"I was not to tell any one but Julius."

"Well, I'm Julius. Besides, wasn't I at the very bottom of the tracing him out? Haven't I the best right to know whether it is bad or good?"

"Not bad, I am sure," said Julius, quickly and anxiously.

"Oh, no, not bad," answered Anne. "He has seen him--had him on board for a night."

"Where?"

"Off Durban. But this whole sheet about it is marked 'Private--only for Julius,' so I could say nothing about it before your mother. I have hardly glanced at it myself as yet, but I think he says Mr.

Douglas made him promise not to tell her or Joanna Bowater."

"Not tell Jenny!" cried Rosamond. "And you said it was not bad. He must have gone and married!"

"I do not think that is it," said Anne; "but you shall hear. Miles says:--'I have at last seen our poor Cousin Archie. I told you I was following up your brother Sandie's hint about the agents for the hunters; and at last I fell in with a merchant, who, on my inquiry, showed me an invoice that I could have sworn to as in Archie's hand, and described his white hair. It seems he has been acting as manager on an ostrich farm for the last three years, far up the country. So I lost no time in sending up a note to him, telling him, if he had not forgotten old times, to come down and see me while I was lying off Durban Bay. I heard no more for ten days, and had got in the stores and was to sail the next day, thinking he had given us all up, when a boat hailed us just come over the bar. I saw Archie's white head, and in ten minutes I had him on deck. 'For Heaven's sake--am I cleared, Miles?' was the first thing he said; and when I could not say that he was, it went to my heart to see how the eager look sank away, and he was like a worn-down man of fifty.

Poor fellow, I found he had ridden two hundred miles, with the hope that I had brought him news that his innocence was proved, and the revulsion was almost more than he could bear. You see, he had no notion that we thought him dead, and so he took the entire absence of any effort to trace him as acquiescence in his guilt; and when he found out how it was, he laid me under the strongest injunctions to disclose to no one that he is living--not that he fears any results, but that he says it would only disturb every one and make them wretched--"

"He must have gone and married. The wretch!" broke in Rosamond.

"No, oh no!" cried Anne. "Only hear the rest. 'I told him that I could not see that at all, and that there was a very warm and tender remembrance of him among us all, and he nearly broke down and said, 'For Heaven's sake then, Miles, let them rest in that! There's more peace for them so.' I suppose I looked--I am sure I did not speak-- as though I were a little staggered as to whether he were ashamed to be known; for he drew himself up in the old way I should have known anywhere, and told me there was no reason I should fear to shake hands with him; however his name might be blasted at home, he had done nothing to make himself unworthy of his mother and Jenny--and there was a sob again. So I let him know that up to my last letters from home Jenny was unmarried. I even remembered those descriptive words of yours, Nannie, 'living in patient peacefulness and cheerfulness on his memory.'"

"I was called on deck just then, so I gave him my home photograph- book, and left him with it. I found him crying like a child over it when I came back; I was obliged to strip it of all my best for him, for I could not move him. We went through the whole of the old story, to see if there were any hope; and when he found that Tom Vivian was dead, and George Proudfoot too, without a word about him, he seemed to think it hopeless. He believes that Proudfoot at least, if not Moy, was deeply in debt to Vivian, though not to that extent, and that Vivian probably incited them to 'borrow' from my mother's letter. He was very likely to undertake to get the draft cashed for them, and not to account for the difference. It may have helped to hasten his catastrophe. Moy I never should have suspected; Archie says he should once have done so as little; but he was a plausible fellow, and would do things on the sly, while all along appearing to old Proudfoot as a mentor to George. Archie seemed to feel his prosperity the bitterest pill of all--reigning like one of the squirearchy at Proudfoot Lawn--a magistrate forsooth, with his daughter figuring as an heiress. One thing worth note--Archie says, that when it was too late, he remembered that the under-clerk, Gadley, might not have gone home, and might have heard him explain that the letter had turned up.'"

"Gadley? Why that's the landlord of the 'Three Pigeons!'" exclaimed Rosamond. "It is Mr. Moy's house, and he supports him through thick and thin."

"Yes," said Julius, "the magistrates have been on the point of taking away his license, but Moy always stands up for him. There is something suspicious in that."

"I heard Miss Moy, with my own ears, tell Mrs. Duncombe that he was the apple of her father's eye," cried Rosamond.

"He's bribed! he's bribed! Oh, I see it all. Well, go on, Anne.

