The Dead Secret: A Novel

by Wilkie Collins

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.
A PLOT AGAINST THE SECRET.

Toward the close of the evening, on the day after Mr. Orridge's interview with Mrs. Norbury, the Druid fast coach, running through Cornwall as far as Truro, set down three inside passengers at the door of the booking-office on arriving at its destination. Two of these passengers were an old gentleman and his daughter; the third was Mrs. Jazeph.

The father and daughter collected their luggage and entered the hotel; the outside passengers branched off in different directions with as little delay as possible; Mrs. Jazeph alone stood irresolute on the pavement, and seemed uncertain what she should do next. When the coachman good-naturedly endeavored to assist her in arriving at a decision of some kind, by asking whether he could do any thing to help her, she started, and looked at him suspiciously; then, appearing to recollect herself, thanked him for his kindness, and inquired, with a confusion of words and a hesitation of manner which appeared very extraordinary in the coachman's eyes, whether she might be allowed to leave her trunk at the booking-office for a little while, until she could return and call for it again.

Receiving permission to leave her trunk as long as she pleased, she crossed over the principal street of the town, ascended the pavement on the opposite side, and walked down the first turning she came to. On entering the by-street to which the turning led, she glanced back, satisfied herself that nobody was following or watching her, hastened on a few yards, and stopped again at a small shop devoted to the sale of book-cases, cabinets, work-boxes, and writing-desks. After first looking up at the letters painted over the door—Buschmann, Cabinet-maker, &c.—she peered in at the shop window. A middle-aged man, with a cheerful face, sat behind the counter, polishing a rosewood bracket, and nodding briskly at regular intervals, as if he were humming a tune and keeping time to it with his head. Seeing no customers in the shop, Mrs. Jazeph opened the door and walked in.

As soon as she was inside, she became aware that the cheerful man behind the counter was keeping time, not to a tune of his own humming, but to a tune played by a musical box. The clear ringing notes came from a parlor behind the shop, and the air the box was playing was the lovely "Batti, Batti," of Mozart.

"Is Mr. Buschmann at home?" asked Mrs. Jazeph.

"Yes, ma'am," said the cheerful man, pointing with a smile toward the door that led into the parlor. "The music answers for him. Whenever Mr. Buschmann's box is playing, Mr. Buschmann himself is not far off from it. Did you wish to see him, ma'am?"

"If there is nobody with him."

"Oh, no, he is quite alone. Shall I give any name?"

Mrs. Jazeph opened her lips to answer, hesitated, and said nothing. The shopman, with a quicker delicacy of perception than might have been expected from him, judging by outward appearances, did not repeat the question, but opened the door at once, and admitted the visitor to the presence of Mr. Buschmann.

The shop parlor was a very small room, with an old three-cornered look about it, with a bright green paper on the walls, with a large dried fish in a glass case over the fire-place, with two meerschaum pipes hanging together on the wall opposite, and a neat round table placed as accurately as possible in the middle of the floor. On the table were tea-things, bread, butter, a pot of jam, and a musical box in a quaint, old-fashioned case; and by the side of the table sat a little, rosy-faced, white-haired, simple-looking old man, who started up, when the door was opened, with an appearance of extreme confusion, and touched the top of the musical box so that it might cease playing when it came to the end of the air.

"A lady to speak with you, Sir," said the cheerful shopman. "That is Mr. Buschmann, ma'am," he added in a lower tone, seeing Mrs. Jazeph stop in apparent uncertainty on entering the parlor.

"Will you please to take a seat, ma'am?" said Mr. Buschmann, when the shopman had closed the door and gone back to his counter. "Excuse the music; it will stop directly." He spoke these words in a foreign accent, but with perfect fluency.

Mrs. Jazeph looked at him earnestly while he was addressing her, and advanced a step or two before she said any thing. "Am I so changed?" she asked softly. "So sadly, sadly changed, Uncle Joseph?"

"Gott im Himmel! it's her voice—it's Sarah Leeson!" cried the old man, running up to his visitor as nimbly as if he was a boy again, taking both her hands, and kissing her with an odd, brisk tenderness on the cheek. Although his niece was not at all above the average height of women, Uncle Joseph was so short that he had to raise himself on tiptoe to perform the ceremony of embracing her.

"To think of Sarah coming at last!" he said, pressing her into a chair. "After all these years and years, to think of Sarah Leeson coming to see Uncle Joseph again!"

"Sarah still, but not Sarah Leeson," said Mrs. Jazeph, pressing her thin, trembling hands firmly together, and looking down on the floor while she spoke.

"Ah! married?" said Mr. Buschmann, gayly. "Married, of course. Tell me all about your husband, Sarah."

"He is dead. Dead and forgiven." She murmured the last three words in a whisper to herself.

"Ah! I am so sorry for you! I spoke too suddenly, did I not, my child?" said the old man. "Never mind! No, no; I don't mean that—I mean let us talk of something else. You will have a bit of bread and jam, won't you, Sarah?—ravishing raspberry jam that melts in your mouth. Some tea, then? So, so, she will have some tea, to be sure. And we won't talk of our troubles—at least, not just yet. You look very pale, Sarah—very much older than you ought to look—no, I don't mean that either; I don't mean to be rude. It was your voice I knew you by, my child—your voice that your poor Uncle Max always said would have made your fortune if you would only have learned to sing. Here's his pretty music box going still. Don't look so downhearted—don't, pray. Do listen a little to the music: you remember the box?—my brother Max's box? Why, how you look! Have you forgotten the box that the divine Mozart gave to my brother with his own hand, when Max was a boy in the music school at Vienna? Listen! I have set it going again. It's a song they call 'Batti, Batti;' it's a song in an opera of Mozart's. Ah! beautiful! beautiful! Your Uncle Max said that all music was comprehended in that one song. I know nothing about music, but I have my heart and my ears, and they tell me that Max was right."

Speaking these words with abundant gesticulation and amazing volubility, Mr. Buschmann poured out a cup of tea for his niece, stirred it carefully, and, patting her on the shoulder, begged that she would make him happy by drinking it all up directly. As he came close to her to press this request, he discovered that the tears were in her eyes, and that she was trying to take her handkerchief from her pocket without being observed.

"Don't mind me," she said, seeing the old man's face sadden as he looked at her; "and don't think me forgetful or ungrateful, Uncle Joseph. I remember the box—I remember every thing that you used to take an interest in, when I was younger and happier than I am now. When I last saw you, I came to you in trouble; and I come to you in trouble once more. It seems neglectful in me never to have written to you for so many years past; but my life has been a very sad one, and I thought I had no right to lay the burden of my sorrow on other shoulders than my own."

Uncle Joseph shook his head at these last words, and touched the stop of the musical box. "Mozart shall wait a little," he said, gravely, "till I have told you something. Sarah, hear what I say, and drink your tea, and own to me whether I speak the truth or not. What did I, Joseph Buschmann, tell you, when you first came to me in trouble, fourteen, fifteen, ah more! sixteen years ago, in this town, and in this same house? I said then, what I say again now: 'Sarah's sorrow is my sorrow, and Sarah's joy is my joy;' and if any man asks me reasons for that, I have three to give him."

He stopped to stir up his niece's tea for the second time, and to draw her attention to it by tapping with the spoon on the edge of the cup.

"Three reasons," he resumed. "First, you are my sister's child—some of her flesh and blood, and some of mine, therefore, also. Second, my sister, my brother, and lastly me myself, we owe to your good English father—all. A little word that means much, and may be said again and again—all. Your father's friends cry, Fie! Agatha Buschmann is poor! Agatha Buschmann is foreign! But your father loves the poor German girl, and he marries her in spite of their Fie, Fie. Your father's friends cry Fie! again; Agatha Buschmann has a musician brother, who gabbles to us about Mozart, and who can not make to his porridge salt. Your father says, Good! I like his gabble; I like his playing; I shall get him people to teach; and while I have pinches of salt in my kitchen, he to his porridge shall have pinches of salt too. Your father's friends cry Fie! for the third time. Agatha Buschmann has another brother, a little Stupid-Head, who to the other's gabble can only listen and say Amen. Send him trotting; for the love of Heaven, shut up all the doors and send Stupid-Head trotting, at least. Your father says, No! Stupid-Head has his wits in his hands; he can cut and carve and polish; help him a little at the starting, and after he shall help himself. They are all gone now but me! Your father, your mother, and Uncle Max—they are all gone. Stupid-Head alone remains to remember and to be grateful—to take Sarah's sorrow for his sorrow, and Sarah's joy for his joy."

He stopped again to blow a speck of dust off the musical box. His niece endeavored to speak, but he held up his hand, and shook his forefinger at her warningly.

"No," he said. "It is yet my business to talk, and your business to drink tea. Have I not my third reason still? Ah! you look away from me; you know my third reason before I say a word. When I, in my turn, marry, and my wife dies, and leaves me alone with little Joseph, and when the boy falls sick, who comes then, so quiet, so pretty, so neat, with the bright young eyes, and the hands so tender and light? Who helps me with little Joseph by night and by day? Who makes a pillow for him on her arm when his head is weary? Who holds this box patiently at his ear?—yes! this box, that the hand of Mozart has touched—who holds it closer, closer always, when little Joseph's sense grows dull, and he moans for the friendly music that he has known from a baby, the friendly music that he can now so hardly, hardly hear? Who kneels down by Uncle Joseph when his heart is breaking, and says, 'Oh, hush! hush! The boy is gone where the better music plays, where the sickness shall never waste or the sorrow touch him more?' Who? Ah, Sarah! you can not forget those days; you can not forget the Long Ago! When the trouble is bitter, and the burden is heavy, it is cruelty to Uncle Joseph to keep away; it is kindness to him to come here."

The recollections that the old man had called up found their way tenderly to Sarah's heart. She could not answer him; she could only hold out her hand. Uncle Joseph bent down, with a quaint, affectionate gallantry, and kissed it; then stepped back again to his place by the musical box. "Come!" he said, patting it cheerfully, "we will say no more for a while. Mozart's box, Max's box, little Joseph's box, you shall talk to us again!"

Having put the tiny machinery in motion, he sat down by the table, and remained silent until the air had been played over twice. Then observing that his niece seemed calmer, he spoke to her once more.

"You are in trouble, Sarah," he said, quietly. "You tell me that, and I see it is true in your face. Are you grieving for your husband?"

"I grieve that I ever met him," she answered. "I grieve that I ever married him. Now that he is dead, I can not grieve—I can only forgive him."

"Forgive him? How you look, Sarah, when you say that! Tell me—"

"Uncle Joseph! I have told you that my husband is dead, and that I have forgiven him."

"You have forgiven him? He was hard and cruel with you, then? I see; I see. That is the end, Sarah—but the beginning? Is the beginning that you loved him?"

Her pale cheeks flushed; and she turned her head aside. "It is hard and humbling to confess it," she murmured, without raising her eyes; "but you force the truth from me, uncle. I had no love to give to my husband—no love to give to any man."

"And yet you married him! Wait! it is not for me to blame. It is for me to find out, not the bad, but the good. Yes, yes; I shall say to myself, she married him when she was poor and helpless; she married him when she should have come to Uncle Joseph instead. I shall say that to myself, and I shall pity, but I shall ask no more."

Sarah half reached her hand out to the old man again—then suddenly pushed her chair back, and changed the position in which she was sitting. "It is true that I was poor," she said, looking about her in confusion, and speaking with difficulty. "But you are so kind and so good, I can not accept the excuse that your forbearance makes for me. I did not marry him because I was poor, but—" She stopped, clasped her hands together, and pushed her chair back still farther from the table.

"So! so!" said the old man, noticing her confusion. "We will talk about it no more."

"I had no excuse of love; I had no excuse of poverty," she said, with a sudden burst of bitterness and despair. "Uncle Joseph, I married him because I was too weak to persist in saying No! The curse of weakness and fear has followed me all the days of my life! I said No to him once. I said No to him twice. Oh, uncle, if I could only have said it for the third time! But he followed me, he frightened me, he took away from me all the little will of my own that I had. He made me speak as he wished me to speak, and go where he wished me to go. No, no, no—don't come to me, uncle; don't say any thing. He is gone; he is dead—I have got my release; I have given my pardon! Oh, if I could only go away and hide somewhere! All people's eyes seem to look through me; all people's words seem to threaten me. My heart has been weary ever since I was a young woman; and all these long, long years it has never got any rest. Hush! the man in the shop—I forgot the man in the shop. He will hear us; let us talk in a whisper. What made me break out so? I'm always wrong. Oh me! I'm wrong when I speak; I'm wrong when I say nothing; wherever I go and whatever I do, I'm not like other people. I seem never to have grown up in my mind since I was a little child. Hark! the man in the shop is moving—has he heard me? Oh, Uncle Joseph! do you think he has heard me?"

Looking hardly less startled than his niece, Uncle Joseph assured her that the door was solid, that the man's place in the shop was at some distance from it, and that it was impossible, even if he heard voices in the parlor, that he could also distinguish any words that were spoken in it.

"You are sure of that?" she whispered, hurriedly. "Yes, yes, you are sure of that, or you would not have told me so, would you? We may go on talking now. Not about my married life: that is buried and past. Say that I had some years of sorrow and suffering, which I deserved—say that I had other years of quiet, when I was living in service with masters and mistresses who were often kind to me when my fellow-servants were not—say just that much about my life, and it is saying enough. The trouble that I am in now, the trouble that brings me to you, goes back further than the years we have been talking about—goes back, back, back, Uncle Joseph, to the distant day when we last met."

"Goes back all through the sixteen years!" exclaimed the old man, incredulously. "Goes back, Sarah, even to the Long Ago!"

"Even to that time. Uncle, you remember where I was living, and what had happened to me, when—"

"When you came here in secret? When you asked me to hide you? That was the same week, Sarah, when your mistress died; your mistress who lived away west in the old house. You were frightened, then—pale and frightened as I see you now."

"As every one sees me! People are always staring at me; always thinking that I am nervous, always pitying me for being ill."

Saying these words with a sudden fretfulness, she lifted the tea-cup by her side to her lips, drained it of its contents at a draught, and pushed it across the table to be filled again. "I have come all over thirsty and hot," she whispered. "More tea, Uncle Joseph—more tea."

"It is cold," said the old man. "Wait till I ask for hot water."

"No!" she exclaimed, stopping him as he was about to rise. "Give it me cold; I like it cold. Let nobody else come in—I can't speak if any body else comes in." She drew her chair close to her uncle's, and went on: "You have not forgotten how frightened I was in that by-gone time—do you remember why I was frightened?"

"You were afraid of being followed—that was it, Sarah. I grow old, but my memory keeps young. You were afraid of your master, afraid of his sending servants after you. You had run away; you had spoken no word to any body; and you spoke little—ah, very, very little—even to Uncle Joseph—even to me."

"I told you," said Sarah, dropping her voice to so faint a whisper that the old man could barely hear her—"I told you that my mistress had left me a Secret on her death-bed—a Secret in a letter, which I was to give to my master. I told you I had hidden the letter, because I could not bring myself to deliver it, because I would rather die a thousand times over than be questioned about what I knew of it. I told you so much, I know. Did I tell you no more? Did I not say that my mistress made me take an oath on the Bible?—Uncle! are there candles in the room? Are there candles we can light without disturbing any body, without calling any body in here?"

"There are candles and a match-box in my cupboard," answered Uncle Joseph. "But look out of window, Sarah. It is only twilight—it is not dark yet."

"Not outside; but it is dark here."

"Where?"

"In that corner. Let us have candles. I don't like the darkness when it gathers in corners and creeps along walls."

