not my silence been dictated by certain considerations which I have found it impossible to ignore.

Into the nature of those considerations I have no wish to enter, nor would it, perhaps, be desirable that I should do so. It will be enough to state, in as few words as possible, to what conclusion they have gradually but surely led me. It is to this: That, unwittingly and unthinkingly, and as one walking blindfold, I have been guilty of the most deplorable mistake of my life.

Is there any need for me to be more explicit, or to enter into details which could not fail of being painful to us both? No, I am sure there is not. Your woman's instinct will have already revealed to you the nature of the mistake in question.

This I may add, that when I last parted from you I had no faintest prevision of what was so soon to happen. Perhaps it never would have happened had circumstances not called me away from Combe Fenton.

Yet who shall say it is not best for the happiness of both that the discovery should have been made before the time had gone by for remedying it! That is the light in which I trust you will endeavor to regard it.

In conclusion, my dear Miss Drelincourt, I can only ask you to believe in the sincerity of my contrition should my conduct be the cause of any temporary unhappiness to you. And that, in any case, it will be no more than temporary is the heartfelt hope of him who now subscribes himself

Your obedient and devoted servant,

Guy Ormsby .

When the foregoing had been written, it was sealed up, addressed in full to "Miss Drelincourt, Rosemount, near Combe Fenton, Devon," and taken charge of by Mrs. Jenwyn.

All that now remained to be done was to arrange for the handing over of the hundred pounds, and then for Mrs. Jenwyn to take her departure.

CHAPTER VII.

AN AMAZING CONFESSION.

Within a month of the events recorded in the preceding chapter, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge had left Combe Fenton. Anna had conceived a violent dislike to the place, and was restless till she got away from it. After her receipt of Guy Ormsby's letter, which Mrs. Jenwyn had arranged to have mailed from London, she never set foot on the sands of Carthew Bay. It is almost needless to state that the girl Fanny was left behind. She had heard of John Clisby's visit to Rosemount, and she needed no one to tell her why Mrs. Jenwyn had chosen to dispense with her services.

A few days before Anna's departure she received the news of her half brother's marriage. The ceremony had been solemnized at the British embassy at Naples, the bride being a Miss Madeline Fenwicke, whose name Anna seemed to remember as that of a visitor at Denham Lodge some three years previously.

In the course of the next four years, at the end of which period we take up their history afresh, Mrs. Jenwyn and her charge found a temporary home in three or four widely different places.

Anna's coming of age, and with it her command of the fortune left her by her father, had made no difference in her simple and inexpensive mode of life. She had had more than enough before for all her needs, and except that she now set aside a considerably larger sum for charitable purposes, the major portion of her income was never drawn upon, but allowed to accumulate untouched in her banker's coffers.

Anna and her brother had met but once since the latter's marriage, and then he brought with him the news of the birth of a daughter.

It was during the time of Anna's sojourn at Dieppe that Drelincourt, when on his way back from London, whither some law business had taken him, made a detour on purpose to see his sister and spend a week with her. He had exiled himself from England, preferring to live abroad, chiefly in Italy, the climate of which seemed to suit both him and his wife, but now and then wintering in Egypt or elsewhere.

But although he and Anna saw so little of each other, he wrote to her regularly once a month, and his letters, chatty, vivacious, and stuffed with news and gossip of one kind or another, made one of the chief pleasures of her quiet existence.

They were the sole link between her and that great, restless, seething world outside her about which she knew so little, and from any closer contact with which she was kept by her constitutional timidity and that distaste for mixing in general society which she found it quite impossible to overcome.

But latterly--that is to say, within the last twelve months or so--the dread shadow which for so long a time had brooded over her life had been penetrated by a ray of sunlight which was gradually broadening and brightening, so that it seemed as if, at no very distant date, Dr. Pounceby's prediction that, in the course of time, Anna would outgrow her mental malady, was on the eve of fulfilment.

For some time past each recurrent attack had been of shorter duration than the preceding one, so that now, instead of extending over twelve days or a fortnight, as used to be the case, they lasted for two or three days only; and there was every reason for hoping that in the course of another year or two they would leave her altogether.

Mrs. Jenwyn had few living relatives, and only one with whom she kept up anything like a regular correspondence. The person in question was a first cousin, Martin Soanes by name, whose position in life was that of managing clerk to a London solicitor in a large way of business.

From Mr. Soanes, when she had been about six months at Guernsey, she one day received a letter, the contents of which proved to be of a sufficiently startling kind.

In it her cousin informed her that, in consequence of an advertisement he had come across in the Times , he had called upon a certain firm in his own line of business, and, on making himself known to them, was told that the person advertised for had, through the death of an uncle in Australia, become entitled to a bequest of twenty two thousand pounds.

That fortunate person was none other than herself, Henrietta Jenwyn, née Henrietta Wynter, daughter of so and so. Finally, Mr. Soanes wrote, her presence was desired in London as speedily as possible, with the view of enabling her to prove her identity.

For a little while after reading the letter Mrs. Jenwyn felt like a stunned person. Some time was needed to enable her to realize her good fortune--if such it should prove to be; and, indeed, at first she hardly knew whether to feel glad or sorry, not being able just yet to discern to what extent it might affect the relations between herself and Anna.

But presently she took comfort. Why need it affect them in any way--this legacy by a man she had never set eyes on, even if it should prove to be hers? Why should not matters go on as they had hitherto done? It certainly would not be her fault if they did not.

The legacy proved to be no myth, but a very pleasant and substantial reality. The sum total was invested in certain railway scrip which for the last half dozen years had never paid a less dividend than five per cent per annum, and there the fortunate legatee decided to let it remain.

It would not have been easy to find a safer or more profitable investment, and the income derivable therefrom seemed to her amply sufficient to meet all needful requirements on her part, even should she finally decide on carrying out a certain project which had been simmering in her brain from within a few hours of her receipt of her cousin's letter.

But it was a project not to be decided upon in a hurry. It was rife with certain consequences from which there would be no escape, and some of them might, perhaps, prove to be of a far more serious kind than was apparent on the surface.

She turned it over in her mind, not once, but a thousand times, considering it from every conceivable point of view; indeed, during those few days all other subjects, including the arrangements connected with her legacy, were subordinated to it. The temptation to carry it into effect appealed to her with an all but irresistible force, and at length she yielded to it so far as to say to herself:

"I will sound Anna. I will put certain questions to her, and from her answers I shall be enabled to judge whether it will be safe to venture any farther, or wiser to draw back, and keep silence for evermore."

When her cab stopped at the garden gate, Anna came flying down the pathway to greet her.

"Well, you dear old thing, what luck have you had?" she cried, as soon as she had given her an affectionate hug. "Has the legacy taken to itself wings and vanished into thin air, or have you brought back a portmanteau stuffed with bank notes?"

"Neither one nor the other. The legacy has not taken to itself wings, but I have not brought so much as a slice of it back with me. It is all safely invested, and I think I can't do better than let if remain where it is."

"And you come back just the same as you went--not even an inch taller than you were five days ago! The same dowdy gown and old-fashioned bonnet. Where's the good of having twenty thousand pounds left you if you have nothing to show for it?"

"That is a question easier to ask than answer. I was quite content, and as happy as I ever expect to be, before this money came. What more can I hope to be now?"

"And you say that you never even saw this uncle of yours who has remembered you so handsomely in his will?" queried Anna, as soon as they were indoors.

"Not so far as my memory serves me, although I believe he saw me when I was an infant. He emigrated when I was about three years old. My mother, who was his favorite sister, heard from him at long intervals for a period of seven or eight years. Then followed a silence which, so far as I am aware, was never broken, and at home the belief gradually grew up among us that he was dead."

"Possibly, if your cousin had not seen the advertisement in the Times , you would never have known anything about your legacy?"

"I think that very probable indeed. I was advertised for under my maiden name, and except my cousin (who, I believe, prides himself on the fact that nothing in the Times escapes him), few, if any, of those now living who knew me before my marriage would be likely to see it, or, if they should see it, would know where to find me."

Although Mrs. Jenwyn had made up her mind to a certain course, she seemed in no special hurry to carry her purpose into effect. Indeed, she was one of those women who never appear to hurry; she could always afford to bide her time.

Besides, in the present case, a few days--or, for that matter, a few weeks or a few months--would make no difference. She told herself that she would not make an opportunity, but wait till one should come to her. Perhaps she was not without a lingering doubt as to the spirit in which Anna might receive her communication, and was not disinclined to let matters go on as they were for a little while longer.

Of one thing she felt sure--that nothing could ever be quite the same as it had been when once her lips should have been unsealed and her secret have passed from her own keeping.

Her opportunity, or what seemed such, came on a certain afternoon when the weather, would not admit of their going out, and she and Anna were seated by the window, one busy with her sewing, the other with her knitting.

The maid had just been in to ask leave to go and visit her mother, who was said to be dying. The girl had been in deep distress.

"I have sometimes wondered, Tetta," said Anna presently, "whether it is harder for a mother to lose her child or for a child to lose its mother. I am not referring to cases like Charlotte's, where the child is grown up; although, if tears are anything to go by, she seems extremely attached to her mother."

"A great deal depends on circumstances. When a mother loses her only child, or one of two, it may reasonably be assumed that she feels the loss far more than she would do if she had other children left to comfort her. Again, where a child loses its mother while still at a tender age, it is not to be expected that the loss can seem such an irreparable one as it would do at a later period, when it is old enough not only to appreciate her love, but to reciprocate it in full measure."

"It was my misfortune to lose my mother when I was at a very tender age," said Anna presently, in a low voice.

"It was. You were barely five years old when she died. I suppose you remember very little about her?"

"Not a great deal. I seem to see her nearly always as an invalid, lying either on a couch or in bed. I have an impression that she was very fond of me, but that I was told I must not make a noise when in her room, nor stay with her too long at a time."

"I suppose it has been a source of never ending regret to you that you lost her at such an early age?" She was watching Anna keenly from between her narrowed lids.

"Of never ending regret?"--with a little surprise in her tone. "No, Tetta, scarcely that, I think. How could it be? At that age our regrets are nearly as fleeting as our joys. I was too young to sound the depths of sorrow, or to allow of any loss touching me very deeply for longer than a few passing hours."

"Still, you often thought of her--often do now, perhaps--and have felt that by her death a void was left in your life which nothing else could fill; and have longed to have her with you, that you might pour your troubles and confidences into her sympathetic ear, for, to a daughter, whose ear is like her mother's?"

For a little while Anna went on stitching in silence. Her brows were knitted, her face wore an expression of dubiety.

Presently she said: "Yes, I have often thought about my poor dead mother, and have sometimes wondered, if she had lived, how she and I would have got on together; perhaps not so well as you and I have, Tetta. But I can't say that I have ever felt about her as you seem to think I ought to have done. Was it wrong and wicked of me not to have those feelings? If it was, I cannot help it. I did not make myself."

Again there was a space of silence which Mrs. Jenwyn did not break. All her attention was apparently being given to her work, but a close observer might have seen that her hands were trembling slightly, and that more than once she dropped her stitches.

"I think, Tetta, it must have been because I have had you by my side to love and cling to almost ever since I can remember, that I have missed my mother as little as I seem to have. You have filled her place to me. I have grown up under your hands, molded by you so far as it was possible for any one to mold me. You have been to me a warm and living reality; she nothing but a dim, sweet memory. How was it possible that she should be anything more to me?"

Mrs. Jenwyn lifted her eyes from her knitting and looked fixedly at Anna. On her face was an expression which seemed to transfigure it.

"Suppose, my dear one," she said, and the words came brokenly and with difficulty, as though she were feeling her way like one in doubt--"mind, I only say suppose--that things had so fallen out that not Mrs. Drelincourt, but I--I--were your mother--what would you have said and thought in that case?"

Anna's eyes met hers with a great wonder shining in them, not unmingled with perplexity. She drew a long breath before she spoke.

"What should I have said and thought in that case--or, rather, what should I say and think now? I should thank Heaven on my knees for having given me a living mother in the place of a dead one, and one whom I could love from the bottom of my heart, as I have loved you from childhood."

Here she rose impulsively from her chair, and making three steps forward, she went down on her knees before Mrs. Jenwyn and laid her clasped hands on the other's lap.

"But, oh, Tetta, what do you mean--what do you mean by asking me such a question?" On her face was the radiance of a dawning hope. Expectation sat on her parted lips; her bosom rose and fell quickly.