If Archie isn't at home before he is a year older--"

Anne went on. "'He allowed that he would have done more wisely in facing it out and standing his trial; but he said, poor fellow, that he felt as if the earth had given way under him. There was not a soul near who believed him; they brought his father's history against him, and moreover he had been at the races, and had been betting, though in fact he had won, and not lost, and the 201. he had become possessed of was his capital, besides the little he could draw out of the bank

"'If he could only have seen Jenny in London she would have turned him back. Indeed, that first stage was to consult her, but he fancied he saw the face of the Wil'sbro' Superintendent in a cab, and the instinct of avoiding arrest carried him to Southampton, where he got a steerage berth in a sailing vessel, and came out to the Cape. He has lived hard enough, but his Scots blood has stood him in good stead, and he has made something as an ivory-hunter, and now has a partnership in an ostrich farm in the Amatongula country.

Still he held to it that it was better he should continue dead to all here, since Mr. Bowater would never forgive him; and the knowledge of his existence would only hinder Jenny's happiness. You should have seen the struggle with which he said that! He left me no choice, indeed; forbade a word to any one, until I suggested that I had a wife, and that my said wife and Julius had put me on the scent. He was immensely struck to find that my sweet Nan came from Glen Fraser. He said the evenings he spent there had done more to renew his home-sickness, and made him half mad after the sight or sound of us, than anything else had done, and I got him to promise to come and see us when we are settled in the bush. What should you say to joining him in ostrich-hatching? or would it be ministering too much to the vanities of the world? However, I'll do something to get him cleared, if it comes to an appeal to old Moy himself, when I come home. Meantime, remember, you are not at liberty to speak a word of this to any one but Julius, and, I suppose, his wife. I hope--' There, Rose, I beg your pardon."

"What does he hope?" asked Rosamond.

"He only hopes she is a cautious woman."

"As cautious as his Nan, eh? Ah, Anne! you're a canny Scot, and maybe think holding your tongue as fine a thing as this Archie does; but I can't bear it. I think it is shocking, just wearing out the heart of the best and sweetest girl in the world."

"At any rate," said Julius, "we must be silent. We have no right to speak, however we may feel."

"You don't expect it will stay a secret, or that he'll go and pluck ostriches like geese, with Miles and Anne, and nobody know it?

'Twould be taking example by their ostriches, indeed!"

"I think so," said Julius, laughing; "but as it stands now, silence is our duty by both Miles and Archie, and Anne herself. We must not make her repent having told us."

"It's lucky I'm not likely to fall in with Jenny just yet," said Rosamond. "Don't leave me alone with her, either of you; if you do, it is at your peril. It is all very well to talk of honour and secrets, but to see the look in her eyes, and know he is alive, seems to me rank cruelty and heartlessness. It is all to let Miles have the pleasure of telling when he comes home."

"Miles is not a woman, nor an Irishwoman," said Julius.

"But he's a sailor, and he's got a feeling heart," said Rosamond; "and if he stands one look of Jenny, why, I'll disown him for the brother-in-law I take him for. By the bye, is not Raymond to know?"

"No," said Anne; "here is a postscript forbidding my telling him or Mrs. Poynsett."

"Indeed! And I suppose Herbert knows nothing?"

"Nothing. He was a boy at school at the time. Say nothing to him, Rose."

"Oh, no; besides, his brain is all run to cricket."

It was but too true. When the sun shone bright in April, and the wickets were set up, Herbert had demonstrated that his influence was a necessity on the village green; and it was true that his goodly and animated presence was as useful morally to the eleven as it was conducive to their triumphs; so his Rector suppressed a few sighs at the frequency of the practices and the endless matches. Compton had played Wil'sbro' and Strawyers, Duddingstone and Woodbury; the choir had played the school, the single the married; and when hay and harvest absorbed the rustic eleven, challenges began among their betters. The officers played the county--Oxonians, Cantabs-- Etonians, Harrovians--and wherever a match was proclaimed, that prime bowler, the Reverend Herbert Bowater, was claimed as the indispensable champion of his cause and country.

If his sister had any power to moderate his zeal, she had had little chance of exercising it; for Mrs. Bowater had had a rheumatic fever in March, and continued so much of an invalid all the summer that Jenny seldom went far from home, only saw her brother on his weekly visits to the sick-room, and was, as Rosamond said, unlikely to become a temptation to the warm heart and eager tongue.

The week-day congregation were surprised one August morning at eight o'clock by the entrance of three ladies in the most recent style of fashionable simplicity, and making the most demonstrative tokens of reverence. As the Rector came out he was seized upon at once by the elder lady.