Uncle Joseph looked all round the room inquiringly; and smiled to himself as he took two candles from the cupboard and lighted them. "You are like the children," he said, playfully, while he pulled down the window-blind. "You are afraid of the dark."

Sarah did not appear to hear him. Her eyes were fixed on the corner of the room which she had pointed out the moment before. When he resumed his place by her side, she never looked round, but laid her hand on his arm, and said to him suddenly—

"Uncle! Do you believe that the dead can come back to this world, and follow the living every where, and see what they do in it?"

The old man started. "Sarah!" he said, "why do you talk so? Why do you ask me such a question?"

"Are there lonely hours," she went on, still never looking away from the corner, still not seeming to hear him, "when you are sometimes frightened without knowing why—frightened all over in an instant, from head to foot? Tell me, uncle, have you ever felt the cold steal round and round the roots of your hair, and crawl bit by bit down your back? I have felt that even in the summer. I have been out of doors, alone on a wide heath, in the heat and brightness of noon, and have felt as if chilly fingers were touching me—chilly, damp, softly creeping fingers. It says in the New Testament that the dead came once out of their graves, and went into the holy city. The dead! Have they rested, rested always, rested forever, since that time?"

Uncle Joseph's simple nature recoiled in bewilderment from the dark and daring speculations to which his niece's questions led. Without saying a word, he tried to draw away the arm which she still held; but the only result of the effort was to make her tighten her grasp, and bend forward in her chair so as to look closer still into the corner of the room.

"My mistress was dying," she said—"my mistress was very near her grave, when she made me take my oath on the Bible. She made me swear never to destroy the letter; and I did not destroy it. She made me swear not to take it away with me, if I left the house; and I did not take it away. She would have made me swear, for the third time, to give it to my master, but death was too quick for her—death stopped her from fastening that third oath on my conscience. But she threatened me, uncle, with the dead dampness on her forehead, and the dead whiteness on her cheeks—she threatened to come to me from the other world if I thwarted her—and I have thwarted her!"

She stopped, suddenly removed her hand from the old man's arm, and made a strange gesture with it toward the part of the room on which her eyes remained fixed. "Rest, mistress, rest," she whispered under her breath. "Is my master alive now? Rest, till the drowned rise. Tell him the Secret when the sea gives up her dead."

"Sarah! Sarah! you are changed—you are ill—you frighten me!" cried Uncle Joseph, starting to his feet.

"WITHOUT SAYING A WORD, HE TRIED TO DRAW AWAY THE ARM SHE STILL HELD."

She turned round slowly, and looked at him with eyes void of all expression, with eyes that seemed to be staring through him vacantly at something beyond.

"Gott im Himmel! what does she see?" He looked round as the exclamation escaped him. "Sarah! what is it! Are you faint? Are you ill? Are you dreaming with your eyes open?"

He took her by both arms and shook her. At the instant when she felt the touch of his hands, she started violently and trembled all over. Their natural expression flew back into her eyes with the rapidity of a flash of light. Without saying a word, she hastily resumed her seat and began stirring the cold tea round and round in her cup, round and round so fast that the liquid overflowed into the saucer.

"Come! she gets more like herself," said Uncle Joseph, watching her.

"More like myself?" she repeated, vacantly.

"So! so!" said the old man, trying to soothe her. "You are ill—what the English call out of sort. They are good doctors here. Wait till to-morrow, you shall have the best."

"I want no doctors. Don't speak of doctors. I can't bear them; they look at me with such curious eyes; they are always prying into me, as if they wanted to find out something. What have we been stopping for? I had so much to say; and we seem to have been stopping just when we ought to have been going on. I am in grief and terror, Uncle Joseph; in grief and terror again about the Secret—"

"No more of that!" pleaded the old man. "No more to-night at least!"

"Why not?"

"Because you will be ill again with talking about it. You will be looking into that corner, and dreaming with your eyes open. You are too ill—yes, yes, Sarah; you are too ill."

"I'm not ill! Oh, why does every body keep telling me that I am ill? Let me talk about it, uncle. I have come to talk about it; I can't rest till I have told you."

She spoke with a changing color and an embarrassed manner, now apparently conscious for the first time that she had allowed words and actions to escape her which it would have been more prudent to have restrained.

"Don't notice me again," she said, with her soft voice, and her gentle, pleading manner. "Don't notice me if I talk or look as I ought not. I lose myself sometimes, without knowing it; and I suppose I lost myself just now. It means nothing, Uncle Joseph—nothing, indeed."

Endeavoring thus to re-assure the old man, she again altered the position of her chair, so as to place her back toward the part of the room to which her face had been hitherto turned.

"Well, well, it is good to hear that," said Uncle Joseph; "but speak no more about the past time, for fear you should lose yourself again. Let us hear about what is now. Yes, yes, give me my way. Leave the Long Ago to me, and take you the present time. I can go back through the sixteen years as well as you. Ah! you doubt it? Hear me tell you what happened when we last met—hear me prove myself in three words: You leave your place at the old house—you run away here—you stop in hiding with me, while your master and his servants are hunting after you—you start off, when your road is clear, to work for your living, as far away from Cornwall as you can get—I beg and pray you to stop with me, but you are afraid of your master, and away you go. There! that is the whole story of your trouble the last time you came to this house. Leave it so; and tell me what is the cause of your trouble now."

"The past cause of my trouble, Uncle Joseph, and the present cause of my trouble are the same. The Secret—"

"What! you will go back to that!"

"I must go back to it."

"And why?"

"Because the Secret is written in a letter—"

"Yes; and what of that?"

"And the letter is in danger of being discovered. It is, uncle—it is! Sixteen years it has lain hidden—and now, after all that long time, the dreadful chance of its being dragged to light has come like a judgment. The one person in all the world who ought never to set eyes on that letter is the very person who is most likely to find it!"

"So! so! Are you very certain, Sarah? How do you know it?"

"I know it from her own lips. Chance brought us together—"

"Us? us? What do you mean by us?"

"I mean—uncle, you remember that Captain Treverton was my master when I lived at Porthgenna Tower?"

"I had forgotten his name. But no matter—go on."

"When I left my place, Miss Treverton was a little girl of five years old. She is a married woman now—so beautiful, so clever, such a sweet, youthful, happy face! And she has a child as lovely as herself. Oh, uncle, if you could see her! I would give so much if you could only see her!"

Uncle Joseph kissed his hand and shrugged his shoulders; expressing by the first action homage to the lady's beauty, and by the second resignation under the misfortune of not being able to see her. "Well, well," he said, philosophically, "put this shining woman by, and let us go on."

"Her name is Frankland now," said Sarah. "A prettier name than Treverton—a much prettier name, I think. Her husband is fond of her—I am sure he is. How can he have any heart at all, and not be fond of her?"

"So! so!" exclaimed Uncle Joseph, looking very much perplexed. "Good, if he is fond of her—very good. But what labyrinth are we getting into now? Wherefore all this about a husband and a wife? My word of honor, Sarah, but your explanation explains nothing—it only softens my brains."

"I must speak of her and of Mr. Frankland, uncle. Porthgenna Tower belongs to her husband now, and they are both going to live there."

"Ah! we are getting back into the straight road at last."

"They are going to live in the very house that holds the Secret; they are going to repair that very part of it where the letter is hidden. She will go into the old rooms—I heard her say so; she will search about in them to amuse her curiosity; workmen will clear them out, and she will stand by in her idle hours, looking on."

"But she suspects nothing of the Secret?"

"God forbid she ever should!"

"And there are many rooms in the house? And the letter in which the Secret is written is hidden in one of the many? Why should she hit on that one?"

"Because I always say the wrong thing! because I always get frightened and lose myself at the wrong time! The letter is hidden in a room called the Myrtle Room, and I was foolish enough, weak enough, crazed enough, to warn her against going into it."

"Ah, Sarah! Sarah! that was a mistake, indeed."

"I can't tell what possessed me—I seemed to lose my senses when I heard her talking so innocently of amusing herself by searching through the old rooms, and when I thought of what she might find there. It was getting on toward night, too; the horrible twilight was gathering in the corners and creeping along the walls. I longed to light the candles, and yet I did not dare, for fear she should see the truth in my face. And when I did light them it was worse. Oh, I don't know how I did it! I don't know why I did it! I could have torn my tongue out for saying the words, and still I said them. Other people can think for the best; other people can act for the best; other people have had a heavy weight laid on their minds, and have not dropped under it as I have. Help me, uncle, for the sake of old times when we were happy—help me with a word of advice."

"I will help you; I live to help you, Sarah! No, no, no—you must not look so forlorn; you must not look at me with those crying eyes. Come! I will advise this minute—but say in what; only say in what."

"Have I not told you?"

"No; you have not told me a word yet."

"I will tell you now."

She paused, looked away distrustfully toward the door leading into the shop, listened a little, and resumed: "I am not at the end of my journey yet, Uncle Joseph—I am here on my way to Porthgenna Tower—on my way to the Myrtle Room—on my way, step by step, to the place where the letter lies hid. I dare not destroy it; I dare not remove it; but run what risk I may, I must take it out of the Myrtle Room."

Uncle Joseph said nothing, but he shook his head despondingly.

"I must," she repeated; "before Mrs. Frankland gets to Porthgenna, I must take that letter out of the Myrtle Room. There are places in the old house where I may hide it again—places that she would never think of—places that she would never notice. Only let me get it out of the one room that she is sure to search in, and I know where to hide it from her and from every one forever."

Uncle Joseph reflected, and shook his head again—then said: "One word, Sarah; does Mrs. Frankland know which is the Myrtle Room?"

"I did my best to destroy all trace of that name when I hid the letter; I hope and believe she does not. But she may find out—remember the words I was crazed enough to speak; they will set her seeking for the Myrtle Room; they are sure to do that."

"And if she finds it? And if she finds the letter?"

"It will cause misery to innocent people; it will bring death to me. Don't push your chair from me, uncle! It is not shameful death I speak of. The worst injury I have done is injury to myself; the worst death I have to fear is the death that releases a worn-out spirit and cures a broken heart."

"Enough—enough so," said the old man. "I ask for no secret, Sarah, that is not yours to give. It is all dark to me—very dark, very confused. I look away from it; I look only toward you. Not with doubt, my child, but with pity, and with sorrow, too—sorrow that ever you went near that house of Porthgenna—sorrow that you are now going to it again."

"I have no choice, uncle, but to go. If every step on the road to Porthgenna took me nearer and nearer to my death, I must still tread it. Knowing what I know, I can't rest, I can't sleep—my very breath won't come freely—till I have got that letter out of the Myrtle Room. How to do it—oh, Uncle Joseph, how to do it, without being suspected, without being discovered by any body—that is what I would almost give my life to know! You are a man; you are older and wiser than I am; no living creature ever asked you for help in vain—help me now! my only friend in all the world, help me a little with a word of advice!"

Uncle Joseph rose from his chair, and folded his arms resolutely, and looked his niece full in the face.

"You will go?" he said. "Cost what it may, you will go? Say, for the last time, Sarah, is it yes or no?"

"Yes! For the last time, I say Yes."

"Good. And you will go soon?"

"I must go to-morrow. I dare not waste a single day; hours even may be precious for any thing I can tell."

"You promise me, my child, that the hiding of this Secret does good, and that the finding of it will do harm?"

"If it was the last word I had to speak in this world, I would say Yes!"

"You promise me, also, that you want nothing but to take the letter out of the Myrtle Room, and put it away somewhere else?"

"Nothing but that."

"And it is yours to take and yours to put? No person has a better right to touch it than you?"

"Now that my master is dead, no person."

"Good. You have given me my resolution. I have done. Sit you there, Sarah; and wonder, if you like, but say nothing." With these words, Uncle Joseph stepped lightly to the door leading into the shop, opened it, and called to the man behind the counter.

"Samuel, my friend," he said. "To-morrow I go a little ways into the country with my niece, who is this lady here. You keep shop and take orders, and be just as careful as you always are, till I get back. If any body comes and asks for Mr. Buschmann, say he has gone a little ways into the country, and will be back in a few days. That is all. Shut up the shop, Samuel, my friend, for the night; and go to your supper. I wish you good appetite, nice victuals, and sound sleep."

Before Samuel could thank his master, the door was shut again. Before Sarah could say a word, Uncle Joseph's hand was on her lips, and Uncle Joseph's handkerchief was wiping away the tears that were now falling fast from her eyes.

"I will have no more talking, and no more crying," said the old man. "I am a German, and I glory in the obstinacy of six Englishmen, all rolled into one. To-night you sleep here, to-morrow we talk again of all this. You want me to help you with a word of advice. I will help you with myself, which is better than advice, and I say no more till I fetch my pipe down from the wall there, and ask him to make me think. I smoke and think to-night—I talk and do to-morrow. And you, you go up to bed; you take Uncle Max's music box in your hand, and you let Mozart sing the cradle song before you go to sleep. Yes, yes, my child, there is always comfort in Mozart—better comfort than in crying. What is there to cry about, or to thank about? Is it so great a wonder that I will not let my sister's child go alone to make a venture in the dark? I said Sarah's sorrow was my sorrow, and Sarah's joy my joy; and now, if there is no way of escape—if it must indeed be done—I also say: Sarah's risk to-morrow is Uncle Joseph's risk to-morrow, too! Good-night, my child—good-night."

---

CHAPTER II.
OUTSIDE THE HOUSE.

The next morning wrought no change in the resolution at which Uncle Joseph had arrived overnight. Out of the amazement and confusion produced in his mind by his niece's avowal of the object that had brought her to Cornwall, he had contrived to extract one clear and definite conclusion—that she was obstinately bent on placing herself in a situation of uncertainty, if not of absolute peril. Once persuaded of this, his kindly instincts all sprang into action, his natural firmness on the side of self sacrifice asserted itself, and his determination not to let Sarah proceed on her journey alone, followed as a matter of course.

Strong in the self-denying generosity of his purpose—though strong in nothing else—when he and his niece met in the morning, and when Sarah spoke self-reproachfully of the sacrifice that he was making, of the serious hazards to which he was exposing himself for her sake, he refused to listen to her just as obstinately as he had refused the previous night. There was no need, he said, to speak another word on that subject. If she had abandoned her intention of going to Porthgenna, she had only to say so. If she had not, it was mere waste of breath to talk any more, for he was deaf in both ears to every thing in the shape of a remonstrance that she could possibly address to him. Having expressed himself in these uncompromising terms, Uncle Joseph abruptly dismissed the subject, and tried to turn the conversation to a cheerful every-day topic by asking his niece how she had passed the night.

"I was too anxious to sleep," she answered. "I can't fight with my fears and misgivings as some people can. All night long they keep me waking and thinking as if it was day."

"Thinking about what?" asked Uncle Joseph. "About the letter that is hidden? about the house of Porthgenna? about the Myrtle Room?"

"About how to get into the Myrtle Room," she said. "The more I try to plan and ponder, and settle beforehand what I shall do, the more confused and helpless I seem to be. All last night, uncle, I was trying to think of some excuse for getting inside the doors of Porthgenna Tower—and yet, if I was standing on the house-step at this moment, I should not know what to say when the servant and I first came face to face. How are we to persuade them to let us in? How am I to slip out of sight, even if we do get in? Can't you tell me?—you will try, Uncle Joseph—I am sure you will try. Only help me so far, and I think I can answer for the rest. If they keep the keys where they used to keep them in my time, ten minutes to myself is all I should want—ten minutes, only ten short minutes, to make the end of my life easier to me than the beginning has been; to help me to grow old quietly and resignedly, if it is God's will that I should live out my years. Oh, how happy people must be who have all the courage they want; who are quick and clever, and have their wits about them! You are readier than I am, uncle; you said last night that you would think about how to advise me for the best—what did your thoughts end in? You will make me so much easier if you will only tell me that."

