speak to my father, or yours. Carl Bramwell ?" Do you love "Yes," she whispered, her face flushing into a deep crimson. "God bless you both!" said Robert, after a moment's pause. "You will be very happy. Yes, you must come home again, and it must be soon. Leave it to me, Hester. Do not be troubled by your father staying here a while longer." He loitered yet a few minutes, with Hester beside him, but neither of them said many words. Then she trode step by step with him down the soft grassy walk and through the house, standing at the door to look after him as he went his lonely way down the street. He turned to see her, and lifted his hat to her, with a forced smile which she was too far off to catch. "It is very hard upon me!" he said to himself, with a groan. CHAPTER XVI. GOOD NEWS FOR CARL. JOHN MORLEY had desired to be alone, that he might confront a thought which had been haunting him ever since he had learned that Rose was not dead. His mind was no longer warped and blinded. With the vigour which had returned to his frame, there had come a clearness of judgment to his reason. Yet the sudden news that Rose lived had probed the old wound to its depths. As long as he had believed her dead his pardon of her transgression against him had been simple. Now a serious complication came into it. alive, and dwelling in the home she had forsaken, the home to which he must soon return. His duty to Hester required that he should not keep her in this exile, to which she resigned herself through devotion to him. That his daughter loved Carl was apparent to him, and he had but little doubt that Carl loved her. Even if Robert Waldron did not disclose the secret of their hiding-place, which need be kept as a She was secret no longer, it was his duty to return to his own town, and appear again amongst his townsmen. But Rose was there! And there too was the dreary life which had fallen from him suddenly as a burden loosened from his weary shoulders. Must he stoop to pick it up again? Must he keep Rose in his house and upon his hearth? He could not do that. He felt that though he might forgive her, though he did forgive her with all his heart; though there was still in the depths of his nature a profound passion for his young wife who had been unfaithful to him; he could never suffer her again to be to him what Hester's mother had been. There was an awful sadness in this. Rose dead had not been to him the terrible grief which Rose living would be. If he returned, he must look upon her fair face again, listen to her sweet voice, be shaken like a reed before her; yet put her away inexorably, against all tears, all pleadings, all contrition. He could not ask Hester what he must do. How could his daughter understand this? There was no alternative offered to him, except the selfish one of staying where he was in this pleasant retreat. But that would be unjust to Hester, whose home-sickness was known to him. A sharp conflict, quickly ended, was fought in his spirit. When he returned to the house of the widow Limet, he told Hester that they would start for England in a few days. During the three past days Hester and her father had had many confidential conversations. The mystery of the attack made upon Robert, and the similar one by which Rose had wellnigh perished, had been fully discussed between them. It had not been any mystery to Hester until now. She had been as fully convinced as Grant and Robert, that her father had been the stealthy assailant in the first instance; and there had been scarcely a doubt upon her mind that he had also attacked Rose in a paroxsym of madness and despair which had made him unconscious of his own deed. But now that he emphatically maintained his innocence, and narrated circumstantially the details of his finding of Rose already dead, as he supposed, she could not withhold her credence. By repeated and strenuous efforts of his memory, the recollection came back to him of having heard Lawson closing the side-door which gave him access to his work-rooms, and this he told to Hester. He had not been alone in the house then. Lawson had been there; and it must have been he who had been the secret and vindictive foe. No one knew as she did the profound hatred Rose had aroused in him, even before her marriage with his master. To no one else had he displayed it. There came back to her mind his wild, half-crazy denunciations of her; his superstitious visions of her own mother's presence, which had ceased when Rose usurped her place in the household. The criminal could be no other than Lawson. But Robert on his part was speeding away for England, with his conviction in no way shaken that it was John Morley's hand which had been lifted up against himself and Rose. His denial of the crime seemed perfectly natural, and almost justifiable, to him; it had been quiet and brief, a mere parenthesis in a conversation. Besides, he was convinced he had no other enemy, not merely in Little Aston, but in all England itself. He still considered himself as having been placed more on a level with John Morley by this double attempt at revenge. He did not see any reason why, where there was so much mutually to for |