"Mr. Charnock! I must introduce myself; I knew your dear mother so well when we were both girls. I am so delighted to find such a church--quite an oasis; and I want to ascertain the best hour for calling on her. Quite an invalid--I was so shocked to hear it.

Will the afternoon suit her? I am only here for three days to deposit these two girls, while I take the other on a round of visits. Three daughters are too great an affliction for one's friends, and Bee and Conny are so delighted to be near their brother and with dear Lena Vivian, that I am very glad above all, since I find there are real church privileges--so different from the Vicar of Wil'sbro'. Poor man; he is a great trial."

All this was said between the church and the lych-gate, and almost took Julius's breath away; but Mrs. Poynsett was prepared to welcome her old friend with some warmth and more curiosity.

Lady Susan Strangeways was a high-bred woman, but even high breeding could not prevent her from being overwhelming, especially as there was a great deal more of her than there had been at the last meeting of the friends, so that she was suggestive of Hawthorne's inquiry, whether a man is bound to so many more pounds of flesh than he originally wedded. However, it was prime condition, and activity was not impeded, but rather received impetus. She had already, since her matutinal walk of more than a mile and back, overhauled the stores for the bazaar, inspected the town-hall, given her advice, walked through the ruins for the church, expressed herself strongly on the horrors of the plan, and begun to organize shilling cards, all before Sir Harry had emerged from his room.

She was most warm-hearted and good-natured, and tears glistened in her honest gray eyes as she saw her old friend's helpless state.

"You don't know how much I have improved," said Mrs. Poynsett; "I feel quite at liberty in this chair, all owing to my good daughters- in-law."

"Ah! I have so pitied you for having no girls! My dear daughters have been so entirely one with me--such a blessing in all I have gone through."

Mrs. Poynsett of course declared her complete comfort in her five sons, but Lady Susan was sure that if she had had as many boys, instead of one son and four daughters, she should have been worn out. Lorimer was a dear, affectionate fellow. Those he loved could guide him with a leash of gossamer, but young men in his position were exposed to so many temptations! There ensued a little sighing over the evils of wealth; and to see and hear the two ladies, no one would have thought that Julia Poynsett had married a young man for love--Susan Lorimer an old man for independence.

Possibly with her present principles she would not have done so; but through the vista of a long and prosperous widowhood deficiencies in the courtship were easily forgotten; and perhaps there was the more romance and sentiment now because she had been balked of it in her youth. She had freely allowed her eldest daughter to enter a sisterhood from the purest, most unselfish motives, but there was compensation in talking of her Margaret as a Sister of Mercy.

And ere long she was anxiously inquiring Mrs. Poynsett's opinion of Eleonora Vivian, and making confidences somewhat trying to the mother of the young lady's ardent lover.

She was quite aware that as to fortune there could hardly be a worse match than Miss Vivian; but she was sensible enough to see that her son had a sufficiency, and generous enough to like the idea of redeeming the old estate. Her husband had spent his latter years in a vain search for a faultless property, and his wealth was waiting for Lorimer's settling down. She had always regretted the having no vassals rightfully her own, and had felt the disadvantages of being Lady Bountiful only by tenant right. To save an old estate from entirely passing out of a family, and relieve 'a noble old wreck,'

like Sir Harry, seemed to her so grand a prospect that she could not but cast a little glamour over the manner of the shipwreck. Still, to do her justice, her primary consideration was the blessing such a woman as Lenore might be to her son.

She had not fathomed Lady Tyrrell. No woman could do so without knowing her antecedents, but she understood enough to perceive that Eleonora was not happy with her, and this she attributed to the girl's deep nature and religious aspirations. Rockpier was an ecclesiastical paradise to Lady Susan, and a close bond with Lenore, to whom in London she had given all the facilities that lay in her power for persevering in the observances that were alien to the gay household at home. She valued this constancy exceedingly, and enthusiastically dilated on the young lady's goodness, and indifference to the sensation she had created. "Lorimer allows he never saw her equal for grace and dignity."

Allows! Fancy Frank _allowing_ any perfection in his Lenore! Was it not possible that a little passing encomium on unusual beauty was being promoted and magnified by the mother into a serious attachment? But Lady Tyrrell was playing into her hands, and Lenore's ecclesiastical proclivities were throwing her into the arms of the family!

It hardly seemed fair to feign sympathy, yet any adverse hint would be treason, and Mrs. Poynsett only asked innocently whether her friend had seen her son Frank.