Uncle Joseph nodded assentingly, assumed a look of the profoundest gravity, and slowly laid his forefinger along the side of his nose.

"What did I promise you last night?" he said. "Was it not to take my pipe, and ask him to make me think? Good, I smoke three pipes, and think three thoughts. My first thought is—Wait! My second thought is again—Wait! My third thought is yet once more—Wait! You say you will be easy, Sarah, if I tell you the end of all my thoughts. Good, I have told you. There is the end—you are easy—it is all light."

"Wait?" repeated Sarah, with a look of bewilderment which suggested any thing rather than a mind at ease. "I am afraid, uncle, I don't quite understand. Wait for what? Wait till when?"

"Wait till we arrive at the house, to be sure! Wait till we are got outside the door; then is time enough to think how we are to get in," said Uncle Joseph, with an air of conviction. "You understand now?"

"Yes—at least I understand better than I did. But there is still another difficulty left. Uncle! I must tell you more than I intended ever to tell any body—I must tell you that the letter is locked up."

"Locked up in a room?"

"Worse than that—locked up in something inside the room. The key that opens the door—even if I get it—the key that opens the door of the room is not all I want. There is another key besides that, a little key—" She stopped, with a confused, startled look.

"A little key that you have lost?" asked Uncle Joseph.

"I threw it down the well in the village on the morning when I made my escape from Porthgenna. Oh, if I had only kept it about me! If it had only crossed my mind that I might want it again!"

"Well, well; there is no help for that now. Tell me, Sarah, what the something is which the letter is hidden in."

"I am afraid of the very walls hearing me."

"What nonsense! Come! whisper it to me."

She looked all round her distrustfully, and then whispered into the old man's ear. He listened eagerly, and laughed when she was silent again. "Bah!" he cried. "If that is all, make yourself happy. As you wicked English people say, it is as easy as lying. Why, my child, you can burst him open for yourself."

"Burst it open? How?"

Uncle Joseph went to the window-seat, which was made on the old-fashioned plan, to serve the purpose of a chest as well as a seat. He opened the lid, searched among some tools which lay in the receptacle beneath, and took out a chisel. "See," he said, demonstrating on the top of the window-seat the use to which the tool was to be put. "You push him in so—crick! Then you pull him up so—crack! It is the business of one little moment—crick! crack!—and the lock is done for. Take the chisel yourself, wrap him up in a bit of that stout paper there, and put him in your pocket. What are you waiting for? Do you want me to show you again, or do you think you can do it now for yourself?"

"I should like you to show me again, Uncle Joseph, but not now—not till we have got to the end of our journey."

"Good. Then I may finish my packing up, and go ask about the coach. First and foremost, Mozart must put on his great coat, and travel with us." He took up the musical box, and placed it carefully in a leather case, which he slung by a strap over one shoulder. "Next, there is my pipe, the tobacco to feed him with, and the matches to set him alight. Last, here is my old German knapsack, which I pack last night. See! here is shirt, night-cap, comb, pocket-handkerchief, sock. Say I am an emperor, and what do I want more than that? Good. I have Mozart, I have the pipe, I have the knapsack. I have—stop! stop; there is the old leather purse; he must not be forgotten. Look! here he is. Listen! Ting, ting, ting! He jingles; he has in his inside money. Aha, my friend, my good Leather, you shall be lighter and leaner before you come home again. So, so—it is all complete; we are ready for the march now, from our tops to our toes. Good-by, Sarah, my child, for a little half-hour; you shall wait here and amuse yourself while I go ask for the coach."

When Uncle Joseph came back, he brought his niece information that a coach would pass through Truro in an hour's time, which would set them down at a stage not more than five or six miles distant from the regular post-town of Porthgenna. The only direct conveyance to the post-town was a night-coach which carried the letter-bags, and which stopped to change horses at Truro at the very inconvenient hour of two o'clock in the morning. Being of opinion that to travel at bed-time was to make a toil of a pleasure, Uncle Joseph recommended taking places in the day-coach, and hiring any conveyance that could be afterward obtained to carry his niece and himself on to the post-town. By this arrangement they would not only secure their own comfort, but gain the additional advantage of losing as little time as possible at Truro before proceeding on their journey to Porthgenna.

The plan thus proposed was the plan followed. When the coach stopped to change horses, Uncle Joseph and his niece were waiting to take their places by it. They found all the inside seats but one disengaged, were set down two hours afterward at the stage that was nearest to the destination for which they were bound, hired a pony-chaise there, and reached the post-town between one and two o'clock in the afternoon.

Dismissing their conveyance at the inn, from motives of caution which were urged by Sarah, they set forth to walk across the moor to Porthgenna. On their way out of the town they met the postman returning from his morning's delivery of letters in the surrounding district. His bag had been much heavier and his walk much longer that morning than usual. Among the extra letters that had taken him out of his ordinary course was one addressed to the housekeeper at Porthgenna Tower, which he had delivered early in the morning, when he first started on his rounds.

Throughout the whole journey, Uncle Joseph had not made a single reference to the object for which it had been undertaken. Possessing a child's simplicity of nature, he was also endowed with a child's elasticity of disposition. The doubts and forebodings which troubled his niece's spirit, and kept her silent and thoughtful and sad, cast no darkening shadow over the natural sunshine of his mind. If he had really been traveling for pleasure alone, he could not have enjoyed more thoroughly than he did the different sights and events of the journey. All the happiness which the passing minute had to give him he took as readily and gratefully as if there was no uncertainty in the future, no doubt, difficulty, or danger lying in wait for him at the journey's end. Before he had been half an hour in the coach he had begun to tell the third inside passenger—a rigid old lady, who stared at him in speechless amazement—the whole history of the musical box, ending the narrative by setting it playing, in defiance of all the noise that the rolling wheels could make. When they left the coach, he was just as sociable afterward with the driver of the chaise, vaunting the superiority of German beer over Cornish cider, and making his remarks upon the objects which they passed on the road with the pleasantest familiarity, and the heartiest enjoyment of his own jokes. It was not till he and Sarah were well out of the little town, and away by themselves on the great moor which stretched beyond it, that his manner altered, and his talk ceased altogether. After walking on in silence for some little time, with his niece's arm in his, he suddenly stopped, looked her earnestly and kindly in the face, and laid his hand on hers.

"There is yet one thing more I want to ask you, my child," he said. "The journey has put it out of my head, but it has been in my heart all the time. When we leave this place of Porthgenna, and get back to my house, you will not go away? you will not leave Uncle Joseph again? Are you in service still, Sarah? Are you not your own master yet?"

"I was in service a few days since," she answered; "but I am free now. I have lost my place."

"Aha! You have lost your place; and why?"

"Because I would not hear an innocent person unjustly blamed. Because—"

She checked herself. But the few words she had said were spoken with such a suddenly heightened color, and with such an extraordinary emphasis and resolution of tone, that the old man opened his eyes as widely as possible, and looked at his niece in undisguised astonishment.

"So! so! so!" he exclaimed. "What! You have had a quarrel, Sarah!"

"Hush! Don't ask me any more questions now!" she pleaded earnestly. "I am too anxious and too frightened to answer. Uncle! this is Porthgenna Moor—this is the road I passed over, sixteen years ago, when I ran away to you. Oh! let us get on, pray let us get on! I can't think of any thing now but the house we are so near, and the risk we are going to run."

They went on quickly, in silence. Half an hour's rapid walking brought them to the highest elevation on the moor, and gave the whole western prospect grandly to their view.

There, below them, was the dark, lonesome, spacious structure of Porthgenna Tower, with the sunlight already stealing round toward the windows of the west front! There was the path winding away to it gracefully over the brown moor, in curves of dazzling white! There, lower down, was the solitary old church, with the peaceful burial-ground nestling by its side! There, lower still, were the little scattered roofs of the fishermen's cottages! And there, beyond all, was the changeless glory of the sea, with its old seething lines of white foam, with the old winding margin of its yellow shores! Sixteen long years—such years of sorrow, such years of suffering, such years of change, counted by the pulses of the living heart!—had passed over the dead tranquillity of Porthgenna, and had altered it as little as if they had all been contained within the lapse of a single day!

The moments when the spirit within us is most deeply stirred are almost invariably the moments also when its outward manifestations are hardest to detect. Our own thoughts rise above us; our own feelings lie deeper than we can reach. How seldom words can help us, when their help is most wanted! How often our tears are dried up when we most long for them to relieve us! Was there ever a strong emotion in this world that could adequately express its own strength? What third person, brought face to face with the old man and his niece, as they now stood together on the moor, would have suspected, to look at them, that the one was contemplating the landscape with nothing more than a stranger's curiosity, and that the other was viewing it through the recollections of half a lifetime? The eyes of both were dry, the tongues of both were silent, the faces of both were set with equal attention toward the prospect. Even between themselves there was no real sympathy, no intelligible appeal from one spirit to the other. The old man's quiet admiration of the view was not more briefly and readily expressed, when they moved forward and spoke to each other, than the customary phrases of assent by which his niece replied to the little that he said. How many moments there are in this mortal life, when, with all our boasted powers of speech, the words of our vocabulary treacherously fade out, and the page presents nothing to us but the sight of a perfect blank!

Slowly descending the slope of the moor, the uncle and niece drew nearer and nearer to Porthgenna Tower. They were within a quarter of an hour's walk of the house when Sarah stopped at a place where a second path intersected the main foot-track which they had hitherto been following. On the left hand, as they now stood, the cross-path ran on until it was lost to the eye in the expanse of the moor. On the right hand it led straight to the church.

"What do we stop for now?" asked Uncle Joseph, looking first in one direction and then in the other.

"Would you mind waiting for me here a little while, uncle? I can't pass the church path—" (she paused, in some trouble how to express herself)—"without wishing (as I don't know what may happen after we get to the house), without wishing to see—to look at something—" She stopped again, and turned her face wistfully toward the church. The tears, which had never wetted her eyes at the first view of Porthgenna, were beginning to rise in them now.

Uncle Joseph's natural delicacy warned him that it would be best to abstain from asking her for any explanations.

"Go you where you like, to see what you like," he said, patting her on the shoulder. "I shall stop here to make myself happy with my pipe; and Mozart shall come out of his cage, and sing a little in this fine fresh air." He unslung the leather case from his shoulder while he spoke, took out the musical box, and set it ringing its tiny peal to the second of the two airs which it was constructed to play—the minuet in Don Giovanni. Sarah left him looking about carefully, not for a seat for himself, but for a smooth bit of rock to place the box upon. When he had found this, he lit his pipe, and sat down to his music and his smoking, like an epicure to a good dinner. "Aha!" he exclaimed to himself, looking round as composedly at the wild prospect on all sides of him as if he was still in his own little parlor at Truro—"Aha! Here is a fine big music-room, my friend Mozart, for you to sing in! Ouf! there is wind enough in this place to blow your pretty dance-tune out to sea, and give the sailor-people a taste of it as they roll about in their ships."

"SHE SIGHED HEAVILY AS SHE FOLLOWED THE LETTERS OF THE INSCRIPTION MECHANICALLY, ONE BY ONE, WITH HER FINGER."

Meanwhile Sarah walked on rapidly toward the church, and entered the inclosure of the little burial-ground. Toward that same part of it to which she had directed her steps on the morning of her mistress's death, she now turned her face again, after a lapse of sixteen years. Here, at least, the march of time had left its palpable track—its foot-prints whose marks were graves. How many a little spot of ground, empty when she last saw it, had its mound and its head-stone now! The one grave that she had come to see—the grave which had stood apart in the by-gone days, had companion graves on the right hand and on the left. She could not have singled it out but for the weather stains on the head-stone, which told of storm and rain over it, that had not passed over the rest. The mound was still kept in shape; but the grass grew long, and waved a dreary welcome to her as the wind swept through it. She knelt down by the stone, and tried to read the inscription. The black paint which had once made the carved words distinct was all flayed off from them now. To any other eyes but hers the very name of the dead man would have been hard to trace. She sighed heavily as she followed the letters of the inscription mechanically, one by one, with her finger:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF
Hugh Polwheal,
AGED 26 YEARS.
HE MET WITH HIS DEATH
THROUGH THE FALL OF A ROCK
IN
PORTHGENNA MINE,
DECEMBER 17TH, 1823.

Her hand lingered over the letters after it had followed them to the last line, and she bent forward and pressed her lips on the stone.

"Better so!" she said to herself, as she rose from her knees, and looked down at the inscription for the last time. "Better it should fade out so! Fewer strangers' eyes will see it; fewer strangers' feet will follow where mine have been—he will lie all the quieter in the place of his rest!"

She brushed the tears from her eyes, and gathered a few blades of grass from the grave—then left the church-yard. Outside the hedge that surrounded the inclosure she stopped for a moment, and drew from the bosom of her dress the little book of Wesley's Hymns which she had taken with her from the desk in her bedroom on the morning of her flight from Porthgenna. The withered remains of the grass that she had plucked from the grave sixteen years ago lay between the pages still. She added to them the fresh fragments that she had just gathered, replaced the book in the bosom of her dress, and hastened back over the moor to the spot where the old man was waiting for her.

She found him packing up the musical box again in its leather case. "A good wind," he said, holding up the palm of his hand to the fresh breeze that was sweeping over the moor—"A very good wind, indeed, if you take him by himself—but a bitter bad wind if you take him with Mozart. He blows off the tune as if it was the hat on my head. You come back, my child, just at the nick of time—just when my pipe is done, and Mozart is ready to travel along the road once more. Ah, have you got the crying look in your eyes again, Sarah? What have you met with to make you cry? So! so! I see—the fewer questions I ask just now, the better you will like me. Good. I have done. No! I have a last question yet. What are we standing here for? why do we not go on?"

"Yes, yes; you are right, Uncle Joseph; let us go on at once. I shall lose all the little courage I have if we stay here much longer looking at the house."

They proceeded down the path without another moment of delay. When they had reached the end of it, they stood opposite the eastern boundary wall of Porthgenna Tower. The principal entrance to the house, which had been very rarely used of late years, was in the west front, and was approached by a terrace road that overlooked the sea. The smaller entrance, which was generally used, was situated on the south side of the building, and led through the servants' offices to the great hall and the west staircase. Sarah's old experience of Porthgenna guided her instinctively toward this part of the house. She led her companion on until they gained the southern angle of the east wall—then stopped and looked about her. Since they had passed the postman and had entered on the moor, they had not set eyes on a living creature; and still, though they were now under the very walls of Porthgenna, neither man, woman, nor child—not even a domestic animal—appeared in view.

"It is very lonely here," said Sarah, looking round her distrustfully; "much lonelier than it used to be."

"Is it only to tell me what I can see for myself that you are stopping now?" asked Uncle Joseph, whose inveterate cheerfulness would have been proof against the solitude of Sahara itself.

"No, no!" she answered, in a quick, anxious whisper. "But the bell we must ring at is so close—only round there—I should like to know what we are to say when we come face to face with the servant. You told me it was time enough to think about that when we were at the door. Uncle! we are all but at the door now. What shall we do?"

"The first thing to do," said Uncle Joseph, shrugging his shoulders, "is surely to ring."

"Yes—but when the servant comes, what are we to say?"

"Say?" repeated Uncle Joseph, knitting his eyebrows quite fiercely with the effort of thinking, and rapping his forehead with his forefinger just under his hat—"Say? Stop, stop, stop, stop! Ah, I have got it! I know! Make yourself quite easy, Sarah. The moment the door is opened, all the speaking to the servant shall be done by me."

"Oh, how you relieve me! What shall you say?"

"Say? This—'How do you do? We have come to see the house.'"