Mrs. Jenwyn bent forward and touched Anna's sunny hair with her lips. "Oh, my darling, cannot you guess?" she said, in a voice shaken with emotion. "I am your mother--I, and not another!"

It was a quarter of an hour later when Mrs. Jenwyn began her confession--for nothing less than that could it be called. As a matter of course, certain things--not necessarily everything--must be told Anna in satisfaction of her legitimate curiosity, and there seemed no reason why the telling of them should not be got over and done with as speedily as possible.

The two were seated side by side on a couch, and Anna held one of her mother's hands in hers as the latter proceeded with her narrative.

"My father, the Rev. George Wynter, was a poor curate in a rural district, with little or no hope of preferment, and when, at the age of sixteen, I was offered the post of companion to Miss Lemoine, of Waterend, he was only too pleased that I should accept it, and so lighten the burden at home.

"For me the next three years were very happy ones, I was not merely Clara Lemoine's companion, but her bosom friend. She was a warm-hearted girl of strong attachments, and I soon learned to love her very dearly. At the end of that time Mrs. Lemoine, who had been an invalid for years, died. The home was broken up, and Clara went out to Calcutta to join her father, who held a position in the Indian Civil Service. There, after a time, she met Colonel Drelincourt and married him, becoming his second wife.

"After about a year the colonel, together with his regiment, returned to England, his wife, of course, accompanying him. Some three or four years later he was ordered out to Egypt at a few days' notice, and was under the necessity of leaving his young wife, to whom he was passionately attached, behind him. He had not been gone a month when she was prematurely confined at a London hotel, but the child, a girl, only lived three weeks.

"By this time I had been a couple of years married, and you, my dear one, were born a fortnight before Mrs. Drelincourt's child. Clara, while in India, had written to me from time to time, and I had duly replied to her letters, so that the link between us had never been broken. She knew of my marriage, and of many, but not the whole, of the circumstances connected with it. She had called upon me at my house in the suburbs of London only a few days before the birth of her daughter. Within an hour of the child's death she sent me a telegram, asking me to go and see her without delay. This I did, and then it was that she went on her knees to me and implored me, with the most passionate entreaties, to give up my child to her, so that she might be enabled to pass it off to her husband in the place of the one that was dead.

"It was a proposition to which, much as I loved Clara Lemoine, and willing though I was to make almost any sacrifice for her, I could not for some time persuade myself to accede. But she bore down my opposition by degrees. Colonel Drelincourt, who was not on good terms with his only son, was extremely desirous of having another child--a boy preferably, but better, far better, a girl than none at all.

"He had been informed in due course of the birth of his daughter, and Clara dreaded the effect which the tidings of the child's death would have upon him--dreaded, or so she made out, that his love for her (there being no likelihood of her having any more children) might gradually fade into indifference, or even turn into positive dislike. 'I will not face my husband without his child, or one he believes to be his, in my arms,' she said. 'If you refuse to give me yours, I will drown myself.' And in the mood in which she then was she was quite capable of doing so.

"But, over and above all this, there were circumstances in my own life which, when I called them to mind, compelled me in my own despite to lend a more favorable ear to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. My husband was a bad and cruel man. (It is better you should know the truth, however painful it may be.) He was both a drunkard and a spendthrift, and something worse than either. He had deserted me months before you were born, leaving me all but penniless.

"I neither knew where he was nor when to expect him back; and it was his return I dreaded more than anything else in the world. Could I have been sure that I should never see him again, I should have felt comparatively happy. But I might hear his knock at the door at any hour of the day or night, and the fear of it turned my life into a perpetual nightmare. Oh, I had good cause for being afraid of him!

"Not to weary you, it will be enough to say that I finally gave way and yielded to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. Of what it cost me to do so I will say nothing.

"When Mrs. Drelincourt was well enough to leave the London hotel, at which she was an entire stranger, it was to go down to Wyvern Towers. It was at a little country station, at which she made a stoppage for the purpose, that you were given over into her charge. Our faithful servant; since dead, with whose services it was impossible to dispense, was our sole confidant in the affair.

"For the next four years I lived as companion to an invalid lady, to whom some portion of my history was known, and who did not object to my passing under a fictitious name--the one by which I have ever since been known. At the end of that time Mrs. Drelincourt sent for me.

"She was in a consumption, and was quite aware that her recovery was hopeless. She had grown to care for you as if you were her own child, and her object in sending for me was not merely that I might nurse her through her last illness, but that after she was gone I might have the permanent charge of you, at any rate for several years to come; nor did she rest satisfied till she had extracted a promise from her husband that her wishes in this respect should be faithfully observed by him. Me, two days before she died, she bound by a solemn promise that only under the most extreme circumstances would I ever reveal the true story of your parentage."

In view of the amazing confession just made by the elder woman, mother and daughter found no lack of subjects to talk about, but it was not till an hour later that a new and, to her, very surprising thought struck Anna.

"If you are my mother," she said, "and of course you are, then Felix cannot be my half brother?"

"That is very true," replied Mrs. Jenwyn, with a faint smile. She had been waiting for Anna to make the discovery.

"Nor any relation at all. Oh, dear! I am very, very sorry for that. I always loved Felix--although, all the same, I used to stand a little bit in awe of him. And now, I suppose I've no right to love him any more. But perhaps you don't intend to tell him even a part of that which you have just told me. In that case, matters would go on as they have always done, and he would continue to think of me and to treat me as his sister."

"And, knowing what you know now, would you be content to go on living on money to which you have no right?"

"I had not thought of that," she said. "No, I suppose I should not be content--indeed, I am quite sure I should not be. But what is to be done?"

"There is only one way out of the difficulty, and that is, for Anna Drelincourt to die."

"I have thought it all out. Listen! In the course of a few days you shall write to Mr. Drelincourt, informing him that you purpose taking a voyage to Madeira for the good of your health, which has been anything but satisfactory of late. We will go and stay there a month; but while on the return voyage Anna Drelincourt shall die, and shall be buried at sea, and on landing it will be my painful duty to inform Mr. Drelincourt of her demise. I think you said that his last letter to you was dated from Bordighera."

Her voice and manner were as dry and matter of fact as if she were explaining some detail of housekeeping, but when she had come to an end Anna sat and stared at her like one doubtful whether she had heard aright.

"Why do you look at me so strangely?" asked her mother, after a minute's silence. "There is no other way open to us that I can see. Can you discern any other?"

"You do not know, you cannot comprehend," resumed Mrs. Jenwyn--and now there was a ring of genuine emotion in her voice--"what I have gone through in the course of the last few days, since I knew that this money was coming to me. On the one hand was my promise to Mrs. Drelincourt not to reveal the secret of your birth, except under very exceptional circumstances; on the other was a mother's heart hungering and crying out for her child. There is no one left alive to whom the death of Anna Drelincourt will be a matter of much moment. Mr. Felix Drelincourt will grieve about her for a little while, but her fortune will make a handsome addition to his income, and he may perhaps derive some consolation from that.

"And so--and so at length I came to the determination to tell you everything. I wanted to claim you as my own--my very own. I wanted to break down the invisible barrier which has kept us apart for too many years. Oh, my darling, do not tell me that I have done wrong!"

"Wrong, mother! How can you imagine such a thing?" cried Anna, as she burst into tears and flung her arms round Mrs. Jenwyn's neck. "In gaining you I have gained everything. All else is as nothing compared with that."

The audacious scheme conceived by Mrs. Jenwyn was carried to a successful issue. To Felix Drelincourt in his Italian home came the tidings of his half sister's death on shipboard while on her way back from Madeira. He grieved sincerely for her loss, and wrote Mrs. Jenwyn a letter full of sympathy, regrets, and grateful acknowledgment of her services to the dead girl. Before leaving England Anna had made a will, in which she bequeathed all she possessed, with the exception of a few trinkets, to Drelincourt. This step was rendered necessary by the peculiar circumstances of the case.

The money which thus accrued to him made a very welcome addition to Drelincourt's somewhat limited income. After the reading of the will he wrote to Mrs. Jenwyn, expressing his surprise and regret that, except so far as regarded the aforesaid trinkets, her name found no mention in it, and offering to continue to her for life the income his father had set aside for her so long as she and Anna should remain together. In reply, Mrs. Jenwyn informed him, with many thanks, that, by the death of a relative, she had recently succeeded to a legacy which would amply suffice to meet all her simple needs in time to come.

And there matters between them came to an end forever, as they probably thought, neither of them foreseeing where and under what peculiar circumstances they should meet again, nor having any prevision of the underlying purpose for which fate had interwoven the threads of their destiny.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

It is a lovely afternoon in early summer, and a pair of youthful lovers have the morning room at Fairlawn to themselves.

And a very pleasant room it is, at once sunny and airy, with two long windows which open on a space of greenest lawn interspersed with flower beds of various quaint shapes and sizes, which as yet are hardly in their full summer beauty. At one end of the room is an archway shrouded by a portière, forming the entrance to the second Mrs. Drelincourt's boudoir.

At a table between the windows a very charming girl, as fresh and sweet as a rosebud dipped in dew, is arranging some cut flowers in a Nankin jar. On a couch no great distance away, admiring her with all his eyes, lounges a rather jaded looking young man in flannels; jaded, be it understood, not from dissipation, but from overwork.

"I only sat out two dances the whole evening, and it was my own fault I didn't dance those." It was Marian Drelincourt who spoke.

"No doubt you fancied yourself the belle of the ball," rejoined the young man. "I dare say there were several other young ladies there who cherished the same pleasing delusion."

"No such silly thought ever entered my head. But I will say this--that if there had been twice as many dances, I could have had partners for all of them."

"You seem on particularly good terms with your young self this afternoon. I almost wonder how you escaped falling in love with one or other of your partners."

"How do you know that I did escape? There were two or three who made themselves especially agreeable. But for anything that may have happened you have only yourself to blame. You ought to have been there to look after me, and keep me out of danger. Mrs. Delisle could easily have managed to get a ticket for you."

"My dear Marian, as if I had not already explained to you how utterly impossible it was for me to start on my holidays till late yesterday afternoon! I took the first train after I was at liberty----"

"And reached Fairlawn just as papa and mamma were sitting down to dinner. Although you professed to be so exceedingly delighted to see them, mamma told me that she never saw you pull such a dismal face as you did last evening. I wonder why?"

"But why didn't Mrs. Drelincourt take you to the ball herself, instead of leaving you to be chaperoned by Mrs. Delisle?"

"Mamma rarely goes anywhere. In the first place, as you know, her health is very delicate, and, in the second, she wouldn't go anywhere without papa."

"Is Mr. Drelincourt, now that he has come back to England, as much of a recluse as he was during the time he lived abroad?"

"Just as much. His coming home has made no difference in his mode of life. We see no company, or next to none, and he and mamma visit nowhere."

"Not at all. You forget for how many years they led the same kind of life abroad. Wet or fine, papa goes out on horseback for a couple of hours every morning. Then, all forenoon he is busy in his laboratory. You may or may not know that he is a fellow of more than one learned society. In the afternoon he and mamma--sometimes taking me with them--drive or walk, and for the evening we have books, chess, and music."

"Quiet, yes; dull, no. Since I left school it is the only kind of life I have known, and I have never longed for any other. Besides"--with a demure glance at the young man--"have I not everything a girl could wish for to make me happy?"

"Sweet one!" exclaimed Walter Deane,--as he sprang to his feet. That half veiled glance was more than flesh and blood could withstand.

Another instant and his arms would have been about her. But Miss Drelincourt sprang back with a warning finger on her lips. "Hush! I think there's some one coming," she whispered. In point of fact, she thought nothing of the kind. But the pretense answered its purpose. Young Deane slunk back to his seat with rather a shamefaced air.

Finding no one appeared, he made a mental note that he had been tricked, but deemed it best to postpone his revenge.

"I don't think I ever saw two people so wholly devoted to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Drelincourt are," he presently remarked. "They are more like--well--like lovers than----"

"Than two people who have been long enough married to have a daughter who will be eighteen on the second of next month. But they are always the same. They seem to live only for each other."

"Oh, I am quite a secondary person, I assure you, especially with papa. Do you know, Wally, I believe he is sometimes actually jealous of me when he thinks I am paying mamma too many attentions. It almost seems as if he grudged me more than a tiny corner of her heart."

"Somehow, papa seems different from other people. I can't explain how or in what way, only I feel that there is a difference."

