tale together, it seemed to Mary's outraged feelings the cruellest insult she had yet received. She was a little creature; but for a mere instant she seemed to tower, and she stood over the trembling maid like a statue of indignation. It cost her much trouble to quiet herself, but in a little while she succeeded.

"Take the pie back to Mrs. Blane with my best thanks for her kindness," she said, "and tell her that I can make no use of it."

The maid, charged with this message, which seemed to her mind to make the deadliest possible breach in politeness, would willingly have abandoned the pie by the roadside, and indeed lingered a good five minutes in front of Mrs. Blane's house before she dared to ring the bell. When at last she plucked up courage to do this, and was rehearsing her speech in preparation for Hepzibah, the door opened and a bearded face appeared, kindly in expression by nature, but looking at this moment stern and white enough to frighten the maid's wits away altogether.

"What is it, my dear?" he asked her gently, seeing that she was alarmed, though he had no guess as to the cause.

"It's not my fault, if you please, sir," said the maid, "but missus won't keep the pie, and she sends it back to Mrs. Blane with her best thanks."

Oh," said Blane; "and who is your mistress?"

"Mrs. Hackett, if you please, sir," said the maid.

Ned Blane dropped the pie dish, which went to pieces within its diaper cover. He stooped with an expression of grave pain to recover it, and stood with it in his handsa wet and sticky mass-as he looked down at the girl.

"Mrs. Blane," he said, "sent this to Mrs. Hackett ?" "Yes, sir."

"Thank you," said Blane quietly, "that will do."

The girl having discharged her errand, made the best of her way back, glad that it was over, and Blane having closed the door walked straight into the kitchen, where his mother sat in her customary place by the side of the hearth.

"Your sending this pie to Mrs. Hackett." "Pie to Mrs. Hackett!" said his mother in great astonishment. "What's the lad talking about, in the name of wonder? I've sent no pie to Mrs. Hackett!"

At this instant Hepzibah, who had been attending to some duties in the rear of the house, bounced suddenly into the kitchen, and hearing these words stood transfixed with a sense of her own guilty deceit.

Blane looked up at her and read the truth in her face at a glance.

"It was you," he asked, "who sent this pie to Mrs. Hackett?" Hepzibah paled and held on to the latch of the door for support. "You sent it as coming from my mother?" Hepzibah was silent and looked as if she were being charged with murder. "Why did you do this?"

"how

"Why Deary me, Mr. Edward," said Hepzibah recovering herself a little, you do talk and how you do look at a body over a little bit of civility like that. The poor thing's never gone and sent it back again?"

"What is the meaning of all this?" said Blane, stern and cold.

"The meaning of it" said Hepzibah, shaking herself back into courage by an effort "the meaning of it is as I wanted to do the poor creature a kindness as her pride wouldn't stand."

Blane turned as pale as Hepzibah had been a minute earlier. "What do you

"A kindness?" he asked.

mean?"

"Mean!" said Hepzibah, half crying with the shock of her recent detection and the wretched sense that she was giving intense pain to the one creature she loved best on earth. "What should I mean, but that the poor creature's starving."

"Dear me!" said the lymphatic Mrs. Blane, in a voice as much moved and as expressive of tender interest as if she had asked a question about the weather. "Are you talking about Polly Haworth, Hepzibah?"

The young man turned about and stood for a minute with one hand on the table near the broken pasty. A curious little gasping sound escaped him. It was so slight that it did not attract his mother's notice, but Hepzibah went white again and made a movement towards him with her hands outstretched, as if she would fain protect and soothe him. He seemed to hear the step behind, and, as if to avoid it, he walked from the kitchen without looking round and went heavily up to his own room.

forced to believe that the affairs he had spoken of were no more than an abominable pretext. Will had his faults, and grave enough they were, even when she could make the lightest of them, but as, on a gloomy day, even a transient gleam of sunshine brings brightness whilst it lasts, so this halting and imperfect news of her husband and his intentions brought contentment to her spirit.

But now came a consequence of the letter which the forger had not anticipated. Before the welcome bank-note was so much as broken for the purchase of household necessaries Mary sat down and wrote a letter to that imaginary John Hargreaves, who lived in the imaginary Kesterton Square.

"SIR,-I should be greatly obliged if you would furnish me with my husband's present address. I am afraid that recent letters may have miscarried."

If this little blind were something less than absolutely truthful, she posted it all the same, and salved her conscience with the hope that it might be true. Two or three days later her inquiry came back again, directed and re-directed in half-a-dozen different hands, and at last officially marked "Misdirected. No Kesterton Square in Birmingham." This amazed her, and awoke new anxieties. Obviously Will was moving in crooked ways, and was in hiding from her. It was easily possible that he might be concealing himself in so large a town as Birmingham, and, inspired by some feeble hope of meeting him, she took the coach into town day after day, and walked wearily up and down the principal thoroughfares, thinking that perchance she might catch sight of him. She had never known it until now, but she was a little short-sighted, and a thousand times her heart leapt within her in the crowded street as she imagined that at last the errant husband was in sight, and she would advance, fluttering from head to foot, to meet an absolute stranger. No habitude of failure lessened the shock of hope and fear and disappointment, and she would go home -if the place were worth calling home-by the coach at night too tired to care for anything. Her whole life seemed to have grown into one constant dull and empty ache.

She had borrowed a directory and had hunted up the names of any and every quarter of the town which might by any possible stupidity have been miswritten as Kesterton Square, and she had some wild notion of calling at all the seventy-ones in

all these different streets and lanes, roads, squares, and places, until she should alight upon the mysterious Hargreaves.