When he had disclosed that remarkable expedient for effecting an entrance into Porthgenna Tower, he spread out both his hands interrogatively, drew back several paces from his niece, and looked at her with the serenely self-satisfied air of a man who has leaped, at one mental bound, from a doubt to a discovery. Sarah gazed at him in astonishment. The expression of absolute conviction on his face staggered her. The poorest of all the poor excuses for gaining admission into the house which she herself had thought of, and had rejected, during the previous night, seemed like the very perfection of artifice by comparison with such a childishly simple expedient as that suggested by Uncle Joseph. And yet there he stood, apparently quite convinced that he had hit on the means of smoothing away all obstacles at once. Not knowing what to say, not believing sufficiently in the validity of her own doubts to venture on openly expressing an opinion either one way or the other, she took the last refuge that was now left open to her—she endeavored to gain time.

"It is very, very good of you, uncle, to take all the difficulty of speaking to the servant on your own shoulders," she said; the hidden despondency at her heart expressing itself, in spite of her, in the faintness of her voice and the forlorn perplexity of her eyes. "But would you mind waiting a little before we ring at the door, and walking up and down for a few minutes by the side of this wall, where nobody is likely to see us? I want to get a little more time to prepare myself for the trial that I have to go through; and—and in case the servant makes any difficulties about letting us in—I mean difficulties that we can not just now anticipate—would it not be as well to think of something else to say at the door? Perhaps, if you were to consider again—"

"There is not the least need," interposed Uncle Joseph. "I have only to speak to the servant, and—crick! crack!—you will see that we shall get in. But I will walk up and down as long as you please. There is no reason, because I have done all my thinking in one moment, that you should have done all your thinking in one moment too. No, no, no—no reason at all." Saying those words with a patronizing air and a self-satisfied smile, which would have been irresistibly comical under any less critical circumstances, the old man again offered his arm to his niece, and led her back over the broken ground that lay under the eastern wall of Porthgenna Tower.

While Sarah was waiting in doubt outside the walls, it happened, by a curious coincidence, that another person, vested with the highest domestic authority, was also waiting in doubt inside the walls. This person was no other than the housekeeper of Porthgenna Tower; and the cause of her perplexity was nothing less than the letter which had been delivered by the postman that very morning.

It was a letter from Mrs. Frankland, which had been written after she had held a long conversation with her husband and Mr. Orridge, on receiving the last fragments of information which the doctor was able to communicate in reference to Mrs. Jazeph.

The housekeeper had read the letter through over and over again, and was more puzzled and astonished by it at every fresh reading. She was now waiting for the return of the steward, Mr. Munder, from his occupations out of doors, with the intention of taking his opinion on the singular communication which she had received from her mistress.

While Sarah and her uncle were still walking up and down outside the eastern wall, Mr. Munder entered the housekeeper's room. He was one of those tall, grave, benevolent-looking men, with a conical head, a deep voice, a slow step, and a heavy manner, who passively contrive to get a great reputation for wisdom without the trouble of saying or doing any thing to deserve it. All round the Porthgenna neighborhood the steward was popularly spoken of as a remarkably sound, sensible man; and the housekeeper, although a sharp woman in other matters, in this one respect shared to a large extent in the general delusion.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Pentreath," said Mr. Munder. "Any news to-day?" What a weight and importance his deep voice and his impressively slow method of using it, gave to those two insignificant sentences!

"News, Mr. Munder, that will astonish you," replied the housekeeper. "I have received a letter this morning from Mrs. Frankland, which is, without any exception, the most mystifying thing of the sort I ever met with. I am told to communicate the letter to you; and I have been waiting the whole morning to hear your opinion of it. Pray sit down, and give me all your attention—for I do positively assure you that the letter requires it."

Mr. Munder sat down, and became the picture of attention immediately—not of ordinary attention, which can be wearied, but of judicial attention, which knows no fatigue, and is superior alike to the power of dullness and the power of time. The housekeeper, without wasting the precious minutes—Mr. Munder's minutes, which ranked next on the scale of importance to a prime minister's!—opened her mistress's letter, and, resisting the natural temptation to make a few more prefatory remarks on it, immediately favored the steward with the first paragraph, in the following terms:

"Mrs. Pentreath,—You must be tired of receiving letters from me, fixing a day for the arrival of Mr. Frankland and myself. On this, the third occasion of my writing to you about our plans, it will be best, I think, to make no third appointment, but merely to say that we shall leave West Winston for Porthgenna the moment I can get the doctor's permission to travel."

"So far," remarked Mrs. Pentreath, placing the letter on her lap, and smoothing it out rather irritably while she spoke—"so far, there is nothing of much consequence. The letter certainly seems to me (between ourselves) to be written in rather poor language—too much like common talking to come up to my idea of what a lady's style of composition ought to be—but that is a matter of opinion. I can't say, and I should be the last person to wish to say, that the beginning of Mrs. Frankland's letter is not, upon the whole, perfectly clear. It is the middle and the end that I wish to consult you about, Mr. Munder."

"Just so," said Mr. Munder. Only two words, but more meaning in them than two hundred in the mouth of an ordinary man! The housekeeper cleared her throat with extraordinary loudness and elaboration, and read on thus:

"My principal object in writing these lines is to request, by Mr. Frankland's desire, that you and Mr. Munder will endeavor to ascertain, as privately as possible, whether a person now traveling in Cornwall—in whom we happen to be much interested—has been yet seen in the neighborhood of Porthgenna. The person in question is known to us by the name of Mrs. Jazeph. She is an elderly woman, of quiet, lady-like manners, looking nervous and in delicate health. She dresses, according to our experience of her, with extreme propriety and neatness, and in dark colors. Her eyes have a singular expression of timidity, her voice is particularly soft and low, and her manner is frequently marked by extreme hesitation. I am thus particular in describing her, in case she should not be traveling under the name by which we know her.

"For reasons which it is not necessary to state, both my husband and myself think it probable that, at some former period of her life, Mrs. Jazeph may have been connected with the Porthgenna neighborhood. Whether this be the fact or no, it is indisputably certain that she is familiar with the interior of Porthgenna Tower, and that she has an interest of some kind, quite incomprehensible to us, in the house. Coupling these facts with the knowledge we have of her being now in Cornwall, we think it just within the range of possibility that you or Mr. Munder, or some other person in our employment, may meet with her; and we are particularly anxious, if she should by any chance ask to see the house, not only that you should show her over it with perfect readiness and civility, but also that you should take private and particular notice of her conduct from the time when she enters the building to the time when she leaves it. Do not let her out of your sight for a moment; and, if possible, pray get some trustworthy person to follow her unperceived, and ascertain where she goes to after she has quitted the house. It is of the most vital importance that these instructions (strange as they may seem to you) should be implicitly obeyed to the very letter.

"I have only room and time to add that we know nothing to the discredit of this person, and that we particularly desire you will manage matters with sufficient discretion (in case you meet with her) to prevent her from having any suspicion that you are acting under orders, or that you have any especial interest in watching her movements. You will be good enough to communicate this letter to the steward, and you are at liberty to repeat the instructions in it to any other trustworthy person, if necessary.

"Yours truly,
"Rosamond Frankland.

"P.S.—I have left my room, and the baby is getting on charmingly."

"There!" said the housekeeper. "Who is to make head or tail of that, I should like to know! Did you ever, in all your experience, Mr. Munder, meet with such a letter before? Here is a very heavy responsibility laid on our shoulders, without one word of explanation. I have been puzzling my brains about what their interest in this mysterious woman can be the whole morning; and the more I think, the less comes of it. What is your opinion, Mr. Munder? We ought to do something immediately. Is there any course in particular which you feel disposed to point out?"

Mr. Munder coughed dubiously, crossed his right leg over his left, put his head critically on one side, coughed for the second time, and looked at the housekeeper. If it had belonged to any other man in the world, Mrs. Pentreath would have considered that the face which now confronted hers expressed nothing but the most profound and vacant bewilderment. But it was Mr. Munder's face, and it was only to be looked at with sentiments of respectful expectation.

"I rather think—" began Mr. Munder.

"Yes?" said the housekeeper, eagerly.

Before another word could be spoken, the maid-servant entered the room to lay the cloth for Mrs. Pentreath's dinner.

"There, there! never mind now, Betsey," said the housekeeper, impatiently. "Don't lay the cloth till I ring for you. Mr. Munder and I have something very important to talk about, and we can't be interrupted just yet."

She had hardly said the word, before an interruption of the most unexpected kind happened. The door-bell rang. This was a very unusual occurrence at Porthgenna Tower. The few persons who had any occasion to come to the house on domestic business always entered by a small side gate, which was left on the latch in the day-time.

"Who in the world can that be!" exclaimed Mrs. Pentreath, hastening to the window, which commanded a side view of the lower door steps.

The first object that met her eye when she looked out was a lady standing on the lowest step—a lady dressed very neatly in quiet, dark colors.

"Good Heavens, Mr. Munder!" cried the housekeeper, hurrying back to the table, and snatching up Mrs. Frankland's letter, which she had left on it. "There is a stranger waiting at the door at this very moment! a lady! or, at least, a woman—and dressed neatly, dressed in dark colors! You might knock me down, Mr. Munder, with a feather! Stop, Betsey—stop where you are!"

"I was only going, ma'am, to answer the door," said Betsey, in amazement.

"Stop where you are," reiterated Mrs. Pentreath, composing herself by a great effort. "I happen to have certain reasons, on this particular occasion, for descending out of my own place and putting myself into yours. Stand out of the way, you staring fool! I am going up stairs to answer that ring at the door myself."

---

CHAPTER III.
INSIDE THE HOUSE.

Mrs. Pentreath's surprise at seeing a lady through the window, was doubled by her amazement at seeing a gentleman when she opened the door. Waiting close to the bell-handle, after he had rung, instead of rejoining his niece on the step, Uncle Joseph stood near enough to the house to be out of the range of view from Mrs. Pentreath's window. To the housekeeper's excited imagination, he appeared on the threshold with the suddenness of an apparition—the apparition of a little rosy-faced old gentleman, smiling, bowing, and taking off his hat with a superb flourish of politeness, which had something quite superhuman in the sweep and the dexterity of it.

"How do you do? We have come to see the house," said Uncle Joseph, trying his infallible expedient for gaining admission the instant the door was open.

Mrs. Pentreath was struck speechless. Who was this familiar old gentleman with the foreign accent and the fantastic bow? and what did he mean by talking to her as if she was his intimate friend? Mrs. Frankland's letter said not so much, from beginning to end, as one word about him.

"How do you do? We have come to see the house," repeated Uncle Joseph, giving his irresistible form of salutation the benefit of a second trial.

"So you said just now, Sir," remarked Mrs. Pentreath, recovering self-possession enough to use her tongue in her own defense. "Does the lady," she continued, looking down over the old man's shoulder at the step on which his niece was standing—"does the lady wish to see the house too?"

Sarah's gently spoken reply in the affirmative, short as it was, convinced the housekeeper that the woman described in Mrs. Frankland's letter really and truly stood before her. Besides the neat, quiet dress, there was now the softly toned voice, and, when she looked up for a moment, there were the timid eyes also to identify her by! In relation to this one of the two strangers, Mrs. Pentreath, however agitated and surprised she might be, could no longer feel any uncertainty about the course she ought to adopt. But in relation to the other visitor, the incomprehensible old foreigner, she was beset by the most bewildering doubts. Would it be safest to hold to the letter of Mrs. Frankland's instructions, and ask him to wait outside while the lady was being shown over the house? or would it be best to act on her own responsibility, and to risk giving him admission as well as his companion? This was a difficult point to decide, and therefore one which it was necessary to submit to the superior sagacity of Mr. Munder.

"Will you step in for a moment, and wait here while I speak to the steward?" said Mrs. Pentreath, pointedly neglecting to notice the familiar old foreigner, and addressing herself straight through him to the lady on the steps below.

"Thank you very much," said Uncle Joseph, smiling and bowing, impervious to rebuke. "What did I tell you?" he whispered triumphantly to his niece, as she passed him on her way into the house.

Mrs. Pentreath's first impulse was to go down stairs at once, and speak to Mr. Munder. But a timely recollection of that part of Mrs. Frankland's letter which enjoined her not to lose sight of the lady in the quiet dress, brought her to a stand-still the next moment. She was the more easily recalled to a remembrance of this particular injunction by a curious alteration in the conduct of the lady herself, who seemed to lose all her diffidence, and to become surprisingly impatient to lead the way into the interior of the house, the moment she had stepped across the threshold.

"Betsey!" cried Mrs. Pentreath, cautiously calling to the servant after she had only retired a few paces from the visitors—"Betsey! ask Mr. Munder to be so kind as to step this way."

Mr. Munder presented himself with great deliberation, and with a certain lowering dignity in his face. He had been accustomed to be treated with deference, and he was not pleased with the housekeeper for unceremoniously leaving him the moment she heard the ring at the bell, without giving him time to pronounce an opinion on Mrs. Frankland's letter. Accordingly, when Mrs. Pentreath, in a high state of excitement, drew him aside out of hearing, and confided to him, in a whisper, the astounding intelligence that the lady in whom Mr. and Mrs. Frankland were so mysteriously interested was, at that moment, actually standing before him in the house, he received her communication with an air of the most provoking indifference. It was worse still when she proceeded to state her difficulties—warily keeping her eye on the two strangers all the while. Appeal as respectfully as she might to Mr. Munder's superior wisdom for guidance, he persisted in listening with a disparaging frown, and ended by irritably contradicting her when she ventured to add, in conclusion, that her own ideas inclined her to assume no responsibility, and to beg the foreign gentleman to wait outside while the lady, in conformity with Mrs. Frankland's instructions, was being shown over the house.

"Such may be your opinion, ma'am," said Mr. Munder, severely. "It is not mine."

The housekeeper looked aghast. "Perhaps," she suggested, deferentially, "you think that the foreign old gentleman would be likely to insist on going over the house with the lady?"

"Of course I think so," said Mr. Munder. (He had thought nothing of the sort; his only idea just then being the idea of asserting his own supremacy by setting himself steadily in opposition to any preconceived arrangements of Mrs. Pentreath.)

"Then you would take the responsibility of showing them both over the house, seeing that they have both come to the door together?" asked the housekeeper.

"Of course I would," answered the steward, with the promptitude of resolution which distinguishes all superior men.

"Well, Mr. Munder, I am always glad to be guided by your opinion, and I will be guided by it now," said Mrs. Pentreath. "But, as there will be two people to look after—for I would not trust the foreigner out of sight on any consideration whatever—I must really beg you to share the trouble of showing them over the house along with me. I am so excited and nervous that I don't feel as if I had all my wits about me—I never was placed in such a position as this before—I am in the midst of mysteries that I don't understand—and, in short, if I can't count on your assistance, I won't answer for it that I shall not make some mistake. I should be very sorry to make a mistake, not only on my own account, but—" Here the housekeeper stopped, and looked hard at Mr. Munder.

"Go on, ma'am," said Mr. Munder, with cruel composure.

"Not only on my own account," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, demurely, "but on yours; for Mrs. Frankland's letter certainly casts the responsibility of conducting this delicate business on your shoulders as well as on mine."

Mr. Munder recoiled a few steps, turned red, opened his lips indignantly, hesitated, and closed them again. He was fairly caught in a trap of his own setting. He could not retreat from the responsibility of directing the housekeeper's conduct, the moment after he had voluntarily assumed it; and he could not deny that Mrs. Frankland's letter positively and repeatedly referred to him by name. There was only one way of getting out of the difficulty with dignity, and Mr. Munder unblushingly took that way the moment he had recovered self-possession enough to collect himself for the effort.