"There's a magnetism about Mr. Drelincourt which seems to draw people to him whether they wish it or no. Me he attracts more than any man I ever met."

"You are not the only one by many who has experienced the same peculiar attraction. Can you wonder at mamma and I loving him so dearly?"

Before there was time to say more the portière was drawn aside, and the second Mrs. Drelincourt advanced slowly into the room.

Although she had left her fortieth birthday behind her, she was still a very beautiful woman, with a freshness and purity of complexion almost rivaling that of her daughter. Strangers seeing them together found it hard to realize that she was Marian's mother.

"Mamma," exclaimed Marian, "I have here the very first Gloire de Dijon which has come into bloom. I've been watching it for days on purpose that you might have it. I've not forgotten that it's your favorite flower."

"As if it were possible to think of you and love you half as much as you deserve!" said Marian, as she proceeded to fix the flower in her mother's dress.

Everybody started and turned their eyes in one direction. The speaker was Mr. Drelincourt. He was standing in the archway, holding the portière aside with one hand.

"It is the only one which is yet open, papa; but there will be a lot more in a day or two."

"By which time they will have become common. N'importe . I must try to find existence endurable without one." Then, turning to his wife: "The postman has just brought me a letter which must have been delayed in transit, since it was evidently intended to reach me yesterday. It is dated from Paris a couple of days ago, and is written by my old friend, Colonel Winslow. In it he says that we may expect him at Fairlawn on Thursday--that's today--in time for dinner. He may arrive at any moment."

"Was it not Colonel Winslow, papa, who stayed with us at Bordighera five or six years ago?"

"I was in short frocks at the time, and I remember that I quite fell in love with him."

"I should advise you not to repeat the process now," remarked young Deane in an aside to her.

"And why not, pray?" she asked in the same tone. "Colonel Winslow, let me tell you, is a very charming man. I always did like elderly men better than boys. I think it very likely that I shall fall desperately in love with him."

Without giving her lover time to reply, she picked up her hat, and swinging it by its ribbons, passed out through one of the long windows. Before she had time to cross the lawn and plunge into the shrubbery beyond, Walter was following her. Drelincourt and his wife stood watching them through the other window.

The twenty years which had passed over Felix Drelincourt's head since his first wife's death had changed him very little to outward seeming. His black hair was turning gray about the temples, his long, thin face looked a trifle longer and thinner, a few crow's feet had gathered about his eyes, and there was a slight but perceptible stoop of his tall, lean figure. And that was all.

"I hope that Colonel Winslow will make a long stay with us," remarked Mrs. Drelincourt, as she seated herself in a favorite easy chair.

"Because the presence of your old friend will be such a pleasure to you; because he will cheer your loneliness, and----"

"Mr. Ormsby," intoned the solemn voice of Wicks, the butler, before any one was aware that the door had been opened.

Drelincourt turned on the instant, and confronted his visitor, one lean, muscular hand gripping the back of his wife's chair like a vise.

Our old acquaintance, his silk, hat balanced carefully in his left hand, advanced with that air of self-consequence which was so much a part of him that he could no more have divested himself of it than he could-have unscrewed and laid aside one of his limbs. He never forgot that he was Mr. Ormsby, of Denham Lodge--not even when he repeated aloud the responses in church and avouched himself a miserable sinner.

He was considerably stouter than when we saw him last, and more scant of breath. His cheeks, too, were fuller and rounder, and his double chin more noticeable than of yore. His complexion was no longer mottled, but of one uniform tint, and that the tint of a boiled lobster, while his once sandy hair had turned completely white. In other respects no change was discernible in him.

"Drelincourt," he began at once, "you and I have not met for twenty years. I have called on you twice since your return, but both times was told you were not at home--a statement which, I tell you candidly, I did not credit. Today, however, I am more fortunate, and it is well I am so, seeing that I am the bearer of news which can scarcely fail to make even you--cold-blooded cynic though you always were--rejoice and feel glad. At last, Drelincourt, at last, and after all these years, the murder of my poor sister will be avenged."

For the next few seconds his listeners might have been figures of wood or stone. They neither stirred nor spoke, but stood or sat in the particular position in which each of them had been arrested by Ormsby's ominous words.

"Enigmas? Stuff! They are a sort of rubbish I never deal in; more in your line, by far. Man alive! I tell you we have got hold of the wretch, the double dyed villain who did the deed, and have laid him safely by the heels in Sunbridge jail. And, after all, Drelincourt, whom do you think the fellow turns out to be?"

"A--h!" It was more an indrawing of the breath than an exclamation. Never had Drelincourt's marvelous command over himself stood him in better stead. For a second or two there was a slight flickering of his eyelids, and that was all.

"Yes, sir," resumed the other, "Gumley, the under gardener, the man who was arrested at the time on suspicion, but ultimately liberated. From the first I made no secret of my belief that he was the criminal. From that belief I have never swerved, and today facts have fully justified it."

There was a perceptible pause on Delincourt's part. Then "Gumley's own confession that----" Another pause.

"It does. But surely no sane person can doubt that the hand which stole the jewels was guilty of the far graver crime!"

"And yet there might be found people, whether sane or otherwise, to doubt the accuracy of such an assumption."

A coldly malignant gleam shot from Ormsby's porcine eyes. "I have not forgotten, Drelincourt, how you stood up for the fellow twenty years ago. Had it not been for your evidence about the locket, in all probability he would have been convicted then. But stand up for him now, after his own confession! On my soul, Drelincourt, it almost looks as if you knew more about the affair than you choose to tell!"

Mrs. Drelincourt let her soft cheek rest for a moment like a caress against her husband's hand, which was still grasping the back of her chair.

"Ormsby, I am one of those men, too few in number, I am sorry to think, who decline to accept assumptions in lieu of facts. You say this fellow has confessed to the robbery. Well and good; let him be punished for it. But to assume that he is, therefore, and as if it were a matter of course, guilty of the more heinous crime seems to me monstrous in the extreme."

"If you were a man of the world, Drelincourt, instead of being the student and recluse you are, you wouldn't talk such rot--for I can call it by no other name. So convinced are I and my brother magistrates of Gumley's guilt that we have unanimously made up our minds to commit him to the next assizes on the double charge of robbery and murder."

"Iv that case, there's nothing more to be said," remarked Drelincourt with a shrug, as he turned away.

He made a sweeping, old fashioned bow, and then marched out, his nose in the air, and the color in his cheeks a shade deeper than when he had entered the room. Wicks shut the door behind him, and the next moment the first dinner bell sounded.

"I will follow you in a few moments," said Drelincourt to his wife. "I have a note to write which must be despatched at once."

He waited with a nonchalant air, a couple of fingers of each hand thrust into his waistcoat pockets, till she had gone, then he sank wearily into a chair.

"At last the sword has fallen! For twenty long years it has been suspended over my head, and now the hair that held it has snapped. Fate guides our footsteps through a blind labyrinth, and brings us to the exit by ways we wot not of. But it may be that all is not yet lost. Some loophole of escape there may be still, though all is dark at present. Through what mischance has Gumley been caught in the toils after all these years? Why has he confessed to the robbery of the jewels? Why---- But these are idle questions. I must see Rodd and get him to fathom this mystery for me."

Therewith he rang the bell. "Tell Mr. Marsh that I wish to see him at once in the library," he said to Wicks. Then to himself he added: "In all the world there is but one soul to whom I can freely talk and from whom I have no concealments."

When he entered the library, three minutes later, he found Roden Marsh already there.

"So--you have heard," he said, as he shut the door, and paused for a moment before advancing. "I can read your news in your face."

"I wanted to be the first to tell it you, so that you might be prepared; but I could find no opportunity of seeing you alone."

"My dear Rodd, night and day for twenty years I have never been otherwise than prepared. But tell me what it is you have heard. At present I am altogether in the dark. That Gumley has been arrested, and has confessed to the robbery of my first wife's jewels--so much I have been told, but beyond that I know nothing."

"Yesterday morning Gumley, who has not been seen in this part of the country for a number of years, tried to pawn a lady's watch. The suspicions of the pawnbroker were aroused, the police were called in, Gumley's lodging was searched, and in it was found nearly the whole of Mrs. Drelincourt's stolen property. This morning I happened to be in Sunbridge on business when Gumley was brought up at the court house before Mr. Ormsby and two other magistrates. It was Draycot, the chief constable, who told me of the arrest, so, of course, I took care to be present at the hearing."

"It seems strange, does it not, that the fellow should have kept his ill-gotten gains by him all these years?"

"To go back to the affair of twenty years ago," resumed the latter. "It seems Gumley's cupidity had been excited by the sight of the jewelry worn at different times by Mrs. Drelincourt, besides which he had sworn to be revenged on her for the horsewhipping she had administered to him a few days before the robbery. He obtained access to the dressing room through the window, by means of a ladder planted outside, purloined by him from one of the outhouses, and duly taken back when he had accomplished his purpose. He had chosen a time when he knew there was not much likelihood of his being interrupted, Lucille, Mrs. Drelincourt's maid, who slept next her mistress' dressing room, being out of the way on leave of absence. Having found the jewel casket, he emptied it of its contents, and got back to his own room at the east lodge by the way he had come. With the exception of the locket afterwards found on him----"

"He hid away the whole of the stolen property in the thatch of the lodge, where the police failed to discover it. I ought here to mention that Gumley had a bed room at the east lodge, which he had not yet given up, although Mrs. Drelincourt had discharged him some days before. Well, finding it impossible, after his release from prison, to obtain possession of the jewelry, he left the neighborhood, only coming back to it about a week ago. At last his long waited for opportunity had arrived. As you know, a new lodge has just been built. The old one was untenanted and on the point of being pulled down. A night or two since Gumley forced his way into it, and there, under the thatch, he found the little parcel he had hidden twenty years ago. What followed is known to you."

"And yet--fools that we are--how many of us are ready to affirm that blind chance alone is the arbiter of our destinies!" Drelincourt sighed heavily, then he rose and took a turn or two across the floor, after which he resumed his seat.

"Ormsby tells me that he and his brother dunderheads have made up their minds to commit Gumley for trial on the capital charge."

"Should Gumley be committed tomorrow, as I suppose he will be, you must go up to London, and see a certain solicitor whose name and address I will give you. You will put Gumley's case into his hands, and instruct him to engage the best counsel. Expense must be no object; only, it must not be known from whence or whom the requisite funds will be forthcoming."

"My dear Rodd, let us have no suppositions, as thou lov'st me! They are hateful things. When you have carried out my instructions, you will have done all that can be done."

Again he rose and in his restless fashion took a turn or two from end to end of the room. Then, as he laid a hand on Rodd's shoulder: "You have read how, during the First Revolution, when the guillotine was busy at work and the Conciérgerie was crammed with prisoners who had been tried and condemned, morning after morning the tumbrels used to come to the prison gate and the names used to be called out of those who were to be led off to execution--you have read all that?"

"Certainly--and how gay the prisoners were, or made believe to be; and how they used to get up little dances among themselves, although they knew that for some of them the sun would rise next morning for the last time."

"Rodd, I feel exactly as I can conceive those condemned prisoners used to feel, except that in my case the end is a little farther off, although none the less inevitable. Meanwhile, let us eat, drink, and be merry. Bring roses and garlands. Let us have in the hautboy and the flute. And as for the grim Shadow biding its time behind my chair--I can feel its presence there already--you and I alone have eyes to see it."

Rodd regarded him with a troubled expression. "I fail to understand you," he said. "You don't mean to imply----"

"Ah! here comes my little girl," exclaimed Drelincourt, turning to her with his gayest smile.

"Yes, you tiresome old thing, and come to scold you. Mamma wants to know what is keeping you so long. If you don't come at once, you won't be able to finish dressing before the bell rings, and then everybody will be kept waiting."

"That would, indeed, be a grave misdemeanor. By the way, you have not told me how you enjoyed the ball last night. When you got back you stole off to bed without my having seen you."

"I saw a light in the laboratory, but was afraid of disturbing you. The ball? Oh, it was just lovely! And what do you think? I danced every dance but two!"

"Greedy child! Then you did not fail to enjoy yourself, although a certain person was not there to keep you company."

"It was my first ball, papa--think of that! I could scarcely fail to enjoy myself, could I? Of course I should have enjoyed myself far more if Wally had been there."

"Of course I am, papa. Have not you yourself agreed that some day we are to be married?"

