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shunned her husband's company, and was embarrassed in his presence. Mr. Chadleigh marked her altered mood with a suspicion he was ashamed to own. He questioned her, and his fear was confirmed by her confusion and distress. But he made magnanimous allowance. He believed in her honest struggle, he was sure she had not wronged him even in thought. Her weakness was one which affects even the least sensitive of women. Caroline was not of the class who compromise themselves; the cloud would pass, and leave all bright as before between husband and wife.

Meanwhile, however, the cloud lay dismally on the little household at the Manor. One autumn evening a ray gleamed suddenly through it. Mr. Chadleigh, taking up the Muddlebury Reorder, read that Chillianwallah Cottage was for sale, its owner intending to reside abroad. The sheer prose of this advertisement rejoiced him. He kissed the eighteen months old heiress, his daughter, babbling on his knee. Now things would right themselves; father, mother, and child would come together again. His spirit lightened all at once; he met the tiny prattle and playfulness of his infant, as if care were equally far from him. And when the small tyrant, spying the great field-glass with which he had been amusing her a little before, demanded to be entertained again with the toy, he laughed as he had not laughed for weeks, and, putting the instrument to Mademoiselle's blue eyes, turned the little shining head upon the wonderland outside the window. He brought the glass to bear upon a tree which marked the turn of the long avenue, and as he did so opened a catechism which had an unexpected result. 'What does Ada see?' 'Big tee.'

And the observer

kicked her mottled shins, in the delight of discovery, against her father's knee. He covered the object himself, and saw something else. It was some large birdprobably a hawk, whose quarry had escaped it in the foliage. It poised above the giant beech. Here was something to test the child's intelligence.

'Look again, Ada. Do you see anything near the big tree?" She looked.

The man,' quoth the shrill prodigy, and crowed again.

Mr. Chadleigh looked with the naked eye. The bird was invisible; the tree stood-a huge and graceful figure before the dull coppery sunset; there was no other form that he saw. The little one had invented an image in the landscape, it seemed. He took the glass, however, and searched the field of vision. Nothing but the leafy tower with the bird of evil hovering still above it....

Ha! The face of a man, a face lurking and watchful, looked out from the shelter full upon the house. It was Arthur Darkin. Mr. Chad'eigh started at the visage which seemed to confront him so nearly; but at once recovering the shock of the apparition, pushed his chair further within the shadow of the curtain, and fixed the spot again. The face was there, furtive, expectant. As he scanned it, his brain filled and heated with a sense of horrid mystery. He set his teeth to suppress a groan. This misery, which had suddenly sprung upon him from its ambush, must be met with action, not with groans. What should he do? Go seek his wife, bid her look for herself, and explain that sight if she could? His wife had not showed that day at all; she had pleaded illness and kept her room. Illness! Did her ailment and its remedy hide in yonder tree?

The better movement, perhaps, would be to surprise the enemy in his lair, and drag the secret from him.

Hush! Feet grinding on the moist gravel outside. It was his wife's maid. The woman passed the window. Mr. Chadleigh, quite forgetting the little creature in his lap, marvelling and silent in presence of an emotion which was the first expression of human trouble she had seen in the world still all new and strange to her, followed the menial with his glass. He saw her turn off the smooth gray avenue, and make for the tree some yards distant on the green lawn. As she advanced, Darkin broke, with an eager movement, from his covert, and stood fully in the open; but the woman, with a glance towards the house, motioned him back. Mr. Chadleigh saw them come together, watched the brief parley, observed that their hands met, and understood the pantomime. Then, as the messenger faced about and Darkin drew back into the shade, he rose, and, bidding the child sit still till he returned, rushed bare-headed from the room and out at a side door opening directly on to the shrubbery, through which different shady paths wound to the avenue. The close-growing underwood stretched impeding limbs across the narrow way, as if to stop him; but he reached the avenue just as the same footstep he had heard but ten minutes before was again audible. The servant, coming suddenly upon her master, showed guilty consciousness. aspect warned her that he knew her errand. He held up his hand.

His

'Hicks,' said he, 'stand in here. I want to speak to you. Don't be alarmed; I don't blame you.'

The woman obeyed, and stepped out of view of the house.

'I saw everything,' said Mr. Chadleigh. You have a letter.'

She produced it from under her cloak, holding it in a hand which trembled.

It was a folded leaf, written in pencil. He read it, Hicks watching him out of the corner of her eye. He kept his countenance.

'What have you got for this?' he asked, indicating the billet. 'You do not understand? What have you been paid as go-between in this business ?'

The woman yearned to a lie, but she dared not utter it. 'He gave me a sovereign,' she said.