"I am perfectly amazed, Mrs. Pentreath," he began, with the gravest dignity. "Yes, I repeat, I am perfectly amazed that you should think me capable of leaving you to go over the house alone, under such remarkable circumstances as those we are now placed in. No, ma'am! whatever my other faults may be, shrinking from my share of responsibility is not one of them. I don't require to be reminded of Mrs. Frankland's letter; and—no!—I don't require any apologies. I am quite ready, ma'am—quite ready to show the way up stairs whenever you are."

"The sooner the better, Mr. Munder—for there is that audacious old foreigner actually chattering to Betsey now, as if he had known her all his life!"

The assertion was quite true. Uncle Joseph was exercising his gift of familiarity on the maid-servant (who had lingered to stare at the strangers, instead of going back to the kitchen), just as he had already exercised it on the old lady passenger in the stage-coach, and on the driver of the pony-chaise which took his niece and himself to the post-town of Porthgenna. While the housekeeper and the steward were holding their private conference, he was keeping Betsey in ecstasies of suppressed giggling by the odd questions that he asked about the house, and about how she got on with her work in it. His inquiries had naturally led from the south side of the building, by which he and his companion had entered, to the west side, which they were shortly to explore; and thence round to the north side, which was forbidden ground to every body in the house. When Mrs. Pentreath came forward with the steward, she overheard this exchange of question and answer passing between the foreigner and the maid:

"But tell me, Betzee, my dear," said Uncle Joseph. "Why does nobody ever go into these mouldy old rooms?"

"Because there's a ghost in them," answered Betsey, with a burst of laughter, as if a series of haunted rooms and a series of excellent jokes meant precisely the same thing.

"Hold your tongue directly, and go back to the kitchen," cried Mrs. Pentreath, indignantly. "The ignorant people about here," she continued, still pointedly overlooking Uncle Joseph, and addressing herself only to Sarah, "tell absurd stories about some old rooms on the unrepaired side of the house, which have not been inhabited for more than half a century past—absurd stories about a ghost; and my servant is foolish enough to believe them."

"No, I'm not," said Betsey, retiring, under protest, to the lower regions. "I don't believe a word about the ghost—at least not in the day-time." Adding that important saving clause in a whisper, Betsey unwillingly withdrew from the scene.

Mrs. Pentreath observed, with some surprise, that the mysterious lady in the quiet dress turned very pale at the mention of the ghost story, and made no remark on it whatever. While she was still wondering what this meant, Mr. Munder emerged into dignified prominence, and loftily addressed himself, not to Uncle Joseph, and not to Sarah, but to the empty air between them.

"If you wish to see the house," he said, "you will have the goodness to follow me."

With those words, Mr. Munder turned solemnly into the passage that led to the foot of the west staircase, walking with that peculiar, slow strut in which all serious-minded English people indulge when they go out to take a little exercise on Sunday. The housekeeper, adapting her pace with feminine pliancy to the pace of the steward, walked the national Sabbatarian Polonaise by his side, as if she was out with him for a mouthful of fresh air between the services.

"As I am a living sinner, this going over the house is like going to a funeral!" whispered Uncle Joseph to his niece. He drew her arm into his, and felt, as he did so, that she was trembling.

"What is the matter?" he asked, under his breath.

"Uncle! there is something unnatural about the readiness of these people to show us over the house," was the faintly whispered answer. "What were they talking about just now, out of our hearing? Why did that woman keep her eyes fixed so constantly on me?"

Before the old man could answer, the housekeeper looked round, and begged, with the severest emphasis, that they would be good enough to follow. In less than another minute they were all standing at the foot of the west staircase.

"Aha!" cried Uncle Joseph, as easy and talkative as ever, even in the presence of Mr. Munder himself. "A fine big house, and a very good staircase."

"We are not accustomed to hear either the house or the staircase spoken of in these terms, Sir," said Mr. Munder, resolving to nip the foreigner's familiarity in the bud. "The Guide to West Cornwall, which you would have done well to make yourself acquainted with before you came here, describes Porthgenna Tower as a Mansion, and uses the word Spacious in speaking of the west staircase. I regret to find, Sir, that you have not consulted the Guide-book to West Cornwall."

"And why?" rejoined the unabashed German. "What do I want with a book, when I have got you for my guide? Ah, dear Sir, but you are not just to yourself! Is not a living guide like you, who talks and walks about, better for me than dead leaves of print and paper? Ah, no, no! I shall not hear another word—I shall not hear you do any more injustice to yourself." Here Uncle Joseph made another fantastic bow, looked up smiling into the steward's face, and shook his head several times with an air of friendly reproach.

Mr. Munder felt paralyzed. He could not have been treated with more ease and indifferent familiarity if this obscure foreign stranger had been an English duke. He had often heard of the climax of audacity; and here it was visibly embodied in one small, elderly individual, who did not rise quite five feet from the ground he stood on!

While the steward was swelling with a sense of injury too large for utterance, the housekeeper, followed by Sarah, was slowly ascending the stairs. Uncle Joseph, seeing them go up, hastened to join his niece, and Mr. Munder, after waiting a little while on the mat to recover himself, followed the audacious foreigner with the intention of watching his conduct narrowly, and chastising his insolence at the first opportunity with stinging words of rebuke.

The procession up the stairs thus formed was not, however, closed by the steward; it was further adorned and completed by Betsey, the servant-maid, who stole out of the kitchen to follow the strange visitors over the house, as closely as she could without attracting the notice of Mrs. Pentreath. Betsey had her share of natural human curiosity and love of change. No such event as the arrival of strangers had ever before enlivened the dreary monotony of Porthgenna Tower within her experience; and she was resolved not to stay alone in the kitchen while there was a chance of hearing a stray word of the conversation, or catching a chance glimpse of the proceedings among the company up stairs.

In the mean time the housekeeper had led the way as far as the first-floor landing, on either side of which the principal rooms in the west front were situated. Sharpened by fear and suspicion, Sarah's eyes immediately detected the repairs which had been effected in the banisters and stairs of the second flight.

"You have had workmen in the house?" she said quickly to Mrs. Pentreath.

"You mean on the stairs?" returned the housekeeper. "Yes, we have had workmen there."

"And nowhere else?"

"No. But they are wanted in other places badly enough. Even here, on the best side of the house, half the bedrooms up stairs are hardly fit to sleep in. They were any thing but comfortable, as I have heard, even in the late Mrs. Treverton's time; and since she died—"

The housekeeper stopped with a frown and a look of surprise. The lady in the quiet dress, instead of sustaining the reputation for good manners which had been conferred on her in Mrs. Frankland's letter, was guilty of the unpardonable discourtesy of turning away from Mrs. Pentreath before she had done speaking. Determined not to allow herself to be impertinently silenced in that way, she coldly and distinctly repeated her last words—

"And since Mrs. Treverton died—"

She was interrupted for the second time. The strange lady, turning quickly round again, confronted her with a very pale face and a very eager look, and asked, in the most abrupt manner, an utterly irrelevant question:

"Tell me about that ghost story," she said. "Do they say it is the ghost of a man or of a woman?"

"I was speaking of the late Mrs. Treverton," said the housekeeper, in her severest tones of reproof, "and not of the ghost story about the north rooms. You would have known that, if you had done me the favor to listen to what I said."

"I beg your pardon; I beg your pardon a thousand times for seeming inattentive! It struck me just then—or, at least, I wanted to know—"

"If you care to know about any thing so absurd," said Mrs. Pentreath, mollified by the evident sincerity of the apology that had been offered to her, "the ghost, according to the story, is the ghost of a woman."

The strange lady's face grew whiter than ever; and she turned away once more to the open window on the landing.

"How hot it is!" she said, putting her head out into the air.

"Hot, with a northeast wind!" exclaimed Mrs. Pentreath, in amazement.

Here Uncle Joseph came forward with a polite request to know when they were going to look over the rooms. For the last few minutes he had been asking all sorts of questions of Mr. Munder; and, having received no answers which were not of the shortest and most ungracious kind, had given up talking to the steward in despair.

Mrs. Pentreath prepared to lead the way into the breakfast-room, library, and drawing-room. All three communicated with each other, and each room had a second door opening on a long passage, the entrance to which was on the right-hand side of the first-floor landing. Before leading the way into these rooms, the housekeeper touched Sarah on the shoulder to intimate that it was time to be moving on.

"As for the ghost story," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, while she opened the breakfast-room door, "you must apply to the ignorant people who believe in it, if you want to hear it all told. Whether the ghost is an old ghost or a new ghost, and why she is supposed to walk, is more than I can tell you." In spite of the housekeeper's affectation of indifference toward the popular superstition, she had heard enough of the ghost-story to frighten her, though she would not confess it. Inside the house, or outside the house, nobody much less willing to venture into the north rooms alone could in real truth have been found than Mrs. Pentreath herself.

While the housekeeper was drawing up the blinds in the breakfast-parlor, and while Mr. Munder was opening the door that led out of it into the library, Uncle Joseph stole to his niece's side, and spoke a few words of encouragement to her in his quaint, kindly way.

"Courage!" he whispered. "Keep your wits about you, Sarah, and catch your little opportunity whenever you can."

"My thoughts! My thoughts!" she answered in the same low key. "This house rouses them all against me. Oh, why did I ever venture into it again!"

"You had better look at the view from the window now," said Mrs. Pentreath, after she had drawn up the blind. "It is very much admired."

While affairs were in this stage of progress on the first floor of the house, Betsey, who had been hitherto stealing up by a stair at a time from the hall, and listening with all her ears in the intervals of the ascent, finding that no sound of voices now reached her, bethought herself of returning to the kitchen again, and of looking after the housekeeper's dinner, which was being kept warm by the fire. She descended to the lower regions, wondering what part of the house the strangers would want to see next, and puzzling her brains to find out some excuse for attaching herself to the exploring party.

After the view from the breakfast-room window had been duly contemplated, the library was next entered. In this room, Mrs. Pentreath, having some leisure to look about her, and employing that leisure in observing the conduct of the steward, arrived at the unpleasant conviction that Mr. Munder was by no means to be depended on to assist her in the important business of watching the proceedings of the two strangers. Doubly stimulated to assert his own dignity by the disrespectfully easy manner in which he had been treated by Uncle Joseph, the sole object of Mr. Munder's ambition seemed to be to divest himself as completely as possible of the character of guide, which the unscrupulous foreigner sought to confer on him. He sauntered heavily about the rooms, with the air of a casual visitor, staring out of window, peeping into books on tables, frowning at himself in the chimney-glasses—looking, in short, any where but where he ought to look. The housekeeper, exasperated by this affectation of indifference, whispered to him irritably to keep his eye on the foreigner, as it was quite as much as she could do to look after the lady in the quiet dress.

"Very good; very good," said Mr. Munder, with sulky carelessness. "And where are you going to next, ma'am, after we have been into the drawing-room? Back again, through the library, into the breakfast-room? or out at once into the passage? Be good enough to settle which, as you seem to be in the way of settling every thing."

"Into the passage, to be sure," answered Mrs. Pentreath, "to show the next three rooms beyond these."

Mr. Munder sauntered out of the library, through the door-way of communication, into the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading into the passage—then, to the great disgust of the housekeeper, strolled to the fire-place, and looked at himself in the glass over it, just as attentively as he had looked at himself in the library mirror hardly a minute before.

"This is the west drawing-room," said Mrs. Pentreath, calling to the visitors. "The carving of the stone chimney-piece," she added, with the mischievous intention of bringing them into the closest proximity to the steward, "is considered the finest thing in the whole apartment."

Driven from the looking-glass by this manœuvre, Mr. Munder provokingly sauntered to the window and looked out. Sarah, still pale and silent—but with a certain unwonted resolution just gathering, as it were, in the lines about her lips—stopped thoughtfully by the chimney-piece when the housekeeper pointed it out to her. Uncle Joseph, looking all round the room in his discursive manner, spied, in the farthest corner of it from the door that led into the passage, a beautiful maple-wood table and cabinet, of a very peculiar pattern. His workmanlike enthusiasm was instantly aroused, and he darted across the room to examine the make of the cabinet closely. The table beneath projected a little way in front of it, and, of all the objects in the world, what should he see reposing on the flat space of the projection but a magnificent musical box at least three times the size of his own!

"Aïe! Aïe!! Aïe!!!" cried Uncle Joseph, in an ascending scale of admiration, which ended at the very top of his voice. "Open him! set him going! let me hear what he plays!" He stopped for want of words to express his impatience, and drummed with both hands on the lid of the musical box in a burst of uncontrollable enthusiasm.

"Mr. Munder!" exclaimed the housekeeper, hurrying across the room in great indignation. "Why don't you look? why don't you stop him? He's breaking open the musical box. Be quiet, Sir! How dare you touch me?"

"Set him going! set him going!" reiterated Uncle Joseph, dropping Mrs. Pentreath's arm, which he had seized in his agitation. "Look here! this by my side is a music box too! Set him going! Does he play Mozart? He is three times bigger than ever I saw! See! see! this box of mine—this tiny bit of box that looks nothing by the side of yours—it was given to my own brother by the king of all music-composers that ever lived, by the divine Mozart himself. Set the big box going, and you shall hear the little baby-box pipe after! Ah, dear and good madam, if you love me—"

"Sir!!!" exclaimed the housekeeper, reddening with virtuous indignation to the very roots of her hair.

"What do you mean, Sir, by addressing such outrageous language as that to a respectable female?" inquired Mr. Munder, approaching to the rescue. "Do you think we want your foreign noises, and your foreign morals, and your foreign profanity here? Yes, Sir! profanity. Any man who calls any human individual, whether musical or otherwise, 'divine,' is a profane man. Who are you, you extremely audacious person? Are you an infidel?"

Before Uncle Joseph could say a word in vindication of his principles, before Mr. Munder could relieve himself of any more indignation, they were both startled into momentary silence by an exclamation of alarm from the housekeeper.

"Where is she?" cried Mrs. Pentreath, standing in the middle of the drawing-room, and looking with bewildered eyes all around her.

The lady in the quiet dress had vanished.

She was not in the library, not in the breakfast-room, not in the passage outside. After searching in those three places, the housekeeper came back to Mr. Munder with a look of downright terror in her face, and stood staring at him for a moment perfectly helpless and perfectly silent. As soon as she recovered herself she turned fiercely on Uncle Joseph.

"Where is she? I insist on knowing what has become of her! You cunning, wicked, impudent old man! where is she?" cried Mrs. Pentreath, with no color in her cheeks and no mercy in her eyes.

"I suppose she is looking about the house by herself," said Uncle Joseph. "We shall find her surely as we take our walks through the other rooms." Simple as he was, the old man had, nevertheless, acuteness enough to perceive that he had accidentally rendered the very service to his niece of which she stood in need. If he had been the most artful of mankind, he could have devised no better means of diverting Mrs. Pentreath's attention from Sarah to himself than the very means which he had just used in perfect innocence, at the very moment when his thoughts were farthest away from the real object with which he and his niece had entered the house. "So! so!" thought Uncle Joseph to himself, "while these two angry people were scolding me for nothing, Sarah has slipped away to the room where the letter is. Good! I have only to wait till she comes back, and to let the two angry people go on scolding me as long as they please."

"What are we to do? Mr. Munder! what on earth are we to do?" asked the housekeeper. "We can't waste the precious minutes staring at each other here. This woman must be found. Stop! she asked questions about the stairs—she looked up at the second floor the moment we got on the landing. Mr. Munder! wait here, and don't let that foreigner out of your sight for a moment. Wait here while I run up and look into the second-floor passage. All the bedroom doors are locked—I defy her to hide herself if she has gone up there." With those words, the housekeeper ran out of the drawing-room, and breathlessly ascended the second flight of stairs.