"Indeed, then, I don't want it to come, oh, for ever so long! As if I were in a hurry to leave you and mamma! It is most unkind of you even to hint at such a thing, and I have a great mind to sulk with you for the rest of the day."

"Such a threat is enough to make any one shake in his shoes. Do you know, petite , of what I have been thinking?"

"Why, now Walter and my old friend Winslow are both here, that we will try for a little while--say, for the next few weeks--to be as jolly as sandboys. Yes, we will be gay, we will be dissipated even (fancy poor mamma being dissipated, eh?), and our mottoes shall be 'Away with melancholy' and ' Vive la bagatelle! '"

"Awfully. Tomorrow, if the weather hold fine, we will drive as far as Beauchamp Chase and picnic there. Then mamma and you must arrange for a garden party, and possibly we may be able to get up a dance or two--and I know not what other frivolities." To himself he said: "What a mockery is all this!"

"You darling papa! How happy we shall be! But come along, do, or mamma will say that you are making me as bad as yourself."

CHAPTER IX.

WAITING FOR THE VERDICT.

In the same pleasant room, with its French windows opening on the lawn, already known to us, Mrs. Drelincourt was reclining on a lounge, engaged in some kind of fine needlework. On a small occasional table within reach of her hand lay an open telegram. She was alone, and had been so for some time, but she did not on that account think herself neglected. Indeed, she was one of those women, few and far between, who love solitude for its own sake, and can taste to the full its subtle charm.

"It's close upon three o'clock, and yet Felix has not returned," he said. "It is not often that he prolongs his ride so far into the afternoon."

"Very seldom indeed. I was becoming rather anxious about him when this came to hand." As she spoke, she handed him the telegram.

"'Drelincourt, Greystone Priors, to Mrs. Drelincourt, Fairlawn.--Selim has fallen lame. Shall leave him here, to be fetched by groom tomorrow, and return by train.' That fully accounts for his non-arrival," added the colonel, as he replaced the telegram on the table, and drew up a chair. "You have heard nothing yet, I presume, as to how Gumley's trial is progressing?"

"Nothing whatever. Roden Marsh is in attendance at the sessions house, and will bring us the news at the earliest possible moment."

"And must your visit really come to an end in the course of a few days?" she presently asked. "Cannot we persuade you to favor us with your company for a fortnight longer?"

"I'm afraid I have no option in the matter. Weeks ago I promised my sister to be with her on the twelfth of this month, and were I to break my word, I should render myself liable to pains and penalties without number."

"I cannot tell you how grateful I feel for the change which your visit--for I can set it down to nothing else--has wrought in FeliX. Not for years--nay, scarcely since our marriage--has he seemed so cheerful, so free from care, so little given to brooding over his experiments and shutting himself up among his books, as during the three weeks you have been with us."

"Ah ha! I do take some little credit to myself for having coaxed our snail out of his shell, for having wheedled our bookworm out of his seclusion; and it must be your care after I'm gone, dear Mrs. Drelincourt, to see that he doesn't revert to his hermit-like ways."

"I am greatly afraid that when your enlivening presence is no longer here, everything will go on precisely as it did before your arrival."

"It is always wise to hope for the best. In any case, I won't fail to come and stir up Felix again in the course of the autumn."

Before more could be said, Marian, closely followed by Walter, each of them carrying a croquet mallet, made their appearance at one of the long windows, which, this balmy afternoon, stood wide open.

"Colonel Winslow," said the flushed and happy looking girl, "we want you to come and decide a point of the game for us about which we can't agree."

Left alone, Mrs. Drelincourt resumed her needlework. Her thoughts were busy with what had just passed between the colonel and herself.

"Yes, Felix has been a changed man from the day of his friend's arrival three weeks ago. And yet, there is something in the change which I fail to understand, and which, for that very reason, dulls the edge of my happiness. To me--but I may be fanciful--there seems something feverish and unreal about his gaiety. His mirth has an air of being assumed for the occasion; in his laughter there is an echo of mockery; it is as though he were laughing at himself for finding anything worth laughing about.

"At times there comes into his eyes a strange, impersonal look, as though he were gazing at something invisible to any one but himself. And why is it that of late he cannot rest at night? Why does he rise and quit the house at daybreak, and not be seen again till breakfast time? There is something below the surface of which I know nothing--something he is hiding from me. He thinks to deceive me by his assumption of gaiety, whereas--Ah!"

A slight noise had caused her to turn her head. There stood her husband, holding aside the portière and gazing smilingly at her. He had gone to the boudoir first in search of her. He now came forward, and having disposed of his hat and gloves on a side table, he bent over his wife and kissed her tenderly.

"My telegram reached you in due course, I see. I was afraid you would be growing uneasy."

"I had gone for a longer ride than usual, when all at once Selim fell lame. I was compelled to dismount and lead him at a snail's pace as far as Greystone Priors, where I had his legs bandaged, and have left him till tomorrow." Then, having drawn up a chair, he asked, but without any apparent eagerness: "Anything fresh? Any news?"

"I have not seen anything of him. But the trial will scarcely be over as early as this, will it?"

Thrusting his hands into his pockets, and whistling under his breath a lively operatic air, he strolled to the garden window and stood gazing out for a little while. His wife followed him with her eyes. Now that his back was towards her, her face had grown suddenly aged and anxious looking.

"He is playing a part, and he thinks I cannot see through the pretense," she whispered to herself. "But love has keen eyes. What it is that he is hiding from me I cannot so much as guess, but sure I am that some secret trouble is gnawing at his heartstrings."

Presently Drelincourt turned from the window, and going to the piano, he sat down on the music stool and began to play a bar of the air he had been whistling.

Suddenly Marian appeared at the window, and seeing her father in the room, she laid a finger on her lips as a caution to her mother. Then she ran lightly across the floor, and next moment her arms were round his neck and her lips pressed to his cheek.

"You were gone this morning before I was down, so that I have not been able to thank you till now for your beautiful, beautiful present."

"Nor I an opportunity of wishing my little girl--ought I not rather to say my bouncing big girl?--many, very many happy returns of the day, which I now do from the bottom of my heart."

His arm was round her waist, and for the next few seconds she felt herself pressed close to him. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Dear papa!" she said to herself. "He loves me more than I thought he did."

At this juncture the colonel and young Deane came in by way of the farther window.

"And I have had other charming gifts," resumed Marian. "One from mamma, one from Wally, another from Colonel Winslow, and yet another from Roden Marsh. Am I not a fortunate girl? You must come and see them where they are laid out in mamma's dressing room."

A little later in the afternoon Drelincourt and Walter Deane happened to be left alone in the morning room.

Deane was turning over a book of engravings at one of the tables, but not without an eye for all that was going forward. Drelincourt was lounging against the framework of the farther window.

"In this suspense there lurks a torture worthy of a grand inquisitor," murmured the latter. "I wonder whether I or that poor devil awaiting sentence in the dock suffers the more on our invisible rack."

Having glanced at his watch, he took to slowly pacing the room, his hands behind his back.

"And yet, what need to wonder? He is but a clod, callous, brutalized, degraded; and though his life is doubtless as sweet to him as mine is to me, there are in me a thousand springs of feeling and emotion, each a separate source of torture, of which such as he can know nothing. In my case the stake is more, infinitely more, than is involved in the premature ending of a life by which I have never set any special store. There's the pity of it! If the issues of our actions affected ourselves alone, we could afford to suffer in silence, and bow our necks to the stroke with something like equanimity; but the Eumenides who wait on wrong doing ever contrive to stab us through the hearts of our dearest and our best."

Young Deane's furtive glances followed Drelincourt every time the latter's back was turned on him.

"I have never seen Mr. Drelincourt so restless as he seems this afternoon," he muttered to himself. "There's something on his mind--that's clear. Can it be that he's troubling himself about the result of the trial? Yet, why should he? It's not as if he were a vindictive man. However it may go, it can matter little to him."

"That boy is eying me and wondering what the deuce is the matter," was Drelincourt's unspoken thought. " Eh bien! Let us give him something else to think about."

Drawing up a chair close to Deane, he seated himself astride it, and rested his crossed arms on its back.

"While I was out this morning," he began, "I was told something which put me about more than I like to own."

"Indeed, sir! I am very sorry to hear it," answered the young fellow, as he shut up the book of engravings and turned a sympathetic face toward the other.

"If I tell my wife, she will be greatly distressed, because she is acquainted with the people concerned; and yet I feel that she ought to know. I'm rather at a loss what to do."

Drelincourt paused to follow with his eyes the flight of a butterfly which had found its way into the room.

"Some little while ago," resumed Drelincourt, "a friend of mine, whom I may be said to have known all my life, was charged on his own confession--a confession he need never have made had he not voluntarily chosen to do so--with the commission of what by the majority of persons would doubtless be regarded as a crime of a very heinous kind; although it is to be presumed that, had he thought well to do so, he could have alleged some justification at least of the crime of which he was guilty. But be that as it may, having made a clean breast of it, there seemed no course left open to him but suicide."

"That touches him!" whispered the latter to himself. Then aloud: "Life had become too bitter to him; he could endure it no longer. Well, he had one child, a daughter, who was engaged to be married at the time of her father's death; but after that event, the man to whom she was betrothed broke off the affair on the plea that it was impossible for him to wed the daughter of a criminal and a suicide."

"The double blow--the loss at once of her father and her lover (not to speak of the social stigma which will inevitably cling to her in time to come) has all but broken poor Lucy's heart. On the other hand, there is, of course, much to be urged from young Melville's point of view, and I have no doubt the majority of men would be inclined to do as he has done. Who can estimate the harm it might have done his future career had he married the daughter of a man who, rather than face the consequences of his crime, had preferred to put an end to himself! Yes, on further reflection, I am inclined to think that he behaved with admirable prudence."

"While I, if he were here, would brand him for the coward and despicable wretch he really is!" exclaimed Deane.

His cheeks were flushed, a fine indignation shone in his eyes; there could be no doubt of the sincerity with which he spoke. Nothing of all this was lost on the elder man.

"But the young lady is well rid of him," he went on. "If in the darkest hours of her life he thus abandons her, what he miscalled his love is not a thing either to covet or regret."

"But consider," urged Drelincourt, "what the world would have said! Think of the shock to his friends!"

"In his place I should have thought only of her I loved. If the world and my friends chose to disapprove, they would have been welcome to do so. Oh, Mr. Drelincourt, what a miserable hound this fellow must be! Not to one man in a thousand in these days is the chance afforded of proving what stuff he's really made of. In King Arthur's time men had to win their wives after a fashion which revealed the coward and the cad in their true colors. What a pity that some such test is not enforced nowadays!"

Drelincourt smiled as he rose and pushed away his chair. "In that case, I'm afraid the number of compulsory bachelors would soon mount up to an alarming figure."

Walter also rose and went and stood by one of the windows. He wore a preoccupied air, as of one debating some question with himself.

"As I told Winslow, I had my reasons for affording Marian and this young fellow an opportunity of falling in love with each other. I do not think--no, I do not think that I am mistaken in him!"

Next moment a shadow darkened his face. Again he glanced at his watch. "The trial ought to be over by now. I thought I heard the sound of galloping hoofs." For a few seconds he stood in a listening attitude. "The sound was in my own brain only. So does expectation play the cheat with itself!"

Presently Deane turned from the window and went up to Drelincourt, who was standing at the center table, examining an etching through a magnifying glass. His face was pale, but his lips were firmly set, and his eyes shone with resolution.

"Mr. Drelincourt," he began, in a voice which had lost something of its customary assurance, "after what has just passed between us, I think it due to you to inform you that I am the son of a man who committed suicide! Probably you will think that such a circumstance ought to have been brought to your knowledge long ago; and, indeed, I feel now that it was both cowardly and wrong on my part to keep it from you. The only excuse I can offer is that my father's memory is so dear to me that--that----"

The words broke on his lips; a mist dimmed his eyes; he turned away while he recovered himself.

"Not a word more is needed," he said in grave, kindly accents. "My boy, all the sad circumstances connected with your father's end are known to me already."

"As also how every penny of your legacy was devoted to the payment of the debts he left behind him."

CHAPTER X.

IN THE LAST RESORT.

It was Marian, who came quickly forward, her cheeks aglow with pleasurable excitement.

