or relief in the thought of their child to him as there was to Rose; it only deepened the heavy cloud which hung over him.

“I have called her Hester," said Rose, after a pause, for he had not answered her last question. Robert bowed his face upon his hands and groaned. This then was the Hester who was to belong to him,-his own child, who was never to know him as her father. But for Hester Morley, grave and gentle and sweet, with all the simple grace which satisfied his taste, the innocent and saintly soul which would have helped him to save his own unstable soul, this Hester was lost to him for ever by an irrevocable forfeit.

My punishment is greater than I can bear," he cried, bitterly.

No," she said, "your punishment is not so great as mine. Think of it. You are rich and honoured, and no one casts a stone at you; while I am a beggar at my husband's door, and he does not know that I am fed by his hand. If he knew, he would fling me as a worthless thing into the street, where every one who passed by would revile me. Yet I think our

sin was equal. But I don't know. No; it was

more evil in me than in you.

ment remain. I deserve it all."

Let my punish

Robert Waldron scarcely heard her. The sound of her words passed through his brain. without making any impression there. This woman beside him, who had laid her thin chilly fingers upon his hand, had but a small share in his thoughts. He could no longer endure her presence. He must be alone to taste, drop by drop, the dregs of the bitter cup which he had first tasted hastily in his youth. He rose abruptly and said that he must leave her.

"It is the last time you will ever see me," said Rose, calmly.

"No," he answered; "we must see one another again."

"You do not know what you say," she added. "There is peril in this house for you and for me. It will never happen again that we can meet as we have done now."

She had opened the door, and was holding the light while he prepared to descend the crazy staircase, so shading it with her hand that the rays fell upon him and the steps he had to tread upon, while her own face was in shadow. She glanced round the sombre court for an

instant. A light shone in Hester's window opposite, and the face of Lawson pressed eagerly against the panes, watching Robert making his slow and cautious descent. But he had not seen her yet. With a smothered With a smothered cry of dismay she let the candle fall from her trembling hold, and hurrying on down the familiar staircase, she put her hand upon Robert's arm, and led him in darkness and silence through the house and into the street beyond. "We have been seen," she whispered, at the door. "I do not know what may come of it. Only I would rather die here in my husband's house, than be cast out once more into the world."

He was about to answer her, to utter some words more pitiful and gentle than any that had fallen from his lips during their interview; but Rose drew back and closed the door once more between them. He did not suppose there would be all the difficulty and danger she imagined in seeing her again; but dismissing her easily from his thoughts, he went home, mindful only of Hester and the child that bore her name, with a heart so heavy that it seemed impossible for the weight to be lifted from it by any event of the future.

CHAPTER III.

A FRUITLESS EFFORT.

JOHN MORLEY'S illness though dangerous was not of long duration, and he appeared to recover from it perfectly. But the deep fountains of his trouble had been stirred too greatly to subside quickly into their former monotony and stillness. He grew restless and unquiet; the disquietude of a man who is looking for some event to change completely, either for good or ill, the current of his life. In vain Hester sought to soothe this strange mood. Grant bade her desist from all effort to do so. It was, he said, a crisis in his mind's history, from which he might come out a new man, with a hale and happy old age lying before him. There was nothing for them to do but stand aside, and look on at the strange conflict.

Hester," said John Morley, one evening just before sunset," "bring me my hat. I am going

out for a walk."

Hester could scarcely conceal her surprise, but she brought him his hat without venturing

a word of comment. He stepped across his threshold, with a dizzy sense of bewilderment, and turned his steps mechanically towards the chapel, feeling his way before him with his stick as if he were blind. The wind played in his long white hair, and breathed coolly upon his fevered face, for there was still a low subtle fever burning in his veins. At the chapel porch, where the doors were closed, he arrested himself, and stood upon the lowest step, looking about him with an air of confusion and questioning. What had he come here for? What was he doing? Where was he going?

He remained just within the portico for some minutes. He had come to the end of the bound he had set for himself and kept to during many years. Beyond this limit, he could just catch a glimpse of trees, with their green branches waving and beckoning to him with gestures of welcome. He saw the level sunbeams burnishing richly the topmost leaves, and the evening song of the birds reached his ear. He reared his bended figure, and lifted

up his snow-white head. Had he been blind and deaf to these things, and was he now going

to hear and see once more? Was the invisible