While Mrs. Pentreath was searching on the west side of the house, Sarah was hurrying, at the top of her speed, along the lonely passages that led to the north rooms.

Terrified into decisive action by the desperate nature of the situation, she had slipped out of the drawing-room into the passage the instant she saw Mrs. Pentreath's back turned on her. Without stopping to think, without attempting to compose herself, she ran down the stairs of the first floor, and made straight for the housekeeper's room. She had no excuses ready, if she had found any body there, or if she had met any body on the way. She had formed no plan where to seek for them next, if the keys of the north rooms were not hanging in the place where she still expected to find them. Her mind was lost in confusion, her temples throbbed as if they would burst with the heat at her brain. The one blind, wild, headlong purpose of getting into the Myrtle Room drove her on, gave unnatural swiftness to her trembling feet, unnatural strength to her shaking hands, unnatural courage to her sinking heart.

She ran into the housekeeper's room, without even the ordinary caution of waiting for a moment to listen outside the door. No one was there. One glance at the well-remembered nail in the wall showed her the keys still hanging to it in a bunch, as they had hung in the long-past time. She had them in her possession in a moment; and was away again, along the solitary passages that led to the north rooms, threading their turnings and windings as if she had left them but the day before; never pausing to listen or to look behind her, never slackening her speed till she was at the top of the back staircase, and had her hand on the locked door that led into the north hall.

As she turned over the bunch to find the first key that was required, she discovered—what her hurry had hitherto prevented her from noticing—the numbered labels which the builder had methodically attached to all the keys when he had been sent to Porthgenna by Mr. Frankland to survey the house. At the first sight of them, her searching hands paused in their work instantaneously, and she shivered all over, as if a sudden chill had struck her.

If she had been less violently agitated, the discovery of the new labels and the suspicions to which the sight of them instantly gave rise would, in all probability, have checked her further progress. But the confusion of her mind was now too great to allow her to piece together even the veriest fragments of thoughts. Vaguely conscious of a new terror, of a sharpened distrust that doubled and trebled the headlong impatience which had driven her on thus far, she desperately resumed her search through the bunch of keys.

One of them had no label; it was larger than the rest—it was the key that fitted the door of communication before which she stood. She turned it in the rusty lock with a strength which, at any other time, she would have been utterly incapable of exerting; she opened the door with a blow of her hand, which burst it away at one stroke from the jambs to which it stuck. Panting for breath, she flew across the forsaken north hall, without stopping for one second to push the door to behind her. The creeping creatures, the noisome house-reptiles that possessed the place, crawled away, shadow-like, on either side of her toward the walls. She never noticed them, never turned away for them. Across the hall, and up the stairs at the end of it, she ran, till she gained the open landing at the top—and there she suddenly checked herself in front of the first door.

The first door of the long range of rooms that opened on the landing; the door that fronted the topmost of the flight of stairs. She stopped; she looked at it—it was not the door she had come to open; and yet she could not tear herself away from it. Scrawled on the panel in white chalk was the figure—"I." And when she looked down at the bunch of keys in her hands, there was the figure "I." on a label, answering to it.

She tried to think, to follow out any one of all the thronging suspicions that beset her to the conclusion at which it might point. The effort was useless; her mind was gone; her bodily senses of seeing and hearing—senses which had now become painfully and incomprehensibly sharpened—seemed to be the sole relics of intelligence that she had left to guide her. She put her hand over her eyes, and waited a little so, and then went on slowly along the landing, looking at the doors.

No. "II.," No. "III.," No. "IV.," traced on the panels in the same white chalk, and answering to the numbered labels on the keys, the figures on which were written in ink. No. "IV." the middle room of the first floor range of eight. She stopped there again, trembling from head to foot. It was the door of the Myrtle Room.

Did the chalked numbers stop there? She looked on down the landing. No. The four doors remaining were regularly numbered on to "VIII."

She came back again to the door of the Myrtle Room, sought out the key labeled with the figure "IV."—hesitated—and looked back distrustfully over the deserted hall.

The canvases of the old family pictures, which she had seen bulging out of their frames in the past time when she hid the letter, had, for the most part, rotted away from them now, and lay in great black ragged strips on the floor of the hall. Islands and continents of damp spread like the map of some strange region over the lofty vaulted ceiling. Cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung down in festoons from broken cornices. Dirt stains lay on the stone pavement, like gross reflections of the damp stains on the ceiling. The broad flight of stairs leading up to the open landing before the rooms of the first floor had sunk down bodily toward one side. The banisters which protected the outer edge of the landing were broken away into ragged gaps. The light of day was stained, the air of heaven was stilled, the sounds of earth were silenced in the north hall.

Silenced? Were all sounds silenced? Or was there something stirring that just touched the sense of hearing, that just deepened the dismal stillness, and no more?

Sarah listened, keeping her face still set toward the hall—listened, and heard a faint sound behind her. Was it outside the door on which her back was turned? Or was it inside—in the Myrtle Room?

Inside. With the first conviction of that, all thought, all sensation left her. She forgot the suspicious numbering of the doors; she became insensible to the lapse of time, unconscious of the risk of discovery. All exercise of her other faculties was now merged in the exercise of the one faculty of listening.

It was a still, faint, stealthily rustling sound; and it moved to and fro at intervals, to and fro softly, now at one end, now at the other of the Myrtle Room. There were moments when it grew suddenly distinct—other moments when it died away in gradations too light to follow. Sometimes it seemed to sweep over the floor at a bound—sometimes it crept with slow, continuous rustlings that just wavered on the verge of absolute silence.

Her feet still rooted to the spot on which she stood, Sarah turned her head slowly, inch by inch, toward the door of the Myrtle Room. A moment before, while she was as yet unconscious of the faint sound moving to and fro within it, she had been drawing her breath heavily and quickly. She might have been dead now, her bosom was so still, her breathing so noiseless. The same mysterious change came over her face which had altered it when the darkness began to gather in the little parlor at Truro. The same fearful look of inquiry which she had then fixed on the vacant corner of the room was in her eyes now, as they slowly turned on the door.

"Mistress!" she whispered. "Am I too late? Are you there before me?"

The stealthily rustling sound inside paused—renewed itself—died away again faintly; away at the lower end of the room.

Her eyes still remained fixed on the Myrtle Room, strained, and opened wider and wider—opened as if they would look through the very door itself—opened as if they were watching for the opaque wood to turn transparent, and show what was behind it.

"Over the lonesome floor, over the lonesome floor—how light it moves!" she whispered again. "Mistress! does the black dress I made for you rustle no louder than that?"

The sound stopped again—then suddenly advanced at one stealthy sweep close to the inside of the door.

If she could have moved at that moment; if she could have looked down to the line of open space between the bottom of the door and the flooring below, when the faintly rustling sound came nearest to her, she might have seen the insignificant cause that produced it lying self-betrayed under the door, partly outside, partly inside, in the shape of a fragment of faded red paper from the wall of the Myrtle Room. Time and damp had loosened the paper all round the apartment. Two or three yards of it had been torn off by the builder while he was examining the walls—sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in small pieces, just as it happened to come away—and had been thrown down by him on the bare, boarded floor, to become the sport of the wind, whenever it happened to blow through the broken panes of glass in the window. If she had only moved! If she had only looked down for one little second of time!

She was past moving and past looking: the paroxysm of superstitious horror that possessed her held her still in every limb and every feature. She never started, she uttered no cry, when the rustling noise came nearest. The one outward sign which showed how the terror of its approach shook her to the very soul expressed itself only in the changed action of her right hand, in which she still held the keys. At the instant when the wind wafted the fragment of paper closest to the door, her fingers lost their power of contraction, and became as nerveless and helpless as if she had fainted. The heavy bunch of keys slipped from her suddenly loosened grasp, dropped at her side on the outer edge of the landing, rolled off through a gap in the broken banister, and fell on the stone pavement below, with a crash which made the sleeping echoes shriek again, as if they were sentient beings writhing under the torture of sound!

The crash of the falling keys, ringing and ringing again through the stillness, woke her, as it were, to instant consciousness of present events and present perils. She started, staggered backward, and raised both her hands wildly to her head—paused so for a few seconds—then made for the top of the stairs with the purpose of descending into the hall to recover the keys.

Before she had advanced three paces the shrill sound of a woman's scream came from the door of communication at the opposite end of the hall. The scream was twice repeated at a greater distance off, and was followed by a confused noise of rapidly advancing voices and footsteps.

She staggered desperately a few paces farther, and reached the first of the row of doors that opened on the landing. There nature sank exhausted: her knees gave way under her—her breath, her sight, her hearing all seemed to fail her together at the same instant—and she dropped down senseless on the floor at the head of the stairs.

---

CHAPTER IV.
MR. MUNDER ON THE SEAT OF JUDGMENT.

The murmuring voices and the hurrying footsteps came nearer and nearer, then stopped altogether. After an interval of silence, one voice called out loudly, "Sarah! Sarah! where are you?" and the next instant Uncle Joseph appeared alone in the door-way that led into the north hall, looking eagerly all round him.

At first the prostrate figure on the landing at the head of the stairs escaped his view. But the second time he looked in that direction the dark dress, and the arm that lay just over the edge of the top stair, caught his eye. With a loud cry of terror and recognition, he flew across the hall and ascended the stairs. Just as he was kneeling by Sarah's side, and raising her head on his arm, the steward, the housekeeper, and the maid, all three crowded together after him into the door-way.

"Water!" shouted the old man, gesticulating at them wildly with his disengaged hand. "She is here—she has fallen down—she is in a faint! Water! water!"

Mr. Munder looked at Mrs. Pentreath, Mrs. Pentreath looked at Betsey, Betsey looked at the ground. All three stood stock-still; all three seemed equally incapable of walking across the hall. If the science of physiognomy be not an entire delusion, the cause of this amazing unanimity was legibly written in their faces; in other words, they all three looked equally afraid of the ghost.

"Water, I say! Water!" reiterated Uncle Joseph, shaking his fist at them. "She is in a faint! Are you three at the door there, and not one heart of mercy among you? Water! water! water! Must I scream myself into fits before I can make you hear?"

"I'll get the water, ma'am," said Betsey, "if you or Mr. Munder will please to take it from here to the top of the stairs."

She ran to the kitchen, and came back with a glass of water, which she offered, with a respectful courtesy, first to the housekeeper, and then to the steward.

"How dare you ask us to carry things for you?" said Mrs. Pentreath, backing out of the door-way.

"Yes! how dare you ask us?" added Mr. Munder, backing after Mrs. Pentreath.

"Water!" shouted the old man for the third time. He drew his niece backward a little, so that she could be supported against the wall behind her. "Water! or I trample down this dungeon of a place about your ears!" he shouted, stamping with impatience and rage.

"If you please, Sir, are you sure it's really the lady who is up there?" asked Betsey, advancing a few paces tremulously with the glass of water.

"Am I sure?" exclaimed Uncle Joseph, descending the stairs to meet her. "What fool's question is this? Who should it be?"

"The ghost, Sir," said Betsey, advancing more and more slowly. "The ghost of the north rooms."

Uncle Joseph met her a few yards in advance of the foot of the stairs, took the glass of water from her with a gesture of contempt, and hastened back to his niece. As Betsey turned to effect her retreat, the bunch of keys lying on the pavement below the landing caught her eye. After a little hesitation she mustered courage enough to pick them up, and then ran with them out of the hall as fast as her feet could carry her.

Meanwhile Uncle Joseph was moistening his niece's lips with the water, and sprinkling it over her forehead. After a while her breath began to come and go slowly, in faint sighs, the muscles of her face moved a little, and she feebly opened her eyes. They fixed affrightedly on the old man, without any expression of recognition. He made her drink a little water, and spoke to her gently, and so brought her back at last to herself. Her first words were, "Don't leave me." Her first action, when she was able to move, was the action of crouching closer to him.

"No fear, my child," he said, soothingly; "I will keep by you. Tell me, Sarah, what has made you faint? What has frightened you so?"

"Oh, don't ask me! For God's sake, don't ask me!"

"There, there! I shall say nothing, then. Another mouthful of water? A little mouthful more?"

"Help me up, uncle; help me to try if I can stand."

"Not yet—not quite yet; patience for a little longer."

"Oh, help me! help me! I want to get away from the sight of those doors. If I can only go as far as the bottom of the stairs I shall be better."

"So, so," said Uncle Joseph, assisting her to rise. "Wait now, and feel your feet on the ground. Lean on me, lean hard, lean heavy. Though I am only a light and a little man, I am solid as a rock. Have you been into the room?" he added, in a whisper. "Have you got the letter?"

She sighed bitterly, and laid her head on his shoulder with a weary despair.

"Why, Sarah! Sarah!" he exclaimed. "Have you been all this time away, and not got into the room yet?"

She raised her head as suddenly as she had laid it down, shuddered, and tried feebly to draw him toward the stairs. "I shall never see the Myrtle Room again—never, never, never more!" she said. "Let us go; I can walk; I am strong now. Uncle Joseph, if you love me, take me away from this house; away any where, so long as we are in the free air and the daylight again; any where, so long as we are out of sight of Porthgenna Tower."

Elevating his eyebrows in astonishment, but considerately refraining from asking any more questions, Uncle Joseph assisted his niece to descend the stairs. She was still so weak that she was obliged to pause on gaining the bottom of them to recover her strength. Seeing this, and feeling, as he led her afterward across the hall, that she leaned more and more heavily on his arm at every fresh step, the old man, on arriving within speaking distance of Mr. Munder and Mrs. Pentreath, asked the housekeeper if she possessed any restorative drops which she would allow him to administer to his niece.

Mrs. Pentreath's reply in the affirmative, though not very graciously spoken, was accompanied by an alacrity of action which showed that she was heartily rejoiced to take the first fair excuse for returning to the inhabited quarter of the house. Muttering something about showing the way to the place where the medicine-chest was kept, she immediately retraced her steps along the passage to her own room; while Uncle Joseph, disregarding all Sarah's whispered assurances that she was well enough to depart without another moment of delay, followed her silently, leading his niece.

Mr. Munder, shaking his head, and looking woefully disconcerted, waited behind to lock the door of communication. When he had done this, and had given the keys to Betsey to carry back to their appointed place, he, in his turn, retired from the scene at a pace indecorously approaching to something like a run. On getting well away from the north hall, however, he regained his self-possession wonderfully. He abruptly slackened his pace, collected his scattered wits, and reflected a little, apparently with perfect satisfaction to himself; for when he entered the housekeeper's room he had quite recovered his usual complacent solemnity of look and manner. Like the vast majority of densely stupid men, he felt intense pleasure in hearing himself talk, and he now discerned such an opportunity of indulging in that luxury, after the events that had just happened in the house, as he seldom enjoyed. There is only one kind of speaker who is quite certain never to break down under any stress of circumstances—the man whose capability of talking does not include any dangerous underlying capacity for knowing what he means. Among this favored order of natural orators, Mr. Munder occupied a prominent rank—and he was now vindictively resolved to exercise his abilities on the two strangers, under pretense of asking for an explanation of their conduct, before he could suffer them to quit the house.

On entering the room, he found Uncle Joseph seated with his niece at the lower end of it, engaged in dropping some sal volatile into a glass of water. At the upper end stood the housekeeper with an open medicine-chest on the table before her. To this part of the room Mr. Munder slowly advanced, with a portentous countenance; drew an arm-chair up to the table; sat himself down in it, with extreme deliberation and care in the matter of settling his coat-tails; and immediately became, to all outward appearance, the model of a Lord Chief Justice in plain clothes.

Mrs. Pentreath, conscious from these preparations that something extraordinary was about to happen, seated herself a little behind the steward. Betsey restored the keys to their place on the nail in the wall, and was about to retire modestly to her proper kitchen sphere, when she was stopped by Mr. Munder.