"Papa, what do think? There are a couple of Neapolitan pifferari on the lawn, and I have told them to come round here. You should have seen how delighted they were when I spoke to them in Italian. I knew you would be pleased to hear them play a few of their simple airs. It will seem like old times come back again, will it not?"

"Old times, forsooth!" exclaimed Drelincourt with his most riant air. "You talk, mignonne , as if this were your fiftieth birthday instead of your eighteenth. But where are these vagabonds of yours? I suppose I must submit to having my ears tortured, since you will it so." Then, as the girl turned away, the shadow swept over his face again, and under his breath he murmured: "Rodd--Rodd--whip and spur!--whip and spur!"

Marian had flitted on to the lawn, and was beckoning to the pifferari , who presently came slouching along, and took up a position a little way removed from one of the long windows.

"Poor fellows! Their clothes seem little more than tatters," remarked Marian, as she reëntered the room. "And yet how picturesque they look!"

"And how very far from clean!" Added Walter in a low voice. "It would be a charity to make them a present of a bar of soap--if one could feel sure of their using it."

Then they began to play. The air, although set to waltz time, was a wild and plaintive one, and not at all like conventional dance music.

After listening for a couple of minutes, Marian clapped her hands and cried excitedly: "Papa, don't you remember?"

"The air they are playing. It's called ' La Strega ,' which"--with a glance at Walter--"being interpreted for the behoof of illiterate people, means 'The Sorceress.'"

"It's the same tune two wandering minstrels played one day ever so long ago on the terrace at Bordighera. And that day you were so gay and light-hearted that you and I danced to it together. Oh, I have not forgotten! And now it's my birthday, and we will dance to it again."

"It's a very delightful kind of madness. Am I not queen today? Do you dare, sir, to dispute any of my behests?"

"It is you, papa, whom I am going to dance with, not that boy. I won't listen to another word. Come! Let us try for a little while to fancy ourselves back in Italy."

He offered no further resistance, but slid an arm round his daughter's waist, and the pair began to waltz to the music. Walter stood looking on from the embrasure of one of the windows. Twice had they gyrated the length of the room and back, when Drelincourt caught sight of Roden Marsh's pale face peering at him through an opening in the portière. The latter had approached unseen and unheard by either of the young folk. For a couple of minutes longer the dancers kept revolving to the music, then, as they again drew near the window where Walter was lounging, Drelincourt beckoned to him to take his place, which the young man did, nothing loath. A second later Drelincourt had disappeared through the portière.

Rodd grasped one of his foster brother's hands in both his, and for a few moments the two stood looking into each other's eyes.

Then Drelincourt said, "Come," and with that he led the way to his own room, where there was less likelihood of their being intruded upon.

"And of course the judge held out no hope of mercy?" he recommenced, as soon as he had seated himself and motioned Rodd to another chair.

"None whatever. The fact of Gumley having confessed to the robbery seemed to be accepted both by judge and jury as conclusive evidence that he must be guilty of the other crime."

"Poor devil! What must his sensations have been when he heard his doom pronounced! But in a little while, as at the wave of a necromancer's wand, the weight of that dread sentence shall be lifted off his heart, and life shall once more taste sweet in his mouth."

"Can you ask? I thought it was long ago understood between us what my course was to be should the worst ever come to pass. The worst has come to pass--as I have felt all along it would surely do some day--and it has now, to be faced. Could anything be more simple?"

"But consider, Felix, consider! This fellow who was sentenced today is a low, brutal, besotted wretch, who--as was proved against him by the police--has already served two terms of penal servitude for other crimes; who, as I have ascertained, has not a single tie to bind him to life, and of whom, when he dies--and the sooner the better--the world will be well rid. No sane man would seriously think of sacrificing himself for such a scoundrel. Let him hang! Such canaille as he are fit fruit for the gallows."

"My dear Rodd, how strangely you must have misread me all these years, if you think it possible that, deliberately and knowingly, I could allow this man to pay the penalty of a crime of which he is as innocent as you are! Granting him to be all that you say he is--assuming him to be the vilest wretch that crawls--his life is the one sacred thing he can call his own till he himself shall forfeit it, and all the unseen powers forbid that I should rob him of it! The thing done by me twenty years ago concerns me, and me only, and I swear that this man's blood shall not lie at my door!"

"Rodd, you remember what we agreed upon long ago in case of emergency? Have you the vial still by you which I gave at that time into your keeping?"

A groan broke from Rodd's lips; too well he knew how futile any further remonstrance on his part would have been. There was that about Drelincourt which brooked no denial. All his life Rodd had done his foster brother's bidding, and he did it now.

"How strangely calm I feel now that the suspense is over and I know the worst!" mused Drelincourt, when Rodd had left the room. "My pulse beats as evenly as an infant's. Tonight I shall sleep as I have not slept for weeks. Now that my doom stares me straight in the face, now that I hear a footstep on the threshold audible to myself alone, of what little consequence the world and its business have all at once become to me! Already life and the things which make life sweet have put on an altogether different aspect; already I find myself regarding them almost as impersonally as if I were a denizen of another plant, and had no part or parcel in them. It is a novel experience, and did time allow, I might endeavor to analyze it."

"Give it me. Not another word!" Drelincourt held out his hand, and Rodd had no choice save to do as he was told. Drelincourt's features were lighted up by a faint smile. "Why this childish puling?" he asked. "Why this sudden faint heartedness? You know well how it was agreed between us years ago that this should be my way of escape when none other was left me."

Rodd resumed his seat without replying, and letting his elbows rest on the table, covered his face with his hands. Drelincourt held the vial up to the light.

"Even in the tiny compass of this the Great Destroyer finds room to lurk. 'Swift and painless,' were the words of the Italian savant when he put it into my hands. Swift--and--painless. It is well. Now I am prepared."

"Not today certainly--nor yet tomorrow. I have much to see to first. Besides, this is my daughter's festa , and no faintest shadow of a cloud shall mar its brightness. In years to come, when she is a happy wife, and when the trouble which is now closing round her shall be nothing but a memory, I would fain have her be able to look back on this day as one of unclouded happiness."

He got up abruptly, his hands clinched, his features working. Scarcely ever before had Rodd seen him so moved.

"Leave me now," he went on, after a brief pause. "I must be alone for a little while. I will see you again later. But not a word to my wife about the verdict. Should she question you, tell her that the trial will not be finished till tomorrow. How strangely you look at me! Go, and fear nothing."

Sadly and lingeringly Rodd left the room. "There is one door of escape for him, and it rests with me to open it," he said to himself as he went. "He saved my life when we were boys; why should I not make an effort to save his now? Felix--Felix--dearer to me than any brother could have been--had I a dozen lives I would willingly sacrifice them all to save yours!"

Left alone, Drelincourt crossed to one of the windows which fronted the west, and flung wide the casement.

"Yes, to leave her--my Madeline--will in very truth be to drain death's bitter cup to the lees. If she and I could but walk hand in hand into yonder sunset, and so vanish forever from mortal ken--that would indeed be well!"

CHAPTER XI.

ONE STEP NEARER.

It was the early afternoon of the sixth day after Gumley's trial and conviction. In the library at Fairlawn, which just then he had all to himself, Mr. Wicks was planted with his back to the empty fireplace, a newspaper which had just arrived in one hand, and a paper knife in the other. As he stood thus he soliloquized aloud:

"Well, of all the rummy goes I ever heard tell of, this licks the lot! To think of Mr. Roden Marsh going and giving himself up as being the murderer of the first Mrs. Drelincourt! But I must say that I never did altogether approve of Mr. Marsh and his goings on. Not that he was what one might call stuck up, because he wasn't. But, for all that, he had ways about him which I couldn't stummick."

The turning of the door handle transformed him on the instant into a different being.

"I have seen nothing of him, ma'am." He was standing at the center table, cutting the newspaper in readiness for Mr. Drelincourt.

"Meaning about Mr. Marsh, ma'am? I can't deny, ma'am, but what I 'ave heard about it: It's in everybody's mouth, if I may make so bold as to say so."

"By a messenger from Sunbridge about a couple of hours ago. He brought a letter for master from Mr. Marsh, who, so the man said, is now in Sunbridge jail, having given hisself up to the police late yesterday evening."

Wicks took it off the writing desk where he had laid it, and handed it to his mistress. "The messenger brought it, ma'am, when you were out in the pony carriage."

"Yes, it is Roden's writing," said Mrs. Drelincourt to herself, as she glanced at the superscription. For a moment or two she pressed her hand to her heart; then, as she gave back the letter, she said: "But do you mean to imply that Mr. Marsh was away from home all last night?"

"According to the chambermaid, ma'am, his bed had not been slep' in." The door was opened quickly, and Marian, followed by Walter, entered the room.

"Mamma----" began the former, and then stopped at sight of Wicks. "That will do, Wicks," said Mrs. Drelincourt.

Then Marian began afresh. "I can see by your face, mamma, that you have heard this terrible rumor; but surely, surely it cannot be true!"

"As you say, dear, it surely cannot be true. And yet I know not what to think. That Roden is in prison seems an undoubted fact."

"The report goes that he went into Sunbridge last evening, and gave himself up to the police." This from Walter.

"Incredible, indeed," replied her mother. "If it be really true that he is guilty, the act must have been committed during a fit of mental aberration when he was not responsible for his actions. But we shall learn the truth when your papa returns."

"Not yet. It is quite fifteen miles to Dunford, where Colonel Winslow was to catch the Scotch express. But he cannot be long now."

"How would it be," said Walter, "if I were to have the bay mare saddled and ride down the Dunford road and meet Mr. Drelincourt on his way back? I could then tell him all about the rumor, after which he might perhaps prefer to drive direct into Sunbridge and find out the particulars for himself before coming home."

"An excellent idea, Walter," said Mrs. Drelincourt. "Go at once, and come to me the moment you return."

As soon as he was gone she said to Marian: "Open one of the windows a little way, dear; I feel slightly faint." Then to herself she added: "My heart feels as if it were constricted by a band of steel."

She was lying back in a capacious leathern easy chair. Marian having opened one of the windows, unceremoniously twisted up the outside sheet of the Times and proceeded gently to fan her mother with it.

Presently the latter looked up at her with a smile. "I am better now, darling," she said. "This sultry weather always tries me."

Marian stooped and kissed her. Then she said: "Oh, mamma, what if it should prove that poor Roden is really out of his mind!"

Mrs. Drelincourt sat up quickly in her chair. "How careless of me to forget!" she exclaimed. "There is a letter on the table from him addressed to your papa, which may possibly explain everything. Run and give it to Walter, and tell him----"

"Here's papa, himself," broke in Marian, as the door opened to admit Drelincourt.

"I am so glad you are come!" sighed his wife, as she turned to him with a quick lighting up of her spiritualized face. Then to her daughter: "Hurry after Walter. You will perhaps be in time to stop him."

"And I am glad that you are glad," replied Drelincourt, regarding her from a little distance with a smile, as he proceeded in leisurely fashion to draw off his-driving gloves. "And yet, all things considered, I have not been long gone. We had quite a race, I must tell you, to catch the express."

"Then you have heard nothing of this dreadful rumor which has put us all so much about?"

"Old Tyson, the turnpike keeper, did mumble something to me while he was counting out my change."

"Did he tell you that Roden gave himself up last night as being the murderer of--of you know whom?"

"Because, my dearest and best, I am absolutely sure that in Rodd's self accusation there is not the slightest grain of truth."

"Then you think that it is all a hallucination on his part? That he has brooded over the affair till at length he has come to believe that he himself is the criminal?"

"I have noticed that he has been somewhat strange in his manner of late. More than once he has said things to me which I utterly failed to comprehend. Now, however, everything is explained."

"Poor Rodd! Poor fellow! But I am forgetting. There is a letter from him for you which was brought here by a special messenger two or three hours ago."

Mrs. Drelincourt rose from her chair, and crossing to the table, found the letter and handed it to her husband.

"Most likely this will throw some further light on Roden's incomprehensible proceeding," she said. "I presume you will at once drive into Sunbridge and take whatever steps may be necessary in order to effect his release."

"That is what I purpose doing--almost immediately. I shall lose no time in carrying out my intention in that regard. It must be done! In my hands rests the question of his freedom or execution, and there is but one course for me to pursue, that the gates of his prison may be opened, and Rodd again enjoy the liberty which is his by right--human and divine."

"Then, for the present, I will leave you. But I shall see you again before you go?"

"Poor Roden! Most sincerely do I hope that you will be able to bring him back with you."

