which needed but a spark to ignite, and spread ruin and devastation all around. And then with fresh force came that temptation which of late had assailed him by night and by day, in the new and fatal form of duty to his future wife-a devil in the guise of an angel of light.

"The hour has come when I must at last resolve finally to tread down the peril that menaces her peace ! A match and two minutes of time are all that I require to make my security impregnable. No eye would see!" No, none, save His, Who is the Father of the fatherless !

CHAPTER IV.

Show boldness and aspiring confidence,

Seek the lion in his den,

And fright him there, and make him tremble there.

We must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

SHAKESPEARE.

THE autumn afternoon was drawing to its close, and clouds of yellowing leaves were being hurried to earth by the breath of the rising breeze. The landlady of the "Travellers" Rest," standing at her ricketty door, meditatively surveyed her lean chickens fighting over their scanty meal of grain; and the lonely inn, with its untidy thatched roof and bowing walls, looked lonelier and more uncanny than ever. Tilda Tagg herself had not been improved by years; there were stray grey hairs in her greasy ringlets, and sourer marks about her thin mouth, and she turned back to lay her tea-table with a less nimble step than of yore.

"Shrimps and pickled pork," she murmured to herself, as she opened her cornercupboard; "be-opes they'll pay for't. They don't look up to no good, they two chaps! But there, it ain't nothin' to me, so long as they don't go bringin' the bobbies about the place." Then pushing open the door which

led into her little bar parlour, she added curtly: "Tea's ready; walk in, gents!"

Mrs Tagg's visitors, two in number, had been spending the afternoon in the privacy of her grimy little sanctum, and the good lady, who had followed them closely when they first entered it, and had taken the precaution of locking up her silver spoons, little suspected that the younger of her unknown guests was no less a person than the missing son and heir of the Lord of the Manor. It was difficult indeed to recognise Ralph's graceful head under the oily wig which covered it, and the blue spectacles which he wore imparted a rather ghastly appearance to his face, sharpened already by recent illness. Ever since the day of his accident, he had lain disabled in Josceline's lodgings, and a tedious time of anguish, both bodily and mental, that month had been to him. The forced postponement of his design had given him time to go through a phase of terrible indecision between opposing duties; an agony out of whose chaos had at last risen immutably the clear conviction that, short of ruining his father, he was bound to do his uttermost for the protection of his little cousin's rights. He read in the papers the news of Lord Rotherhame's approaching marriage, and concluded rightly that such an event would be to him a fresh motive to destroy the criminating papers. Aided by Murray-Carr, his faithful ally, he resolved,

VOL. III.

E

the moment he was strong enough, to take the long-delayed journey to Rotherhame and discover, if possible, that ancient entrance through the vaults, of which his father had spoken to him, and ransack the Castle dungeons for the knapsack of which six months ago, little dreaming of its contents, he had caught sight as it lay among the rubbish in the desecrated oratory. He knew it was a desperate chance. But such as it was, he dared not neglect it; and he determined, whatever the result, to go afterwards and hide himself far from his home, become a common sailor, an emigrant, anything by which he might gain an independent livelihood, and avoid handling money which had been stolen from the fatherless.

On one point he was clear, although the casuistry of a rather morbid conscience had, for a time, bewildered him; no word must be whispered which could endanger a hair of his father's head, or, during his lifetime, darken his fair name. He clung to the desperate hope that even after Lord Rotherhame's death he might be able to contrive some scheme by which he could resign the peerage and yet conceal his father's complicity in the fraud. At all events, till that day he would keep silence, and reserve in secresy and safety the proofs by which alone he could hope in the end to make restitution to his deeply injured kinswoman.

Josceline had been lying for more than an

hour asleep Ralph, unable to close his eyes, was seated at the ill-fitting window, looking out restlessly over the wild heath country, now in mourning for the dead bloom of summer. The hoarse cawing of the rooks could be heard as, wending hotnewards to their roost round the Castle Keep, they filled the air with their tumultuous unison of sound. A deep sadness filled his breast. True picture of his life! Everything that was lovely in nature was fading and dying, and like the dull, forgetful grave into which flowers and leaves were sinking, seemed the irrevocable separation from the father he had adored, and to whom his heart still clung with a persistent and passionate devotion. A wild longing seized him to spring out of the window, to clear with active feet the short mile which lay between him and his home, to force his way into the beloved presence, and, by an absolute surrender of every personal aim and duty, to buy back the coveted treasure of his father's love.

on the chintz-covered settle.

But as he was on the point of yielding to the temptation, his eye caught the crests of the three gaunt fir trees which, swaying their mournful arms on high, marked the spot where the fateful waters of Culpepper's Bowl stagnated in solitude. He thought of the unquiet, dripping form that in his vision had come to him within the Castle walls-walls which like the tent of Achan, hid the spoils of blood;