'And she?'

'My mistress? Nothing, sir. But she has been a kind lady to me, and O, sir-'

Faugh! He could have spurned this reptile. He stopped her protest with a gesture.

'You have been poorly paid for such a service. I shall give you a hundred sovereigns for the same work. Carry this note to your mistress as if it had fallen into no other hands. Bring me the answer before you deliver it to the man who has only paid you twenty shillings. A hundred pounds, woman!'

Her

Hicks was ready-witted. mistress was ruined, no doubt. A hundred pounds would be solid salvage from the wreck of her maid's place. With a passing qualm in her greedy soul, she agreed to this new mission, and, taking the note as Mr. Chadleigh refolded it, went on to the house.

She was speedily back with a reply under cover. He tore the envelope open, and, at the first word he read, turned his back. But she saw his shoulders heave with the pang it shook him to suppress. Then, speaking in a manner and tone of deadly calm, he said,

'Take this and deliver it safely. Hold your tongue, mind! And come to me after dinner for your money.'

Next day Mr. Chadleigh went into Muddlebury, and had an interview with the family solicitor.

The day after brought an outbreak of the equinox. It was the most violent storm remembered for a generation. The rain and the wind had driven together all day without a lull, save those boding intervals in which the tempest, as it were, pauses to gather breath.

The tall trees round the Manor roared and tossed their long arms in the blast, which pierced through their shelter, and, searching every joint and cranny of the old house, made it strangely audible. The strong rooks sat cowering in their nests on the boughs, with wings alert for flight should their homes give way under them. Small birds, blown from their nests, were carried helpless like leaves across the sky.

Mr. Chadleigh watched the weather. It suited his mood, this Nature, troubled as he was. The time since that discovery had been for him a terrible ordeal. The demeanour of his wife made it all the harder to endure. She seemed all at once to recover her old mood, and treated him with the familiarity and more than the fondness of the old days. It was as if a weight had been lifted off her mind, or as if some exceeding joy had suddenly arrived to her. The fiercest pang for him was to know the secret of this sudden happiness. He managed, by a mighty effort, to conceal his knowledge of the monstrous deceit which was being practised against him, and felt the satisfaction of the damned in watching the play of his wife's hypocrisy.

The night set in wild and dark, but with lengthening spells of subsidence. Eight o'clock was soon reached after the dinner-hour at the Manor. At eight o'clock Mrs. Chadleigh rose as if the clock had

surprised her, and was leaving the room. Her husband spoke :

'Now that you are recovering your old self, Carrie,' said he, ‘suppose you sit and read to me as you used to, for an hour or so.'

She hesitated, came back from the door, kissed his bald forehead, and, looking at him with most rank dissimulation, said,

'Not to-night, dear John. Any and every other time you wish, but this. I have something very particular to do to-night, and must ask you to excuse me.'

Tell me, what is this something particular?'

She drew back her hand from his shoulder and her eyes from his face, and, stepping back from him a little, said with vehemence,

'O, no, I cannot. I dare not tell you just now ! But I'll keep my solemn pledge that you shall know it.'

'Why, Carrie, what's the matter? You are as excited as if you were bent upon some bad business or other. I only hope it's all right, whatever it is.'

His manner was too grave for raillery; but his wife, without looking at him, laughed, and said in a lively tone he should know the secret, but not just yet.

The viper! He opened a book, and allowed her to quit the room. When she had left he dashed the book on the carpet, and, dropping his face in his hands, burst into tears. A sound at the door caused him to look up eagerly. Was it she coming back with the key to the secret? It was only a mockery of the wind.

Then, with his eye on the clock, he fell into gloomy reverie.

Nine! He turned down the two lamps on the table, and left the room. The wind had risen again; the house creaked and strained and rattled. The ear was of no use at such an hour. He went

along the corridor to the smokingroom, entered, and leaving the door an inch ajar, sat at it, holding it thus. All was dark behind him, all was only less dark before him. But when his sight had shaped itself to the gloom, he knew that nobody could pass his lurkingplace unseen.

She will fly this way. So he thought. Back doors for such deeds. Hush! Something more solid and darker than the dusk passed him. It was she. As the vision went by he heard a sound like the petulant cry of a child.

'My child too! Robbery and dishonour! You wretch, you wretch !'

With this desperate wail he reached out his hand, and groped for the revolver he had laid all ready for use during the evening. Somebody had been in the room since and removed the weapon. had to light a match to find it. With only this delay he followed his wife.