"Wait, if you please," said the steward; "I shall have occasion to call on you presently, young woman, to make a plain statement."

Obedient Betsey waited near the door, terrified by the idea that she must have done something wrong, and that the steward was armed with inscrutable legal power to try, sentence, and punish her for the offense on the spot.

"Now, Sir," said Mr. Munder, addressing Uncle Joseph as if he was the Speaker of the House of Commons, "if you have done with that sal volatile, and if the person by your side has sufficiently recovered her senses to listen, I should wish to say a word or two to both of you."

At this exordium, Sarah tried affrightedly to rise from her chair; but her uncle caught her by the hand, and pressed her back in it.

"Wait and rest," he whispered. "I shall take all the scolding on my own shoulder, and do all the talking with my own tongue. As soon as you are fit to walk again, I promise you this: whether the big man has said his word or two, or has not said it, we will quietly get up and go our ways out of the house."

"Up to the present moment," said Mr. Munder, "I have refrained from expressing an opinion. The time has now come when, holding a position of trust as I do in this establishment, and being accountable, and indeed responsible, as I am, for what takes place in it, and feeling, as I must, that things can not be allowed or even permitted to rest as they are—it is my duty to say that I think your conduct is very extraordinary." Directing this forcible conclusion to his sentence straight at Sarah, Mr. Munder leaned back in his chair, quite full of words, and quite empty of meaning, to collect himself comfortably for his next effort.

"My only desire," he resumed, with a plaintive impartiality, "is to act fairly by all parties. I don't wish to frighten any body, or to startle any body, or even to terrify any body. I wish to unravel, or, if you please, to make out, what I may term, with perfect propriety—events. And when I have done that, I should wish to put it to you, ma'am, and to you, Sir, whether—I say, I should wish to put it to you both, calmly, and impartially, and politely, and plainly, and smoothly—and when I say smoothly, I mean quietly—whether you are not both of you bound to explain yourselves."

Mr. Munder paused, to let that last irresistible appeal work its way to the consciences of the persons whom he addressed. The housekeeper took advantage of the silence to cough, as congregations cough just before the sermon, apparently on the principle of getting rid of bodily infirmities beforehand, in order to give the mind free play for undisturbed intellectual enjoyment. Betsey, following Mrs. Pentreath's lead, indulged in a cough on her own account—of the faint, distrustful sort. Uncle Joseph sat perfectly easy and undismayed, still holding his niece's hand in his, and giving it a little squeeze, from time to time, when the steward's oratory became particularly involved and impressive. Sarah never moved, never looked up, never lost the expression of terrified restraint which had taken possession of her face from the first moment when she entered the housekeeper's room.

"Now what are the facts, and circumstances, and events?" proceeded Mr. Munder, leaning back in his chair, in calm enjoyment of the sound of his own voice. "You, ma'am, and you, Sir, ring at the bell of the door of this Mansion" (here he looked hard at Uncle Joseph, as much as to say, "I don't give up that point about the house being a Mansion, you see, even on the judgment-seat")—"you are let in, or, rather, admitted. You, Sir, assert that you wish to inspect the Mansion (you say 'see the house,' but, being a foreigner, we are not surprised at your making a little mistake of that sort); you, ma'am, coincide, and even agree, in that request. What follows? You are shown over the Mansion. It is not usual to show strangers over it, but we happen to have certain reasons—"

Sarah started. "What reasons?" she asked, looking up quickly.

Uncle Joseph felt her hand turn cold, and tremble in his. "Hush! hush!" he said, "leave the talking to me."

At the same moment Mrs. Pentreath pulled Mr. Munder warily by the coat-tail, and whispered to him to be careful. "Mrs. Frankland's letter," she said in his ear, "tells us particularly not to let it be suspected that we are acting under orders."

"Don't you fancy, Mrs. Pentreath, that I forget what I ought to remember," rejoined Mr. Munder—who had forgotten, nevertheless. "And don't you imagine that I was going to commit myself" (the very thing which he had just been on the point of doing). "Leave this business in my hands, if you will be so good.—What reasons did you say, ma'am?" he added aloud, addressing himself to Sarah. "Never you mind about reasons; we have not got to do with them now; we have got to do with facts, and circumstances, and events. I was observing, or remarking, that you, Sir, and you, ma'am, were shown over this Mansion. You were conducted, and indeed led, up the west staircase—the Spacious west staircase, Sir! You were shown with politeness, and even with courtesy, through the breakfast-room, the library, and the drawing-room. In that drawing-room, you, Sir, indulge in outrageous, and, I will add, in violent language. In that drawing-room, you, ma'am, disappear, or, rather, go altogether out of sight. Such conduct as this, so highly unparalleled, so entirely unprecedented, and so very unusual, causes Mrs. Pentreath and myself to feel—" Here Mr. Munder stopped, at a loss for a word for the first time.

"Astonished," suggested Mrs. Pentreath after a long interval of silence.

"No, ma'am!" retorted Mr. Munder. "Nothing of the sort. We were not at all astonished; we were—surprised. And what followed and succeeded that? What did you and I hear, Sir, on the first floor?" (looking sternly at Uncle Joseph). "And what did you hear, Mrs. Pentreath, while you were searching for the missing and absent party on the second floor? What?"

Thus personally appealed to, the housekeeper answered briefly—"A scream."

"No! no! no!" said Mr. Munder, fretfully tapping his hand on the table. "A screech, Mrs. Pentreath—a screech. And what is the meaning, purport, and upshot of that screech?—Young woman!" (here Mr. Munder turned suddenly on Betsey) "we have now traced these extraordinary facts and circumstances as far as you. Have the goodness to step forward, and tell us, in the presence of these two parties, how you came to utter, or give, what Mrs. Pentreath calls a scream, but what I call a screech. A plain statement will do, my good girl—quite a plain statement, if you please. And, young woman, one word more—speak up. You understand me? Speak up!"

Covered with confusion by the public and solemn nature of this appeal, Betsey, on starting with her statement, unconsciously followed the oratorical example of no less a person than Mr. Munder himself; that is to say, she spoke on the principle of drowning the smallest possible infusion of ideas in the largest possible dilution of words. Extricated from the mesh of verbal entanglement in which she contrived to involve it, her statement may be not unfairly represented as simply consisting of the following facts:

First, Betsey had to relate that she happened to be just taking the lid off a saucepan, on the kitchen fire, when she heard, in the neighborhood of the housekeeper's room, a sound of hurried footsteps (vernacularly termed by the witness a "scurrying of somebody's feet"). Secondly, Betsey, on leaving the kitchen to ascertain what the sound meant, heard the footsteps retreating rapidly along the passage which led to the north side of the house, and, stimulated by curiosity, followed the sound of them for a certain distance. Thirdly, at a sharp turn in the passage, Betsey stopped short, despairing of overtaking the person whose footsteps she heard, and feeling also a sense of dread (termed by the witness, "creeping of the flesh") at the idea of venturing alone, even in broad daylight, into the ghostly quarter of the house. Fourthly, while still hesitating at the turn in the passage, Betsey heard "the lock of a door go," and, stimulated afresh by curiosity, advanced a few steps farther—then stopped again, debating within herself the difficult and dreadful question, whether it is the usual custom of ghosts, when passing from one place to another, to unlock any closed door which may happen to be in their way, or to save trouble by simply passing through it. Fifthly, after long deliberation, and many false starts—forward toward the north hall and backward toward the kitchen—Betsey decided that it was the immemorial custom of all ghosts to pass through doors, and not unlock them. Sixthly, fortified by this conviction, Betsey went on boldly close to the door, when she suddenly heard a loud report, as of some heavy body falling (graphically termed by the witness a "banging scrash"). Seventhly, the noise frightened Betsey out of her wits, brought her heart up into her mouth, and took away her breath. Eighthly, and lastly, on recovering breath enough to scream (or screech), Betsey did, with might and main, scream (or screech), running back toward the kitchen as fast as her legs would carry her, with all her hair "standing up on end," and all her flesh "in a crawl" from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.

"Just so! just so!" said Mr. Munder, when the statement came to a close—as if the sight of a young woman with all her hair standing on end and all her flesh in a crawl were an ordinary result of his experience of female humanity—"Just so! You may stand back, my good girl—you may stand back.—There is nothing to smile at, Sir," he continued, sternly addressing Uncle Joseph, who had been excessively amused by Betsey's manner of delivering her evidence. "You would be doing better to carry, or rather transport, your mind back to what followed and succeeded the young woman's screech. What did we all do, Sir? We rushed to the spot, and we ran to the place. And what did we all see, Sir?—We saw you, ma'am, lying horizontally prostrate, on the top of the landing of the first of the flight of the north stairs; and we saw those keys, now hanging up yonder, abstracted and purloined, and, as it were, snatched from their place in this room, and lying horizontally prostrate likewise on the floor of the hall.—There are the facts, the circumstances, and the events, laid, or rather placed, before you. What have you got to say to them? I call upon you both solemnly, and, I will add, seriously! In my own name, in the name of Mrs. Pentreath, in the name of our employers, in the name of decency, in the name of wonder—what do you mean by it?"

With that conclusion, Mr. Munder struck his fist on the table, and waited, with a glare of merciless expectation, for any thing in the shape of an answer, an explanation, or a defense which the culprits at the bottom of the room might be disposed to offer.

"Tell him any thing," whispered Sarah to the old man. "Any thing to keep him quiet; any thing to make him let us go! After what I have suffered, these people will drive me mad!"

Never very quick at inventing an excuse, and perfectly ignorant besides of what had really happened to his niece while she was alone in the north hall, Uncle Joseph, with the best will in the world to prove himself equal to the emergency, felt considerable difficulty in deciding what he should say or do. Determined, however, at all hazards, to spare Sarah any useless suffering, and to remove her from the house as speedily as possible, he rose to take the responsibility of speaking on himself, looking hard, before he opened his lips, at Mr. Munder, who immediately leaned forward on the table with his hand to his ear. Uncle Joseph acknowledged this polite act of attention with one of his fantastic bows; and then replied to the whole of the steward's long harangue in these six unanswerable words:

"I wish you good-day, Sir!"

"How dare you wish me any thing of the sort!" cried Mr. Munder, jumping out of his chair in violent indignation. "How dare you trifle with a serious subject and a serious question in that way? Wish me good-day, indeed! Do you suppose I am going to let you out of this house without hearing some explanation of the abstracting and purloining and snatching of the keys of the north rooms?"

"Ah! it is that you want to know?" said Uncle Joseph, stimulated to plunge headlong into an excuse by the increasing agitation and terror of his niece. "See, now! I shall explain. What was it, dear and good Sir, that we said when we were first let in? This—'We have come to see the house.' Now there is a north side to the house, and a west side to the house. Good! That is two sides; and I and my niece are two people; and we divide ourselves in two, to see the two sides. I am the half that goes west, with you and the dear and good lady behind there. My niece here is the other half that goes north, all by herself, and drops the keys, and falls into a faint, because in that old part of the house it is what you call musty-fusty, and there is smells of tombs and spiders, and that is all the explanation, and quite enough, too. I wish you good-day, Sir."

"Damme! if ever I met with the like of you before!" roared Mr. Munder, entirely forgetting his dignity, his respectability, and his long words in the exasperation of the moment. "You are going to have it all your own way, are you, Mr. Foreigner? You will walk out of this place when you please, will you, Mr. Foreigner? We will see what the justice of the peace for this district has to say to that," cried Mr. Munder, recovering his solemn manner and his lofty phraseology. "Property in this house is confided to my care; and unless I hear some satisfactory explanation of the purloining of those keys hanging up there, Sir, on that wall, Sir, before your eyes, Sir—I shall consider it my duty to detain you, and the person with you, until I can get legal advice, and lawful advice, and magisterial advice. Do you hear that, Sir?"

Uncle Joseph's ruddy cheeks suddenly deepened in color, and his face assumed an expression which made the housekeeper rather uneasy, and which had an irresistibly cooling effect on the heat of Mr. Munder's anger.

"You will keep us here? You?" said the old man, speaking very quietly, and looking very steadily at the steward. "Now, see. I take this lady (courage, my child, courage! there is nothing to tremble for)—I take this lady with me; I throw that door open, so! I stand and wait before it; and I say to you, 'Shut that door against us, if you dare.'"

At this defiance, Mr. Munder advanced a few steps, and then stopped. If Uncle Joseph's steady look at him had wavered for an instant, he would have closed the door.

"I say again," repeated the old man, "shut it against us, if you dare. The laws and customs of your country, Sir, have made me an Englishman. If you can talk into one ear of a magistrate, I can talk into the other. If he must listen to you, a citizen of this country, he must listen to me, a citizen of this country also. Say the word, if you please. Do you accuse? or do you threaten? or do you shut the door?"

Before Mr. Munder could reply to any one of these three direct questions, the housekeeper begged him to return to his chair and to speak to her. As he resumed his place, she whispered to him, in warning tones, "Remember Mrs. Frankland's letter!"

At the same moment, Uncle Joseph, considering that he had waited long enough, took a step forward to the door. He was prevented from advancing any farther by his niece, who caught him suddenly by the arm, and said in his ear, "Look! they are whispering about us again!"

"Well!" said Mr. Munder, replying to the housekeeper. "I do remember Mrs. Frankland's letter, ma'am; and what then?"

"Hush! not so loud," whispered Mrs. Pentreath. "I don't presume, Mr. Munder, to differ in opinion with you; but I want to ask one or two questions. Do you think we have any charge that a magistrate would listen to, to bring against these people?"

Mr. Munder looked puzzled, and seemed, for once in a way, to be at a loss for an answer.

"Does what you remember of Mrs. Frankland's letter," pursued the housekeeper, "incline you to think that she would be pleased at a public exposure of what has happened in the house? She tells us to take private notice of that woman's conduct, and to follow her unperceived when she goes away. I don't venture on the liberty of advising you, Mr. Munder, but, as far as regards myself, I wash my hands of all responsibility, if we do any thing but follow Mrs. Frankland's instructions (as she herself tells us) to the letter."

Mr. Munder hesitated. Uncle Joseph, who had paused for a minute when Sarah directed his attention to the whispering at the upper end of the room, now drew her on slowly with him to the door. "Betzee, my dear," he said, addressing the maid, with perfect coolness and composure, "we are strangers here; will you be so kind to us as to show the way out?"

Betsey looked at the housekeeper, who motioned to her to appeal for orders to the steward. Mr. Munder was sorely tempted, for the sake of his own importance, to insist on instantly carrying out the violent measures to which he had threatened to have recourse; but Mrs. Pentreath's objections made him pause in spite of himself.

"Betzee, my dear," repeated Uncle Joseph, "has all this talking been too much for your ears? has it made you deaf?"

"Wait!" cried Mr. Munder, impatiently. "I insist on your waiting, Sir!"

"You insist? Well, well, because you are an uncivil man is no reason why I should be an uncivil man too. We will wait a little, Sir, if you have any thing more to say." Making that concession to the claims of politeness, Uncle Joseph walked gently backward and forward with his niece in the passage outside the door. "Sarah, my child, I have frightened the man of the big words," he whispered. "Try not to tremble so much; we shall soon be out in the fresh air again."

In the mean time, Mr. Munder continued his whispered conversation with the housekeeper, making a desperate effort, in the midst of his perplexities, to maintain his customary air of patronage and his customary assumption of superiority. "There is a great deal of truth, ma'am," he softly began—"a great deal of truth, certainly, in what you say. But you are talking of the woman, while I am talking of the man. Do you mean to tell me that I am to let him go, after what has happened, without at least insisting on his giving me his name and address?"