It seemed a strange and ghostly sort of life to lead, for she was altogether alone now, and hardly ever exchanged a word, except upon matters of mere necessity, with a fellow-creature. She called upon nobody,

and nobody called upon her. Those people of the little township who had at first been indignant against John Howarth and his wife for their neglect of their daughter, sup posed now, naturally enough, since Mary went on living in her husband's house, that the builder supplied the necessary funds, and so forgot their indignation. The girl's singular position was talked of eagerly for a while and was then dismissed from memory. When anybody who had known Hackett for the narrator in the tale of his disapcame from a distance, there was a little spice pearance. But even this could not last for ever, and the history, though rustic annals die hard, began to flag in interest.

Then, as if Mary had not had trouble enough upon her shoulders already, a new one descended upon her, and she began to be certain that the house, night after night, was being watched, and became assured that the watcher was always the same person. The first suspicion which occurred to her came when, on a moonlight night about the middle of July, she threw open her bedroom window and looked out upon the deserted road and the tranquil widespread fields. She had no light, and the house and its neighbour threw their joint shadow on the road before her, and on to the hedge which faced their doors. Beyond the distinctly marked line of shade upon the field, the moonlight lay in a broad vapoury whiteness, in which objects, though easily discernible, took strange and fantastic shapes. She had sat at the open window for a good five minutes, drawing in a sad tranquillity from the moonlight and the silence, when a dry stick cracked behind the hedge and drew her startled gaze to the spot whence the sound proceeded. Following this came complete silence. She listened till the wide air made a singing in her ears like the lingering echo of the waves which children find in sea-shells. Hearing no repetition of the sound, but suspecting rather than discerning an added bulk of darkness somewhere in the shadows, she closed the window, drew down the blind, and watched through the merest crevice between the bars. That something darker than the shadows began to move, and the cracking sound, heard more faintly through

the closed window than before, again reached her ears. The moving object stole under the hedge for twenty or thirty yards, growing distinct from the other shadows whilst it moved, and melting back into them again whenever it stood still; and then, passing over a stile, appeared in the moonlight of the road, at that distance and in that light recognisable only as a man.

Mary never sat at her open window again after this, but she was often tempted to watch, and the watch was almost invariably rewarded by the earlier or later detection of the figure. Who the man was and why he was there she could not guess. Once a sus picion crossed her mind, but she dismissed it with shame and anger that such a thought should have occurred to her. It was to the effect that her husband mistrusted her, and had set a spy to watch the house during his absence, and report to him if it were entered. But one night, as she sat in the darkness in the lower room before the hour of moonrise, she was aware of the shadowy watcher pacing dimly up and down, trusting solely in the darkness, and taking no advantage this time of the shelter of the hedge.

Vaguely as she had made out his aspect, she knew him for the same, and as she watched his goings to and fro the door of the neighbouring house was suddenly thrown open, and a broad ray of light darting from it, fell full upon the mysterious prowler's face. The face was, of course, Ned Blane's.

Mary was in a permanent mood now to be easily indignant, and she rose up in wrath against this intrusion upon her privacy. What right had he, or any man, to hang about the house in that way, watching her and spying upon her? Some sense of the unobtrusive and wordless devotion of the watch touched her here, and brought her down from the heights of anger to which she had ascended. And yet the proceeding was intolerable, and sooner or later was sure to be discovered, to bring about new whisperings of scandal and new unmerited sorrow.

Blane had recoiled at the sudden ray of light, and had disappeared before these varying thoughts and emotions had well had time to course through her heart and mind. But now he was back again, pacing up and down in the darkness. She could see the pale blur of his face turned steadfastly towards the house.

She determined to ignore him, and withdrew herself from the window. She would not even know of his being there, but that was difficult. Even when she had gone to her

bedroom, and having prepared for her night's rest had blown out the light, she peeped again through an interstice in the blind, and saw the dim figure still going up and down.

The morning after this discovery Mary received a second letter from the mysterious Hargreaves, enclosing a second ten-pound note with the same formula as before. At first she did not notice any difference of address, but by-and-by her eye lighted upon the first line of the communication, and she saw that it was dated, not from Kesterton, but from Chesterton, Square. The forger had relied upon his memory, and his memory had played him false.

She had returned the borrowed directory a fortnight before, and not caring to ask for it again, she set out at once for the great town, determined, if possible, to unravel the mystery, and at least to discover if Chesterton Square stood in as airy a situation as its forerunner. There was no Chesterton Square to be found or heard of, and she came back troubled.

That night the watcher came again. A painful fascination impelled her by this time to keep as regular a watch for him as he evidently kept upon the house, and as he came in sight a suspicion burst upon her mind with so vivid and sudden a light that it looked like certainty. She lit a candle hastily, ran upstairs, and emptied the contents of a drawer upon the bed, and from the tumbled heap of papers before her, after a search of a moment or two, took a letter from Ned Blane to her husband, and setting this and the communication from John Hargreaves side by side, came, in spite of the stiff disguise of the legal-looking caligraphy, to the swift conclusion that they were written by the same hand.

It was bitter enough in all conscience to have been deserted by her husband, even though she confessed to herself that she had never loved him; it was heartbreaking to be deserted by the people of her own flesh and blood; but to be insulted by the cheating charity of a rejected lover seemed tenfold worse than all.

She descended to the dining-room, and taking the bank-note from the table on which it lay, crumpled it wrathfully in her hand and walked swiftly from the room into the hall, and from the hall into the roadway. The furtive watcher was away at a round pace in an instant, but she followed and called upon him by name.

"Mr. Blane! I will not be avoided. I order you to listen to me."