harming him, yet it was better to let you think I had, than that you should hear the truth: yet even the truth must now be but a little way off, I knew. Now I had owned that I meant to kill him, you must needs believe Blake when he told his tale-for if it was not true, why should I have sought his life? I could no longer defy him, so far as you were concerned, though I might defy the law; and what was this small gain as compared with that huge loss! Even though acquitted by others, I could not stay to read repugnance and abhorrence in your eyes; I do not say the conviction of my guilt, for I have proved my innocence: still, I did kill him."

Ay! there was the blot: Maggie could have forgiven all that-nay, even that itself, perchance, but could have forgotten it never. It was well in him to have left her; she confessed she could never have taken that hand in hers again which had struck Richard down and slain him. Yet was not John dead too, and in a manner also slain; and did not his blood also cry out for justice, the justice she alone could give it! She read on.

"I did not dare to say good-bye to you, Maggie: my heart would have burst asunder, and I should have perished at your feet a guilty man, as you must then have needs believed. I resolved to write all my story out, and then to leave home before the dawn-I cared not whither. It was an easy task, for I had conned it a thousand times; and here it is. Whatever steps he takes, no harm can befall you now from Dennis Blake. If, however, my departure has caused him to return to Rosebank before the appointed day, and to reveal to you what he knows, then it must needs be that he has convinced you. Thence it is that I shall write upon this paper: To be read when I am dead, or when you have lost your faith in me. It will be no blame to you if you have done so, dearest ; yet you will now have read the explanation, point by point, of all that

happened, and the whole story of my wretched life. I hope and pray that before it meets your eyes I shall be dead, since, being dead, my tale will be more like to move your soul to pity and forgiveness. Oh, think not how I have sinned, but how I have suffered!-that many a time I could have slain myself, but for the thought that loss of life was loss of you; that I would do so now, but for the word I gave, which, being passed to you, is sacred and inviolable! I have sinned, I know—a sin that may, indeed, be even unpardonable, since it was committed against yourself. It was base and selfish in me, when Richard had perished as he did, to suffer you to wed me so much of guilt I own to; for the rest, Heaven is my judge, and it is just!

"Forget me, darling!-O Maggie, Maggie! to think that I should live to utter such a prayer!-forget me: that is the best that I can wish for you!"

Those were his last words; so ended the sad story of John Milbank's life. "Forget me," to the woman he had lived for, died for! Never yet, perhaps, has the woman existed who could have forgotten under the like circumstances; or, if such has existed, it was not Maggie. She had forgiven him all that was hers to forgive him-his trespass against herself; yet she would never forget him, or cease to honour his unhappy memory. What touched her most of all was his humilityhis taking it for granted that she would have made no sacrifices to rescue his name from shame. He had not stated what cruel terms had been imposed upon him by Blake, "since he will never profit by them;" and again, "No harm can befall you now through Dennis Blake." He had supposed that anything that villain could have said against himself, or caused others to say, would be of "no harm" to her. At how low a rate had he been content to count her love for him, while lavishing on her the treasures of his heart's devotion! That

she could never have lived with him after she had come to the knowledge of what had happened to Richard, she admitted to herself even now; but she confessed her husband's worth.

She recognised, without flinching, what manner of man he had been on whom she had thrown away her love in youth, and what manner of man was this one. She wondered, with him, how she could have clung to such a worthless weed, while this flower of manhood was pining for her; how the devotion of the one could have counted for so little, and the admiration of the other for so much: but she had gained her wisdom at the cost of both their lives.

One thought alone gave her comfort: she had opened the packet because she knew that he was dead, not because she had lost faith in him. She had felt all along, notwithstanding Blake's statement, and many a fact more or less in corroboration of it, that, somehow or other, her husband would be proved guiltless-that he was incapable of guilt-and she rejoiced that her conviction had been independent of this proof. She had never lost faith in him; but she had it now more strongly than she ever had; she believed his tale, she pitied him, and she loved him.

"What dat, mamma; Granny's hair?"

Little Willie, tired at last with his picture-book, had been watching her as she broke the seal of the little packet that the ship-captain had sent to her containing the lock of hair cut from her dead husband's head.

She lifted the child on to her knees, and caressed him with inexpressible tenderness.

"No, darling," sighed she; "it is not Granny's hair, though it is white enough to be so."

How sharp must have been the agony that had blanched it ; what a memento of a wasted life it was! He was gone out of the reach of her pity; but, thank Heaven! she had baffled his enemy, and his memory, untarnished by public disgrace,

was still left to her to revere and honour. For its sake she felt that she could still do much, could battle for it-if need were, and notwithstanding what her present victory had cost her-to the end. To one thing only she felt herself unequal -namely, to remain, even for a single night, beneath that dreadful roof. That very afternoon, therefore, when the early dusk had fallen, she put on cloak and bonnet, and, with the child, set forth to her father's house. The old man was overjoyed to see her; and her arrival seemed to him, as indeed it well might do, the most natural thing in the world.

"I am glad, dear Maggie, that you have come hither," said he tenderly, "and do not spend this wretched New Year's Eve alone at home."

"I have come to spend not only New Year's Eve with you," she answered, "but the new year, and all new years that God may please to send us; for I have no home now except the old one!"

CHAPTER XLI.

PERPLEXITIES.

It was one of the advantages consequent upon her having been "buried alive," as the Hilton folks had designated her quiet married life, although they had owned John Milbank to be "the best of husbands," that Maggie was not now pestered with those conventional calls of sympathy and shallow expressions of condolence which so often add a new trouble to the sense of bereavement. "Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he be weary of thee," was an injunction written surely with especial reverence to those would-be comforters, who at such times disturb with well-meant commonplaces our thoughts of Death and Loss. In Maggie's case, such visitors would have been an infliction indeed, and something worse, since itching ears and prying eyes were sources of positive danger. Her husband's secret had been preserved so far, but it was by no means secure; and it behoved her still to be on her guard, and wary with her tongue, in reply to all questions concerning him. The few persons, however, whose intimacy permitted of their visiting her, loved her too well, or respected her grief too much, to indulge their curiosity upon that subject. Her father, reticent by nature, was too glad to find his daughter once more making her home beneath his roof, to pry into the causes which had induced her to leave her own; and, indeed, it seemed natural enough that Rosebank, with its now doubly sad and mysterious asso