He

The following morning was serene and beautiful. People went abroad to enjoy the freshness of the calm and see the ravage of the storm. The field steward at the Manor, judging from experience that the mardyke had been rudely tested, marched a gang of labourers thither to repair damages. The men found the structure seriously wrecked. Great gaps had been bitten out of it by the waves, which had vomited the fragments back upon the face of the bank, where they lay heaped or strewn.

Amid this ruin lay the dead body of Mr. Chadleigh, miserably crushed and mangled by the violence of the water or some other force. It was yet early when those who came upon this dreadful sight rushed with the tidings to the Manor. They told their tale with the brutal precipitation of panic. In the same headlong fashion

Hicks sped with it to her mistress. At the first breath of the message Mrs. Chadleigh fell upon the floor, and for many days after hovered between life and death. Her friends almost dreaded the recovery which would bring her to the knowledge that she had lost child as well as husband; for Ada Chadleigh had disappeared on the night her father perished: the little innocent had been carried away, it was thought, by the sea, which had rejected her father after having killed him.

Mrs. Chadleigh made a slow convalescence. She could throw no light upon the mystery, which, after vast discussion, was fitted to the most plausible theory. This was that Mr. Chadleigh had ventured out, as his habit had been, to watch the angry waves breaking over the defence; that he had had the incredible folly to take his daughter with him out into the weather, and that both had been surprised by the cruel and treacherous element. No other conclusion was more plausible than this, which became the popular version of the tragedy after the first sensation had passed.

The fact that the private door leading from the Manor grounds had been found open gave colour to this explanation. One circumstance alone baffled ingenuity to account for. A revolver had been picked up at some distance from where the body was found. It had the charges of powder and ball wetted into impotence still in every chamber. What did that weapon signify? Here was a point of the stark enigma which quite disabled speculation.

In less than a year the incident began to subside into local tradition, when the dark interest of it was sharply revived by the announcement of the marriage in London of Arthur Darkin, Esq.,

of Chillianwallah Cottage, Muddlebury, and late of the Clodshire Fencibles, to Caroline, relict of the late John Chadleigh, Esq., of Chadleigh Manor. The marriage was much commented on, and turned the more suspicious intelligence of the neighbourhood to sinister deductions. It was remembered, for instance, that the sale of Chillianwallah Cottage and the departure of its owner, both of which had been advertised a few days before the catastrophe, had not taken place.

Mr. Grantley Welbore was bitterly wroth with his sister, and expressed himself in terms so full of accusation as well as of anger, that Darkin challenged him to sustain his assertions before a jury. This of course he was unable to do, and he was therefore obliged to pay the costs of the preliminaries in a libel suit, as well as to sign a public apology for his reckless and unfounded language. In the seventeen years that had elapsed since these occurrences the families of Chadleigh Manor and the Laurels had remained strangers to each other. The Darkins lived an isolated life, seeing and visiting very few people. That local tradition which follows all families with a history, attached to them like a cloud. Arthur Darkin was a personage in the county hierarchy; had been high sheriff, and was entitled to wear the uniform of deputy-lieutenant; but he was not popular. Thus it was that when in a political crisis it was proposed by certain electors of Muddlebury that he should be invited to save the Commonwealth, the suggestion was pooh-poohed, and Mr. Grantley Welbore, his brother-inlaw, selected for the trust.

Had the reader been present when Mrs. Caroline Darkin reIceived the letter from her niece Edith, he would have noticed that

the lady, though younger than her brother, the member for Muddlebury, looked many years his senior. Her face, mild and wasted, retained no trace of the hoyden beauty of old. She had an air of settled melancholy; her whole aspect suggested that ill-health which has its root more in a sickness of the spirit than in bodily malaise.

Mrs. Darkin, like her husband, had but a very limited correspondence. She opened the letter in a listless way. It was very short and very simple:

'My dear Aunt,-You will be surprised, and, perhaps, displeased, by this; but we are in great distress and trouble, and I write to you in the hope that you may help us. If you are disposed to do so come at once, and you will learn all. We are all very wretched, and do not know what to do. Neither my father nor my mother knows I am writing to you. Help them if you can.-Your loving niece, EDITH.'

This call from kindred long estranged went straight to the heart, and produced a sudden and violent agitation in Mrs. Darkin. Her husband stood upon the hearth, cold, gloomy, and stern. He was equipped for the October stubble,his gun was in his hand, two pointers looked up at him with eager wistful ees and tongues already lolling in a canine imagination of the chase.

Mrs. Darkin rose, and, moving feebly, went to her husband and put the letter in his hand. He read it over and over, and, turning to her, said in a curt chilling tone,

'Well?'

'I shall go to them, Arthur,' said the wife.

Her husband's face showed more incredulity than displeasure.

'Yes,' she went on, 'this is my opportunity arrived at last. It is

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