"I hope so too. In any case, you need not fear but we shall soon have him released from durance vile."

He opened the door for her, and as she was passing out, he stooped and touched her hair with his lips. She smiled up at him, and her lips softly breathed the word "Dearest!"

Could she have seen the change which came over his face the moment the door was shut behind her, she would have been startled, indeed. The transformation was marvelous. The real man was alone with himself.

"Poor Roden, indeed!" he murmured. "But what about poor Felix? And alas!--and alas! What about poor Madeline?"

He was standing in the middle of the floor, turning over the letter absently between his fingers.

"How little she dreams of the awful knowledge which a few short hours must inevitably bring her? For there must be no more delay. This mad act of Rodd's has served to bring matters to a climax a little sooner than I intended. Today is Thursday, and Saturday was the day I had fixed on in my mind as the one on which my long hidden secret should be laid bare to the world. But now that the end is so near, it matters not whether the revelation be made today or a few hours hence. Yes, after twenty years--the end!--just as the past with its dread secret was beginning to assume the vagueness of a half forgotten dream, and life was becoming sweeter to me than ever it had been before. If, perchance, I see tomorrow's sunrise, it will scarcely be from the windows of Fairlawn!"

"I may as well read what that foolish Rodd has to urge in defense of his insane action, although I know quite well beforehand the line of argument he will take."

Sunbridge Jail, Thursday, 6 A.M.

My Dear Foster Brother :

When we were lads together you saved my life at the imminent risk of your own. The time has now come when I can cancel the debt by saving yours.

To me life is a concern of little moment. So far as I know, I have not a single relative living, and were I to die tomorrow, there is not a being in the world, with the exception, maybe, of yourself, to whom that event would cause one pang of regret.

You, my dear Felix, are possessed of nearly everything which tends to make existence sweet to most persons. In your wife and daughter alone you have a double tie sufficient to cause a man to cling to this world with all his might.

Let me, then, for their dear sakes, if not for your own, most earnestly beg and entreat of you to accept the payment hereby offered of that just debt which has been so long owing, and which, I swear as Heaven is above me, will be joyfully discharged by

Your devoted and affectionate

Roden Marsh .

"Just as I thought," said Drelincourt, as he refolded the letter. "Dear, true hearted, simple minded old Rodd! And does he really dream for one moment that I either shall, can, or will accept the sacrifice he is so eager to consummate? Even after all these years, how little he knows me! No, my dear Rodd, neither you, nor Gumley, nor any one shall discharge that debt which is due from Felix Drelincourt alone. So, now to consider--to consider."

He lay back in his chair and closed his eyes, still holding Rodd's letter in his hand. He had sat thus for a matter of five or six minutes when the door was opened by Wicks.

Mr. Drelincourt's eyebrows came together for a moment. "Better show them in here," he said. "Their coming is most opportune for my purpose," he continued aloud, as soon as he was alone. "It will spare me the necessity of a journey to Sunbridge." With that he put away the letter in the breast pocket of his coat, and stood up to receive his visitors. "Now to screw my courage to the sticking place! I could laugh, were this a time for laughter, at the thought of Ormsby aghast--dumfounded--his fat cheeks quivering like a jelly--when the truth is told him. And he was so sure Gumley was the man. Poor Ormsby! At last your thirst for vengeance shall be appeased."

CHAPTER XII.

ON THE BRINK.

"I think I can guess the nature of the business which has brought you, Sir John; but in any case you are welcome," he said. "Ormsby, how are you?"

Sir John cleared his throat. "As I judge, then, you have heard of the singular freak--for at present I can look upon it as nothing more--of your secretary, or whatever he is, Roden Marsh?"

"Who gave himself up last night at Sunbridge as being the murderer of my ever to be lamented sister." This from Mr. Ormsby.

"I have been from home all morning, and the first I heard of the affair was half an hour ago. I was on the point of driving into Sunbridge when you were announced. But pray be seated."

"I am glad to have saved you the journey," remarked Sir John, as he sat down. "My--our--object in coming to see you is to ascertain whether you can throw any light on this most extraordinary business, for, to tell you the truth, we are at a loss to know what steps we ought to take next with the view of either proving or disproving Marsh's statement."

"And not feeling sure how the affair might turn out, nor what fresh light you might be able to throw on it, I ordered Draycot, the chief constable, to follow us, so as to be in readiness in case of emergency."

"Hum--hum. Confound his sneering ways!" remarked Ormsby to himself, with a grunt.

"One thing, gentlemen, I may tell you," went on Drelincourt, "which is, that one of the first steps you will have to take will be to set Mr. Marsh at liberty."

"Then you are satisfied in your own mind," said Sir John, "that he is not really the criminal he seems so desirous of making himself out to be?"

"What, then, can be the fellow's motive for such an insane proceeding?" demanded Ormsby--reasonably enough. "Is he a madman, or merely a fool?"

"But this is such a terrible crime for any sane man to charge himself with?" interpolated Sir John.

"You say, Drelincourt, that one of our first steps must be to set him at liberty," resumed Ormsby. "Now, I don't see that at all. He has seen fit to charge himself with the commission of a most heinous offense, and has put a lot of people to no end of worry and bother; consequently it will rest with him to thoroughly disprove his words before being allowed to regain his liberty. If I had my way, I would treat such pestilent fellows to a month on the treadmill."

"It is possible that Mr. Drelincourt may be in a position to throw an unexpected light on the affair," remarked Sir John in his blandest tones.

"It will assume an altogether different complexion from the one it wears at present. That goes without saying." It was Drelincourt who completed the sentence.

He drummed on the table for a few seconds with his finger tips. Then he resumed:

"A few days ago an enlightened British jury declared the man Gumley to be guilty of murder because, having confessed to being a thief, they assumed that he must of necessity be the author of the greater crime. It was a verdict, my dear Ormsby, in which I have no doubt you fully concurred."

"I did concur in it, and most fully. Twenty years ago I avowed my belief in Gumley's guilt, a belief which the result of the recent trial has fully justified, for of course I attach no credence to the so called confession of this hair brained Roden Marsh. No, sir, you may rely upon it that Gumley is the real criminal, and I shall receive with much satisfaction the news that he has been hanged."

"And yet, I am afraid, my dear Ormsby, that for once your usual acumen has been at fault--a rare occurrence, I admit--seeing that I happen to be in a position to prove that yonder poor devil now lying under sentence of death had no more to do with the tragic end of my first wife than either of you."

"Drelincourt, you astound me," exclaimed Sir John. "Are we really to understand that you are in a position to prove Gumley's innocence?"

"In that case, the question naturally follows: If you are prepared to prove Gumley's innocence, are you, further, in a position to bring the real criminal's guilt home to him?"

"You astonish me more and more," responded Sir John. "It is a fortunate thing that Ormsby and I took it into our heads to call upon you."

"Had you not done so, I should have called upon you, Sir John, a little later in the day."

"With the view of conveying to me the same information that you have just now imparted?"

"Then you had made up your mind before seeing us today to reveal what you know?"

"Of course, our meeting here today is altogether informal and ex officio ; still, if I gather your intention aright, you will be prepared at another time and place--say tomorrow, at Sunbridge court house--to substantiate on oath what you have just told us?"

"Perhaps you would prefer not to reveal the name of the real criminal till the whole affair can be officially investigated?"

Drelincourt did not answer for a moment or two. "Why wait till tomorrow?" he asked himself. "The time for further concealment is at an end." Then aloud: "Gentlemen, you see the real criminal, as you term him, before you!"

Both the others started to their feet, and stared at him with an amazement which for a little while bereft them of speech.

"Yes, I, and I alone, am the man." He spoke in passionless, almost frigid tones, and as the words left his lips he, too, rose to his feet.

"Drelincourt, never in the whole course of my life have I been shocked as you have just shocked me," said the baronet. "I am utterly at a loss for words. I--I know not what to say." His agitation and distress were unmistakable.

"Then say nothing, Sir John, that will be the wisest course. Yes, I, and I alone, am the man," Drelincourt repeated. "But this I must add in self-justification--so far as such a deed is open to justification--that what I did was done when I could hardly be said to be answerable for my actions. From my youth I have been addicted to occasionally walking in my sleep, and it was in a fit of somnambulism that I killed my wife."

The baronet's face brightened. "Have you any witnesses to prove that such was the case?" he eagerly asked.

"Not one," replied Drelincourt, with a shrug. "As you may perhaps remember, my temporary quarters at the time were at a little shanty of mine called the Cot?" Sir John nodded assent. "On the fatal morning I rose in my sleep, dressed myself in my sleep, and, still asleep, I walked from the Cot to the Towers. But no eye saw me enter the house--which I did through a side door by means of my master key--no eye saw me do the deed, and no eye saw me quit the house after it was done."

"And no judge and jury would credit such a cock and bull story for one moment," broke in Ormsby, with a brutal laugh.

"For once, Ormsby, you and I are fully agreed," answered Drelincourt, with a thin smile. Then, turning again to the baronet: "And now, Sir John, I must ask you to allow me to have a quarter of an hour alone with my wife, after which I shall be entirely at your disposal."

"With her the suspicion of such a thing is as far removed as Heaven is from hell."

The words smote Drelincourt as an ice cold wind might have done. A shiver went through him from head to foot.

Ormsby could no longer contain himself. "So, then, we have got the truth at last!" he burst out, a dull gleam of vindictive malice lighting up his little white lashed eyes. "At last the foul mystery which shrouded my poor sister's fate is dispelled, and the man who, in cold blood--for I tell you plainly that I attach not the slightest credit to your sleep walking rigmarole--slew the innocent being he had sworn to love and cherish through life stands revealed to the world as the miscreant he really is!"

"For twenty years my sister's blood has cried aloud for vengeance, but, thank Heaven, it has not cried in vain! For twenty years the gallows has been waiting, and at length it shall be satisfied. The day you are hung, Drelincourt, shall be kept by me and mine as a holiday and festival, and so shall every anniversary of it be kept as long as I live."

Drelincourt fixed him with two glittering eyes, but did not speak. He was standing with his back to the center table, and resting both hands upon it. It was a favorite attitude of his.

"Ormsby, I will not listen to this sort of thing any longer. It is shameful--shameful!"

But the other had not done yet. He was determined to have his say out at every cost. The concentrated venom of years had at length found an outlet.

"Somnambulism, indeed!" he sneered. "Tell that to the marines. Now we can understand why, twenty years ago, you were so anxious that Gumley should go scot free, and why you lied about the locket; for I have no doubt it was a lie. Now----"

"Stop!" broke in Drelincourt, with uplifted right hand. "That is a point about which I have something to say. Knowing Gumley to be innocent of my wife's death, I did my best at the time to secure his acquittal; but bear in mind this--that had the verdict gone against him, I should most assuredly have given myself up then as I am giving myself up today. From the first I swore that, whatever else I might be guilty of, his death should not be laid to my charge. Sir John, a few moments, if you please."

Out of the library there opened a much smaller room, where most of Roden Marsh's work was done. Towards this Drelincourt now led the way.

"What can he have to say to Sir John that he doesn't want me to hear?" asked Ormsby of himself, as he stood staring after the others with a mingled expression of curiosity and distrust. "After all, what does it matter? It's enough for me that, of his own accord, Drelincourt has put the hangman's rope round his neck. Now that he has confessed, what a blind fool I feel myself to have been not to have suspected the truth long ago. A score of things occur to me, any one of which ought to have sufficed to give me an inkling of it. And yet, not even his wife has the ghost of a suspicion--or so he says! Then let me be the first to enlighten her! A score of years ago his hand stabbed my sister to the heart; but there are more ways of stabbing a person to the heart than one."

A slow, cruel smile crept over his face. He nodded his head twice, as if in approval of what he had decided upon. Then, seating himself at the writing table, and having sought for and found the requisite materials, for the next three or four minutes he wrote busily. When he had done, he inclosed what he had written in an envelope, addressed the latter, and rang the bell.

"Give this into Mrs. Drelincourt's own hands--and as soon as possible," he said to Wicks, as he handed him the letter.

"Ah-ha I my dear Drelincourt, that will serve to go part way in payment of the thousand and one sneers with which you have favored me at various times," he muttered, rubbing his hands gleefully as he rose from the table: "Let those laugh who win! The chance won't be given him of indulging in them much longer. No doubt he will favor the hangman with one of his most cynical smiles as that functionary adjusts the rope, and will say to him in those bland tones of his, which always seem to veil a sneer, 'My good friend, I hope you won't bungle this simple little affair.' The fellow has the cool effrontery of the Foul Fiend himself."

