life, she clung to this poor scheme with feverish persistency, and for the moment it buoyed her up. It had an immediate value, too, since it absolved her from the necessity of explaining anything. Everybody was left by it to form his own conclusions. But in the meantime, some sort of action was demanded of her. She put on her bonnet and shawl, and announced her intention of going in person to Mitchell Street; it was possible, she said, that her husband had gone thither; and at all events, it was only right that she should at once inform her father of what had taken place. So much, at least, was necessary to satisfy the proprieties in the eyes of Mrs Morden; and, upon the whole, it seemed the most natural thing to do in the case suggested; if she had herself suspected John to be deranged, she would not have been satisfied with sending others to look for him. At the same time, Maggie trembled at the notion of leaving home, even for an hour, lest tidings should in the meantime arrive there which might need judicious interpretation. However, she at once set out, though the snow was by this time beginning to fall thickly. At a few paces from home, indeed, the house itself was scarcely visible, and taking advantage of this circumstance, she could not resist entering the tool-house unperceived, upon her way to the gate. It was thence that John had taken his spade and pickaxe, and there they now lay, just within the doorway, where she had seen him throw them down. She had examined the place the day before, but there was a vague attraction about it-though an attraction of repulsion-which still haunted her. It was a bare, common edifice of its kind enough. Empty flower-pots and odds and ends of matting strewed the unpaved floor, and notwithstanding the season, it was pervaded by a smell of mould, as though the gardening operation of "potting" had been but recently carried on in it. This smell was more powerful where the wood was stacked in a huge pile upon the side nearest to the house, and it seemed

to her that the stack did not present the same appearance as it had done yesterday. On closer inspection she felt convinced of this; and on rolling a log or two away and moving some brushwood, she came upon the cause—a considerable heap of newly-dug-out earth. Exploring further, she discovered an orifice in the floor, communicating with a damp, dark passage, large enough to permit of the entrance of a human body. That was the precise image that her thought suggested, just as if it had been expressed in words: large enough "for a human body;" and an unspeakable terror took possession of her soul as the idea occurred to her suppose that hole had been excavated for the very purpose to receive the body of Dennis Blake!

Her limbs seemed to give way beneath her, and she sat down with beating heart upon a huge overturned basket, the only substitute for a seat the place afforded. She had taxed her husband with digging a grave, and he had not denied it. What if the grave were within a few feet of her! Though she knew that no actual crime had been committed, she felt as though she were actually in the presence of a murdered corpse. The very smell of the earth made her sick and faint. The basket, she now discovered, had been filled with it; it had evidently been used for carrying out what had been dug from the hole. She examined the spade and pickaxe, and felt quite a relief to find that the soil attaching to them was not of the same kind, and was mixed with gravel. It was not here, then, that John had been working last night, but in the little wood or spinney, from which she had seen him coming with the lantern, and which was in the neighbourhood of the gravel-pit. A sudden instinct caused her to smear the flat of the spade and the pick with the earth about her; the discovery of what had happened here was probably inevitable, but she would leave no hint of what had happened elsewhere. As to what had happened she knew nothing, but she felt she

was on the verge of some discovery, if only she had the courage to make it. With a silent prayer for strength and mercy, and both for another's sake as well as for her own, Maggie once more approached the excavation. The narrow passage into which it led was not, she now perceived, utterly dark; a grey gleam of light struggled into it from the other end. It ran in a gradual slant towards the house, and more than once she slipped on the damp surface as she felt her way, bent almost double, along the narrow path. The grey light, however, increased, and by the time she had reached the termination of the passage, and emerged into a walled chamber, she was able to recognise it as the cellar, through the grating of which the clear morning rays were streaming. The cause, then, of the underground noises she had heard at night was at once apparent they had been made by the strokes of the pickaxe when the man at work in the passage had come to the cellar-wall, and begun to loosen the bricks. No wonder that, having seen no sign of disturbance of the soil, or of the grating without, her suspicions of some thief having effected an entrance below-stairs had been set at rest; for who could have dreamt of such a method of ingress as had been really adopted?

That the robber was Dennis Blake she could have no doubt; reduced to beggary and ruin, it was not unlikely that the idea should have struck him of thus possessing himself, unsuspected, of the wine in her husband's cellar, with the value of which he was so well acquainted; but as to what had caused his offence to be condoned, and the offender to be taken into her husband's confidence, that was a mystery as great as ever.

In the place in which Maggie now found herself she had never before set foot. The cellar, it will be remembered, had been bricked up by John's orders on the very morning after his brother's sudden departure, and in a sort of abhor

rence, as was understood, of the habits of life which had led to it and to poor Richard's ruin, and as a testimony against them. The last person who had entered it by the door had been probably Richard himself.

Nothing since that time had apparently been removed, and indeed, it was certain that the marauder had been discovered just at the moment when he had first made good his entrance. The bins still contained a considerable supply of wine, and the undisturbed dust of years had accumulated upon them. By the steps leading to the bricked-up door was a broken bottle, the contents of which, long dried up, had left a dark stain on the stone floor. The whole scene presented a picture of desolation and desertion, in which there was small temptation to tarry. Moreover, there was a chance, however slender, while she did so, of some one coming to the tool-house and finding what she had found. Maggie, therefore, retraced her steps thither as quickly as the slipperiness of the incline. would permit; and, having covered the excavation with timber and brushwood, so as to conceal it from any casual visitor, she took her way to her father's house.

CHAPTER XXIX.

JOHN'S LEGACY.

BUT for that chance suggestion of honest Mrs Morden's, Maggie's task with her father would have been difficult indeed. She would have had to invent some incredible story, to account for her husband's absence, and would have contradicted herself in a thousand particulars. As it was, she had merely to describe John's sudden and unaccountable illness, his strangeness of manner and aspect (without, however, mentioning the actual transformation that had taken place with him in the latter respect), and lastly, his inexplicable disappearance, to produce the very effect that she most desired.

"Why, good heavens! John must have gone mad!" was, in fact, the engraver's involuntary exclamation, on hearing her tidings; and though, shocked upon Maggie's account at his imprudence, he immediately strove to soften the force of his own words, she saw that they represented his belief.

"No doubt," said he, "this is but some temporary aberration, probably the result of fever, for your husband is just the very last man in the world to become a lunatic; so judicious, so calm and unexcitable, and, even under the most trying circumstances with one single exception, which might have stirred a stoic, has always shown so much self-command and self-restraint."

How well she knew it, and how poignantly that reference to his quarrel with Dennis Blake went to her very soul! John

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