"You may rely upon me, Drelincourt. Everything shall be carried out as you wish." It was Sir John who was speaking, as the two men came back from the inner room.

Ormsby's face darkened. "If Sir John chooses to forget that this man is a criminal, I don't," he said to himself. Then, aloud: "Ahem! I presume you are now prepared, Sir John, to make out and sign a warrant for the committal of Mr. Drelincourt to Sunbridge jail, on the charge of which he has just admitted himself to be guilty!"

"I can't, Ormsby--I can't. I couldn't put pen to paper just now to save my life," replied the kind hearted baronet, whose distress at the position in which circumstances had placed him was self-evident. "Besides, where's the need for a warrant? Drelincourt is giving himself up voluntarily, and--and the charge against him can be taken down at the proper time and place."

"Just as you please, of course. Then, if you have no objection, I will ring for Draycot and give him the requisite instructions and have him carry them out now."

"Ormsby, one moment," said Drelincourt. "I have a few words to say to you on a topic which it is my wish never to have to refer to again. It is in reference to your sister's death. Seeing that I have never attempted to cozen my conscience by putting forward any plea of justification for what I did, other than that it was done while I was asleep, it is not likely that at this time of day I should care to urge anything in extenuation of it, either to you or to any one. Still, I think it well that you should be told, although to no one else will the fact ever pass my lips, that your sister won me for her husband by an act of treachery so base and heartless that I will spare you the pain of listening to any of its details. Believe me or not, as you please, but such is the simple truth. And now, Sir John, with your permission, I will say a few words to my wife, after which I shall be wholly at your disposal. I do not doubt but that you will allow me such a privilege."

He bowed gravely to both gentlemen, then turned and went. As he shut the door behind him and walked into the room a deep sigh welled up from his heart.

"Our business here is at an end, and the sooner we get away the better," remarked Sir John to Ormsby.

"So say I. But it will be requisite to see Draycot for a minute before we go, as he must now take upon himself the responsibility of looking after Drelincourt. I suppose he will prefer being driven into Sunbridge in his brougham. Well, there's no harm in that. It's the last time he will ride in it."

Sir John was already at the door. As Ormsby followed him out, he said to himself, half aloud: "Thank Heaven that I have lived to see this day. At last, my poor Kitty, at last you are avenged!"

CHAPTER XIII.

LAST THINGS.

The note given by Mr. Ormsby to Wicks was placed by that functionary on the table in Mrs. Drelincourt's boudoir. Although he had been told to deliver it at once, he took no notice of the request. His mistress was probably in her dressing room, and the note might wait till she came downstairs. He was not going to put himself out of the way to please Mr. Ormsby, whose imperative mode of addressing him had cut his superfine feelings to the quick.

On entering the room a little later, Drelincourt failed to perceive the note. He sank into an easy chair, and supporting an elbow on either of its arms, he let his chin rest on his interlocked fingers. He was awaiting the coming of his wife.

The boudoir was lighted by a large oriel window, the upper half of which contained a representation in stained glass of the coat of arms and device of the Drelincourts.

After waiting a few minutes, Drelincourt rose in order to ring the bell. The sands in his hour glass were running quickly away. As he crossed the room, he caught sight of the letter, and he at once picked it up. The superscription was in a peculiar, crabbed hand, which, as he looked at it, seemed to grow familiar under his eyes. Then the truth flashed across him: the writing was James Ormsby's. He had seen more than one specimen of it in years gone by, and his memory was a tenacious one. He could not be mistaken.

"Now, what can Ormsby have to write about to my wife?" he asked himself. "He owes me a grudge, or fancies he does, and now that, of my own accord, I have put myself beyond his reach, it would be just like him to vent the last drops of his spite on Madeline. She must not be allowed to read what he has written till I have thoroughly satisfied myself that it is fit for her to see."

"The caitiff!--the coward! To aim a final blow at me through Madeline." He groaned out the words between his teeth. His strong, lean fingers gripped the note, as they would have gripped Ormsby's throat had he been there.

A tap at the door recalled him to himself. Next moment Wicks entered, carrying a letter on a salver.

"Just brought by a mounted messenger, sir. The man is waiting in case there should be any answer."

Not without surprise, Drelincourt saw that the address was in his wife's writing. He opened the envelope, extracted the contents, and read as follows:

Dear Felix :

Do not be more surprised than you can help when I tell you that I am writing this at the Dun Cow Inn, Overthwaite. The explanation is very simple.

I was standing on the terrace when Sir John Musgrave and Mr. Ormsby drove up, but they seemed too much preoccupied to see me. After they had entered the house, I descended the steps and turned into the drive, which I find pleasantly shady these hot afternoons. Presently I saw a dog cart coming along at a rapid pace, the driver of which pulled up on reaching me, and asked whether I was Mrs. Drelincourt. When satisfied on the point, he told me that he had been sent by his master, the landlord of the Dun Cow, to inform us that Mr. Walter Deane had been thrown by his horse, and was lying with a broken ankle at the inn in question.

I must tell you that a little while before you reached home this afternoon Wally set off on the bay mare, in the hope of meeting you on your road back, and imparting to you the news about Roden Marsh, so that, if you chose to do so, you could ride direct into Sunbridge before coming to Fairlawn. How you and he missed each other I cannot imagine.

Well, when the man had told me his news, I did not wait to go back to the house in order to break it to you--I had no doubt you were engaged with your visitors--or to Marian, but climbed into the dog cart beside him, and was driven here its rapidly as possible. As you know, Overthwaite is not quite three miles from Fairlawn.

I found poor Walter already in the doctor's hands. The fracture is a bad one, and, as a matter of course, he will be laid up for some weeks to come. He will remain overnight where he is, and I shall stay with him; but I hope, with the doctor's sanction, to have him transferred to Fairlawn in the course of tomorrow. Perhaps you can make it convenient to ride over after breakfast and ascertain how we are getting on.

I leave you to tell Marian as much or as little as you may think best.

Your loving wife,

Madeline .

Wicks was still waiting. Drelincourt, after considering for a few moments, said to him: "Tell the messenger there is no answer."

"It is well--it is better so," he continued half aloud, when the man had gone. "We are spared a parting, and I a confession, which would have racked the hearts of both. This will tell her all after I am gone that is needful for her to know." As he spoke, he took a sealed packet from his breast pocket and laid it on the table. It was addressed to his wife.

"She, at least, will not condemn me," he resumed. "She sees with the large eyes of love and charity. She will read and understand. My image will not be deposed in her heart. My memory will be cherished by her while she has breath to speak my name."

"Not long will she stay after I am gone. The thread of her life is frail--very frail. She will make haste to follow me."

A tap at the door was followed by the entrance of Marian. She paused with the open door in her hand.

"I am looking for mamma," said the girl. "I can't find her anywhere. And Wally, who ought to have been back long ago, has not yet returned. What can have become of them?"

"Shall I enlighten you? Yes? Well, then, at the present moment the pair of them may be found at the inn named Dun Cow, in the village of Overthwaite, a couple of miles away."

"Ah, that's a question you must not ask me, or, at any rate, one I must not answer. Perhaps I have divulged too much already. But shall I tell you what I should do in your place?"

"I should ask Robert to drive me over in the pony chaise to the Dun Cow, and take the pair of them unawares. By so doing I fancy you will surprise them quite as much as they are plotting to surprise you."

"Are you aware, papa, that Mr. Draycot is pacing the entrance hall, waiting to see you?"

"I shall be ready to see him in the course of a few minutes. By the way, you may as well give me your good night kiss before you go. I shall be engaged when you return, and shall not care to be disturbed."

Marian flung her arms round his neck in impulsive fashion, and kissed him a number of times. Then he pressed her to his heart for a moment, and it seemed to her that she heard a whispered "Heaven bless you, my child!" She glanced up into his face with a momentary surprise, for he was not used to being demonstrative; but she read nothing there. The eyes that met hers were calm and shining, and on his features was the stamp of a great serenity.

"You darling daddy!" exclaimed the girl, as she pulled his ear playfully. "You don't half know how much I love you."

When she was gone and the door shut behind, her, he could hear her singing as she went. He stood without stirring till the sound had died away.

Then a deep sigh welled up from his heart. "The last link is severed," he said, as he turned away. "Winslow will act a father's part by her till she marries. In years to come, when she has a husband and children of her own, all this will seem like a dream of old, unhappy, far off things. So, now to bid the world a long goodby!"

Taking out of his pocket the vial given him by Roden Marsh some days before, he held it up to the light. But at this moment there came another knock. Replacing the vial in his pocket, he went to the door, opened it and disclosed Draycot.

"I am sorry to disturb you, Mr. Drelincourt," said the chief constable--"more sorry than I can say. But time is running on, and Mr. Ormsby's instructions were most imperative."

"Five minutes, only five more minutes, Draycot, and then, my good fellow, you shall do with me as you will."

"All right, Mr. Drelincourt. You'll excuse me, sir, I'm sure, but duty is duty." With that he shut the door, turned on his heel, and strode back to his post in the entrance hall.

Drelincourt went back to the easy chair and seated himself on one of its low, broad arms. His features were tense and drawn, but his marvelous command over himself was in no wise shaken.

"How the evening sun lights up that window and brings out the motto of my ancestors: J'espère toujours. Tojours j'espère! Who shall dare to sound the depths of infinite compassion? Even for such as I there may be hope. 'Swift and painless' were the Italian doctor's words when he gave me this." He was gazing at the vial, which lay in the palm of his hand. "Now to find out whether he spoke the truth!"

CHAPTER XIV.

WITH ALL SPEED.

On quitting Fairlawn, which they did together after their interview with Drelincourt, Sir John Musgrave and Mr. Ormsby parted at the park gates, each going his own way. The baronet took the road to Sunbridge, and, picking up a brother magistrate en route, drove with him direct to the jail. There Roden Marsh was at once summoned before them, and having been severely lectured for his insane act, was forthwith ordered to be set at liberty. Mr. Drelincourt's voluntary confession that he, and he alone, was the guilty person obviated all necessity for Rodd's further confinement.

He left the jail fearing the worst, his heart tortured with anxiety of the most poignant kind. His proffered sacrifice had been contemned, and, so far as he could judge, had merely been the means of precipitating a catastrophe to avert which he would willingly have given his life's blood. His one burning desire just now was to reach Fairlawn with all possible speed.

That his being there would avail to dissuade Felix from his rash purpose he greatly doubted, but not willingly would he throw away the faintest chance. Perhaps, even now, he might be too late!

The jail at Sunbridge was little more than a stone's cast from the railway station, and no sooner was the grim portal shut behind him than he hurried off to the latter, with the intention of hiring a cab in which to be driven to Fairlawn. It was growing dark by this time, and the station lamps were being lighted one by one.

A train had arrived a few minutes earlier, and every cab but one had been engaged. Towards this one he now made his way, but only reached it in time to see the door banged by the driver, and to find that it had already an occupant. With a muttered anathema, he glanced inside the cab, and then, not a little to his surprise, saw that the person about to be driven off in it was none other than Mrs. Jenwyn.

The same instant it struck him that if her destination was Wyvern Towers, the one cab would serve the purpose of both. It appeared that the recognition had been mutual, and, in point of fact, Mrs. Jenwyn was the first to speak.

"Oh, Mr. Marsh, is that you?" she began, addressing him through the cab window. "I am very glad to see you, because you can perhaps inform me whether I am likely to find Mr. Drelincourt at Fairlawn."

"I have every reason to believe you will find him there. But--pardon the question--are you bound for Fairlawn?"

"That is my destination. I have just arrived from London, where I have been staying for the last few days, and wish to see Mr. Drelincourt, and with as little delay as possible, about a matter of very special importance."

"I, too, am bound for Fairlawn--and in a hurry," said Roden, hiding the surprise he could not help feeling. "So, as there is not another cab left on the stand, if you will kindly allow me to share yours, you will be rendering me a great service."

"Why, certainly. I shall be very glad of your company, Mr. Marsh, and we can talk as we go along."

So Roden, having given his orders to the driver, got inside, and away they rattled; but all talking was out of the question till they had left the paved streets of the town behind them, and were well out on the quiet country road.

Then said Mrs. Jenwyn: "My errand to Fairlawn is a very singular one, as I have no doubt you will admit, Mr. Marsh, when I have explained to you what it is."

"It is the fact, is it not, that a man named Gumley is lying under sentence of death in Sunbridge jail as being the supposed murderer of the first Mrs. Drelincourt?"

"The fact is as you state it. But why do you say as being the 'supposed' murderer of Mrs. Drelincourt?"

"Because I am in a position to prove that the man in question had nothing whatever to do with the crime for which he has been convicted, and it is with the view of laying my evidence to that effect before Mr. Drelincourt that I am now on my way to Fairlawn."

For a little while sheer amazement held Rodd speechless. But presently came a question which, under the circumstances, was almost inevitable: "You have indeed surprised me, Mrs. Jenwyn; but if you are in a position to prove Gumley's innocence, you are, perhaps, equally in a position to bring the real criminal's guilt home to him?"

Again Rodd's thoughts held him silent for a little while. Then he said tentatively: "Mr. Drelincourt----" and then he was silent.

"You say that you are on your road to see him about this very matter of Gumley's?"

"Then you do not know, you cannot have heard, that this very afternoon, In order to save Gumley's life, Mr. Drelincourt gave himself up as the murderer of his wife!"

"Mr. Drelincourt his wife's murderer? No! No!" The words were uttered almost in a shriek.

"Then he has confessed to a falsehood. It is not true, I tell you. I can prove it. Mr. Drelincourt had no more hand in his wife's death than you or I had."

Rodd pinched his arm as if to convince himself that he was really awake. Was Mrs. Jenwyn in her right mind? Was she not laboring under one of those strange hallucinations to which some persons seem constitutionally liable? Perhaps she would tell him, in addition, that she herself was really the criminal!

Was there a word of truth in what she had just asseverated with such extraordinary emphasis? He greatly doubted it. And yet if there should be! The mere thought of such a thing turned him dizzy.

A burning curiosity got the better of his discretion. "The real criminal was----" He paused for a moment, as if expecting Mrs. Jenwyn to fill up the hiatus.

"Pardon me, Mr. Marsh," she said, "but what I have to reveal must first of all be told Mr. Drelincourt. When that has been done, the affair will be out of my hands. But you, in your turn, can tell me something, provided there is no objection to your doing so. By what circumstances was Mr. Drelincourt influenced in coming to his strange determination to charge himself with the commission of a crime of which he is wholly guiltless?"

Rodd told himself that, although she had not answered his question, there was no reason why he should not answer hers.

"In early life Mr. Drelincourt was addicted to walking in his sleep, and it was while he was in one of his fits of somnambulism that he believed himself to have been guilty of the death of his wife. I need not trouble you with the details of the evidence which seemed to bring the crime irresistibly home to him; it will be enough to remark that both to him and me--for all the particulars of the affair have been known to me from the first--it appeared absolutely conclusive. And yet, Mrs. Jenwyn, you now assert, and in the most positive terms, that Mr. Drelincourt's belief had absolutely no foundation of fact!"

"I do assert it, and at the proper time and place I shall be prepared to prove my words."

Roden Marsh sank back in his seat with a great sigh of contentment. However amazing it might seem, he could no longer doubt that Mrs. Jenwyn was in a position to carry out all that she had undertaken to do. Her words and manner were convincing.

About the details of the story she had come prepared to tell he cared little; it was enough for him to know that the dread burden which had weighed upon them for so many years would at length be lifted off the shoulders of his beloved foster brother, never to be reimposed. With the question of whose shoulders it was about to be transferred to he did not trouble himself at all.

But a moment later he cried out: "Shall I get there in time? Shall I arrive before it is to late?" They were questions which lit a flame of torment within him.

He took out his repeater and struck the hour. Then, protruding his head and half his body out of the cab window, he shouted to the man on the box: "Drive hard--drive fast! There will be a sovereign for you if you get there in a quarter of an hour."

The driver gave a whoop and cracked his whip. Never had the old horse in the fly been driven at such a pace before.

CHAPTER XV.

THE SECRET OP WYVERN TOWERS.

To return to Drelincourt. As has been said, he had the unstoppered vial to his lips, and was about to drain the contents, when the door was thrown open and Roden Marsh rushed into the room.

With one sweep of his arm he dashed the bottle from Drelincourt's hand, crying out: "Thank God, I am not too late!"

"Because you would have made the most frightful mistake of your life; because there is no need of your sacrificing yourself for Gumley; because the real murderer has been discovered!"

Rodd got out all this in a breath and then dropped into a chair, panting from the haste with which he had come and the excitement which possessed him.

"Had nothing whatever to do with it, as Mrs. Jenwyn will tell you. She is here now, waiting impatiently to see you."

"That she will tell you herself. I will bring her at once;" And Rodd started up.

"Wait," he said. "Give me a few moments. I can scarcely realize yet that--that I am not in another world."

They had shaken hands, and, at her host's request, she had seated herself on a chair opposite his own, on the other side of the hearth.

"Roden Marsh tells me that you are the bearer of some very remarkable news," he said, "and, in point of fact, that your visit here tonight was on purpose to make it known to me. Is that so, may I ask?"

"I am given to understand that the information you wish to impart to me is concerned with the death of my first wife."

"You know already from Roden Marsh that I have all along laid her death at my own door. I had every reason for believing that I had killed her while in a somnambulistic state, but Roden tells me you assert most positively that my belief was utterly baseless."

Mr. Drelincourt sat up in his chair. A hectic spot burned in either cheek. His whole frame was a-tingle with excitement.

"The person to whom your first wife owed her death was none other than your half sister, Anna Drelincourt."

Slowly, clearly, and unhesitatingly fell the words. Mrs. Jenwyn had come purposely to declare the truth, and the more simply she put it the better.

For a little while they sat in silence. Drelincourt seemed utterly overcome. Anna's name was the last he would have picked out with all the world to choose from. And yet----

"Go on, please. Tell me all you know of the dreadful affair," he said, after a time.

"Anna, poor girl, was no more mistress of her actions at the time it happened than you, Mr. Drelincourt, had reason to believe yourself to be master of yours. Just then she was laboring under one of her recurrent attacks of mania. At such times, as you are aware, in all her actions, thoughts, and habits, she became again as a child of ten.

"But there were occasions when darker symptoms would betray themselves, when I caught little glimpses below the surface which caused even me who knew her so well and loved her so dearly to tremble and ask myself what still darker fate the future might have in store for her. Of such symptoms, however, I said nothing to any one. Where would have been the use of my doing so? No one could help her, nothing more could be done for her than had been already done. The future must be left to care for itself.

"Anna and I slept in separate rooms, with a door between, which, by her wish, was always kept open at night. I may add that it was my practice to sleep with my bunch of keys under my pillow. On the morning in question I awoke earlier than usual, and while the day was still very young. There was upon me an uneasy sense of something being wrong.

"Instinctively I felt for my keys. They were gone. I was out of bed in an instant, and, crossing to Anna's room, I looked in. It was empty. Then I noticed that the outer door of my room, which opened into the anteroom, was slightly ajar. Only giving myself time to thrust my feet into a pair of slippers and to wrap a shawl round my shoulders, I started to look for Anna, dreading I knew not what.

"The first thing I saw was my bunch of keys hanging from the lock of the baize covered door, one of which had been used to open it. From the anteroom I passed into the corridor, the doors opening into which were all shut, and so went swiftly forward till I reached the gallery at the head of the great staircase. Still there was no sign of Anna.

"While hesitating what to do next, I perceived that the door of Mrs. Drelincourt's dressing room was partly open. It seemed to me a most unlikely thing that I should find Anna there, yet it was impossible to answer for her actions while she was as she was. Before descending to the lower parts of the house I would satisfy myself so far. (I knew that you, sir, were away at the Cot.) Pushing wider the dressing room door, I went in and then paused. A slight noise in the bedroom drew me forward; on the soft carpet my footsteps were inaudible.

"Peeping cautiously through the divided portière, I beheld Anna standing by Mrs. Drelincourt's bed, still grasping the stiletto with which she had just accomplished her dreadful purpose. Her face was towards me, and the expression it wore just then I can never forget; my dreams were haunted by it for months afterwards. While gazing thus at her handiwork, a low maniacal laugh broke from her lips. A moment later she tossed the stiletto away, and made for the portière. I had barely time to shelter myself behind a screen before she passed me, going straight out of the room.

"Scarcely had she disappeared before I was in the bed chamber. I quickly satisfied myself that Mrs. Drelincourt was dead. For her nothing could be done, and my one thought now was how I could best screen the culprit. When I got back to my rooms, I found her fast asleep in bed, a lovely color mantling her cheeks, and her lips parted with a childlike smile.

"That morning, I remember, she slept a little later than usual, but when she awoke she was as gay and as full of innocent fun as, at such times, she nearly always was. She had slain Mrs. Drelincourt (whom, I have reason to know, she secretly hated) in a temporary access of homicidal mania, but her memory, on awaking, retained no recollection of it whatever."

Mrs. Jenwyn ceased speaking, and Drelincourt was slow to break the silence which ensued.

At length he said: "You have succeeded in astonishing me more, Mrs. Jenwyn, than I was ever astonished before. But that is a point on which I will not expatiate at present. May I take it that you never said anything to my poor sister about what you had witnessed in my wife's bed room?"

"So that she lived and died in utter ignorance of that terrible morning's work?"

"From the bottom of my heart, madam, I thank you for your wise reticence. While it would have benefited nobody to have revealed what you knew to Anna, it would have distressed her infinitely, and, in all probability, would have tended to shorten her life. For her sake I shall always hold myself your debtor. But tell me this, please. In case Gumley, after his arrest twenty years ago, had been brought to trial and found guilty, as he has been now, what action would have been taken by you? Or should you have taken any at all?"

"I should have done at that time precisely what I have done today: I should have sought an interview with you, and have revealed to you everything that was known to me."

It was evident to Drelincourt that Mrs. Jenwyn had been actuated by precisely the same motives that had prevailed with himself.

To the widow it seemed that the time had now come when she might ask a question on her own account.

"And now, sir, that I have told you all this," she said, "will you kindly inform me, in return, what step it will be needful for me to take."

Mr. Drelincourt considered for a few moments. Then he said: "As it seems to me, the proper thing to do will be for both of us to put in an appearance in the morning before the Sunbridge magistrates, when you can depose on oath to the truth of what you have told me here tonight. What will happen after that I cannot tell. The joint wisdom of our friends on the bench will decide that point for us."

After a little further conversation, the housekeeper was summoned, and Mrs. Jenwyn given into her charge. Breakfast would be on the table at nine, her host told her, and at ten the brougham would be in readiness to drive them into Sunbridge.

The arrangement made by Drelincourt overnight was duly carried into effect next morning. The brougham conveyed Mrs. Jenwyn and him into Sunbridge, where they presented themselves before the bench of magistrates.

At Drelincourt's request he was sworn first. To recapitulate his statement would be superfluous, what he had to tell being known to us already. Then came Mrs. Jenwyn's turn, the nature of whose evidence is equally known to us. After that the magistrates retired to their private room in order to consult together, with the result that the case was adjourned for a couple of days to allow of their taking legal opinion in the interim, bail being accepted for the reappearance of Drelincourt and Mrs. Jenwyn.

At the adjourned inquiry no charge was preferred against the former, but the widow was committed for trial at the autumn assizes, on the count of being accessory after the fact to the murder of the first Mrs. Drelincourt. That such a charge, bearing in mind the peculiar character of the case, should involve any more severe penalty than a very limited term of imprisonment was what nobody believed or expected. Meanwhile, Mrs. Jenwyn was released on bail, the surety for her appearance at the assize bar being no other than Felix Drelincourt.

Long before this the latter had told everything to his wife. With what passed between them on the occasion we have nothing to do. This, however, may be said; that, woman-like, Mrs. Drelincourt thought far more of the lack of confidence in her as a wife which her husband's confession revealed than she did of anything else he had to tell her.

When the Sunbridge autumn assizes came on, Mrs. Jenwyn failed to put in an appearance, nor was she anywhere to be found. As a consequence, Mr. Drelincourt's bail was estreated, for which he was by no means sorry. He would rather have forfeited the amount twice over than have had the details of poor Anna's unhappy story related in a court of justice.

Some time before this Gumley had been released under an order from the Home Office.

THE END.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Secret of Wyvern Towers

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