"Do you put trust enough in the foreigner to believe that he would give you his right name and address if you asked him?" inquired Mrs. Pentreath. "With submission to your better judgment, I must confess that I don't. But supposing you were to detain him and charge him before the magistrate—and how you are to do that, the magistrate's house being, I suppose, about a couple of hours' walk from here, is more than I can tell—you must surely risk offending Mrs. Frankland by detaining the woman and charging the woman as well; for after all, Mr. Munder, though I believe the foreigner to be capable of any thing, it was the woman that took the keys, was it not?"

"Quite so! quite so!" said Mr. Munder, whose sleepy eyes were now opened to this plain and straightforward view of the case for the first time. "I was, oddly enough, putting that point to myself, Mrs. Pentreath, just before you happened to speak of it. Just so! just so!"

"I can't help thinking," continued the housekeeper, in a mysterious whisper, "that the best plan, and the plan most in accordance with our instructions, is to let them both go, as if we did not care to demean ourselves by any more quarreling or arguing with them, and to have them followed to the next place they stop at. The gardener's boy, Jacob, is weeding the broad walk in the west garden this afternoon. These people have not seen him about the premises, and need not see him, if they are let out again by the south door. Jacob is a sharp lad, as you know; and, if he was properly instructed, I really don't see—"

"It is a most singular circumstance, Mrs. Pentreath," interposed Mr. Munder, with the gravity of consummate assurance; "but when I first sat down to this table, that idea about Jacob occurred to me. What with the effort of speaking, and the heat of argument, I got led away from it in the most unaccountable manner—"

Here Uncle Joseph, whose stock of patience and politeness was getting exhausted, put his head into the room again.

"I shall have one last word to address to you, Sir, in a moment," said Mr. Munder, before the old man could speak. "Don't you suppose that your blustering and your bullying has had any effect on me. It may do with foreigners, Sir; but it won't do with Englishmen, I can tell you."

Uncle Joseph shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and rejoined his niece in the passage outside. While the housekeeper and the steward had been conferring together, Sarah had been trying hard to persuade her uncle to profit by her knowledge of the passages that led to the south door, and to slip away unperceived. But the old man steadily refused to be guided by her advice. "I will not go out of a place guiltily," he said, "when I have done no harm. Nothing shall persuade me to put myself, or to put you, in the wrong. I am not a man of much wits; but let my conscience guide me, and so long I shall go right. They let us in here, Sarah, of their own accord; and they shall let us out of their own accord also."

"Mr. Munder! Mr. Munder!" whispered the housekeeper, interfering to stop a fresh explosion of the steward's indignation, which threatened to break out at the contempt implied by the shrugging of Uncle Joseph's shoulders, "while you are speaking to that audacious man, shall I slip into the garden and give Jacob his instructions?"

Mr. Munder paused before answering—tried hard to see a more dignified way out of the dilemma in which he had placed himself than the way suggested by the housekeeper—failed entirely to discern any thing of the sort—swallowed his indignation at one heroic gulp—and replied emphatically in two words: "Go, ma'am."

"What does that mean? what has she gone that way for?" said Sarah to her uncle, in a quick, suspicious whisper, as the housekeeper brushed hastily by them on her way to the west garden.

Before there was time to answer the question, it was followed by another, put by Mr. Munder.

"Now, Sir!" said the steward, standing in the door-way, with his hands under his coat-tails and his head very high in the air. "Now, Sir, and now, ma'am, for my last words. Am I to have a proper explanation of the abstracting and purloining of those keys, or am I not?"

"Certainly, Sir, you are to have the explanation," replied Uncle Joseph. "It is, if you please, the same explanation that I had the honor of giving to you a little while ago. Do you wish to hear it again? It is all the explanation we have got about us."

"Oh! it is, is it?" said Mr. Munder. "Then all I have to say to both of you is—leave the house directly! Directly!" he added, in his most coarsely offensive tones, taking refuge in the insolence of authority, from the dim consciousness of the absurdity of his own position, which would force itself on him even while he spoke. "Yes, Sir!" he continued, growing more and more angry at the composure with which Uncle Joseph listened to him—"Yes, Sir! you may bow and scrape, and jabber your broken English somewhere else. I won't put up with you here. I have reflected with myself, and reasoned with myself, and asked myself calmly—as Englishmen always do—if it is any use making you of importance, and I have come to a conclusion, and that conclusion is—no, it isn't! Don't you go away with a notion that your blusterings and bullyings have had any effect on me. (Show them out, Betsey!) I consider you beneath—aye, and below!—my notice. Language fails, Sir, to express my contempt. Leave the house!"

"And I, Sir," returned the object of all this withering derision, with the most exasperating politeness, "I shall say, for having your contempt, what I could by no means have said for having your respect, which is, briefly—thank you. I, the small foreigner, take the contempt of you, the big Englishman, as the greatest compliment that can be paid from a man of your composition to a man of mine." With that, Uncle Joseph made a last fantastic bow, took his niece's arm, and followed Betsey along the passages that led to the south door, leaving Mr. Munder to compose a fit retort at his leisure.

Ten minutes later the housekeeper returned breathless to her room, and found the steward walking backward and forward in a high state of irritation.

"Pray make your mind easy, Mr. Munder," she said. "They are both clear of the house at last, and Jacob has got them well in view on the path over the moor."

---

CHAPTER V.
MOZART PLAYS FAREWELL.

Excepting that he took leave of Betsey, the servant-maid, with great cordiality, Uncle Joseph spoke not another word, after his parting reply to Mr. Munder, until he and his niece were alone again under the east wall of Porthgenna Tower. There he paused, looked up at the house, then at his companion, then back at the house once more, and at last opened his lips to speak.

"I am sorry, my child," he said—"I am sorry from my heart. This has been what you call in England a bad job."

Thinking that he referred to the scene which had just passed in the housekeeper's room, Sarah asked his pardon for having been the innocent means of bringing him into angry collision with such a person as Mr. Munder.

"No! no! no!" he cried. "I was not thinking of the man of the big body and the big words. He made me angry, it is not to be denied; but that is all over and gone now. I put him and his big words away from me, as I kick this stone, here, from the pathway into the road. It is not of your Munders, or your housekeepers, or your Betzees, that I now speak—it is of something that is nearer to you and nearer to me also, because I make of your interest my own interest too. I shall tell you what it is while we walk on—for I see in your face, Sarah, that you are restless and in fear so long as we stop in the neighborhood of this dungeon-house. Come! I am ready for the march. There is the path. Let us go back by it, and pick up our little baggages at the inn where we left them, on the other side of this windy wilderness of a place."

"Yes, yes, uncle! Let us lose no time; let us walk fast. Don't be afraid of tiring me; I am much stronger now."

They turned into the same path by which they had approached Porthgenna Tower in the afternoon. By the time they had walked over a little more than the first hundred yards of their journey, Jacob, the gardener's boy, stole out from behind the ruinous inclosure at the north side of the house with his hoe in his hand. The sun had just set, but there was a fine light still over the wide, open surface of the moor; and Jacob paused to let the old man and his niece get farther away from the building before he followed them. The housekeeper's instructions had directed him just to keep them in sight, and no more; and, if he happened to observe that they stopped and turned round to look behind them, he was to stop, too, and pretend to be digging with his hoe, as if he was at work on the moorland. Stimulated by the promise of a sixpence, if he was careful to do exactly as he had been told, Jacob kept his instructions in his memory, and kept his eye on the two strangers, and promised as fairly to earn the reward in prospect for him as a boy could.

"And now, my child, I shall tell you what it is I am sorry for," resumed Uncle Joseph, as they proceeded along the path. "I am sorry that we have come out upon this journey, and run our little risk, and had our little scolding, and gained nothing. The word you said in my ear, Sarah, when I was getting you out of the faint (and you should have come out of it sooner, if the muddle-headed people of the dungeon-house had been quicker with the water)—the word you said in my ear was not much, but it was enough to tell me that we have taken this journey in vain. I may hold my tongue, I may make my best face at it, I may be content to walk blindfolded with a mystery that lets no peep of daylight into my eyes—but it is not the less true that the one thing your heart was most set on doing, when we started on this journey, is the one thing also that you have not done. I know that, if I know nothing else; and I say again, it is a bad job—yes, yes, upon my life and faith, there is no disguise to put upon it; it is, in your plainest English, a very bad job."

As he concluded the expression of his sympathy in these quaint terms, the dread and distrust, the watchful terror, that marred the natural softness of Sarah's eyes, disappeared in an expression of sorrowful tenderness, which seemed to give back to them all their beauty.

"Don't be sorry for me, uncle," she said, stopping, and gently brushing away with her hand some specks of dust that lay on the collar of his coat. "I have suffered so much and suffered so long, that the heaviest disappointments pass lightly over me now."

"I won't hear you say it!" cried Uncle Joseph. "You give me shocks I can't bear when you talk to me in this way. You shall have no more disappointments—no, you shall not! I, Joseph Buschmann, the Obstinate, the Pig-headed, I say it!"

"The day when I shall have no more disappointments, uncle, is not far off now. Let me wait a little longer, and endure a little longer: I have learned to be patient, and to hope for nothing. Fearing and failing, fearing and failing—that has been my life ever since I was a young woman—the life I have become used to by this time. If you are surprised, as I know you must be, at my not possessing myself of the letter, when I had the keys of the Myrtle Room in my hand, and when no one was near to stop me, remember the history of my life, and take that as an explanation. Fearing and failing, fearing and failing—if I told you all the truth, I could tell no more than that. Let us walk on, uncle."

The resignation in her voice and manner while she spoke was the resignation of despair. It gave her an unnatural self-possession, which altered her, in the eyes of Uncle Joseph, almost past recognition. He looked at her in undisguised alarm.

"No!" he said, "we will not walk on; we will walk back to the dungeon-house; we will make another plan; we will try to get at this devil's imp of a letter in some other way. I care for no Munders, no housekeepers, no Betzees—I! I care for nothing but the getting you the one thing you want, and the taking you home again as easy in your mind as I am myself. Come! let us go back."

"It is too late to go back."

"How too late? Ah, dismal, dingy, dungeon-house of the devil, how I hate you!" cried Uncle Joseph, looking back over the prospect, and shaking both his fists at Porthgenna Tower.

"It is too late, uncle," she repeated. "Too late, because the opportunity is lost; too late, because if I could bring it back, I dare not go near the Myrtle Room again. My last hope was to change the hiding-place of the letter—and that last hope I have given up. I have only one object in life left now; you may help me in it; but I can not tell you how unless you come on with me at once—unless you say nothing more about going back to Porthgenna Tower."

Uncle Joseph began to expostulate. His niece stopped him in the middle of a sentence, by touching him on the shoulder and pointing to a particular spot on the darkening slope of the moor below them.

"Look!" she said, "there is somebody on the path behind us. Is it a boy or a man?"

Uncle Joseph looked through the fading light, and saw a figure at some little distance. It seemed like the figure of a boy, and he was apparently engaged in digging on the moor.

"Let us turn round, and go on at once," pleaded Sarah, before the old man could answer her. "I can't say what I want to say to you, uncle, until we are safe under shelter at the inn."

They went on until they reached the highest ground on the moor. There they stopped, and looked back again. The rest of their way lay down hill; and the spot on which they stood was the last point from which a view could be obtained of Porthgenna Tower.

"We have lost sight of the boy," said Uncle Joseph, looking over the ground below them.

Sarah's younger and sharper eyes bore witness to the truth of her uncle's words—the view over the moor was lonely now, in every direction, as far as she could see. Before going on again, she moved a little away from the old man, and looked at the tower of the ancient house, rising heavy and black in the dim light, with the dark sea background stretching behind it like a wall. "Never again!" she whispered to herself. "Never, never, never again!" Her eyes wandered away to the church, and to the cemetery inclosure by its side, barely distinguishable now in the shadows of the coming night. "Wait for me a little longer," she said, looking toward the burial-ground with straining eyes, and pressing her hand on her bosom over the place where the book of Hymns lay hid. "My wanderings are nearly at an end; the day for my coming home again is not far off!"

The tears filled her eyes and shut out the view. She rejoined her uncle, and, taking his arm again, drew him rapidly a few steps along the downward path—then checked herself, as if struck by a sudden suspicion, and walked back a few paces to the highest ridge of the ground. "I am not sure," she said, replying to her companion's look of surprise—"I am not sure whether we have seen the last yet of that boy who was differing on the moor."

As the words passed her lips, a figure stole out from behind one of the large fragments of granite rock which were scattered over the waste on all sides of them. It was once more the figure of the boy, and again he began to dig, without the slightest apparent reason, on the barren ground at his feet.

"Yes, yes, I see," said Uncle Joseph, as his niece eagerly directed his attention to the suspicious figure. "It is the same boy, and he is digging still—and, if you please, what of that?"

Sarah did not attempt to answer. "Let us get on," she said, hurriedly. "Let us get on as fast as we can to the inn."

They turned again, and took the downward path before them. In less than a minute they had lost sight of Porthgenna Tower, of the old church, and of the whole of the western view. Still, though there was now nothing but the blank darkening moorland to look back at, Sarah persisted in stopping at frequent intervals, as long as there was any light left, to glance behind her. She made no remark, she offered no excuse for thus delaying the journey back to the inn. It was only when they arrived within sight of the lights of the post-town that she ceased looking back, and that she spoke to her companion. The few words she addressed to him amounted to nothing more than a request that he would ask for a private sitting-room as soon as they reached their place of sojourn for the night.

They ordered beds at the inn, and were shown into the best parlor to wait for supper. The moment they were alone, Sarah drew a chair close to the old man's side, and whispered these words in his ear—

"Uncle! we have been followed every step of the way from Porthgenna Tower to this place."

"So! so! And how do you know that?" inquired Uncle Joseph.

"Hush! Somebody may be listening at the door, somebody may be creeping under the window. You noticed that boy who was digging on the moor?—"

"Bah! Why, Sarah! do you frighten yourself, do you try to frighten me about a boy?"

"Oh, not so loud! not so loud! They have laid a trap for us. Uncle! I suspected it when we first entered the doors of Porthgenna Tower; I am sure of it now. What did all that whispering mean between the housekeeper and the steward when we first got into the hall? I watched their faces, and I know they were talking about us. They were not half surprised enough at seeing us, not half surprised enough at hearing what we wanted. Don't laugh at me, uncle! There is real danger: it is no fancy of mine. The keys—come closer—the keys of the north rooms have got new labels on them; the doors have all been numbered. Think of that! Think of the whispering when we came in, and the whispering afterward, in the housekeeper's room, when you got up to go away. You noticed the sudden change in that man's behavior after the housekeeper spoke to him—you must have noticed it? They let us in too easily, and they let us out too easily. No, no! I am not deluding myself. There was some secret motive for letting us into the house, and some secret motive for letting us out again. That boy on the moor betrays it, if nothing else does. I saw him following us all the way here, as plainly as I see you. I am not frightened without reason, this time. As surely as we two are together in this room, there is a trap laid for us by the people at Porthgenna Tower!"

"A trap? What trap? And how? and why? and wherefore?" inquired Uncle Joseph, expressing bewilderment by waving both his hands rapidly to and fro close before his eyes.

"They want to make me speak, they want to follow me, they want to find out where I go, they want to ask me questions," she answered, trembling violently. "Uncle! you remember what I told you of those crazed words I said to Mrs. Frankland—I ought to have cut my tongue out rather than have spoken them! They have done dreadful mischief—I am certain of it—dreadful mischief already. I have made myself suspected! I shall be questioned, if Mrs. Frankland finds me out again. She will try to find me out—we shall be inquired after here—we must destroy all trace of where we go to next—we must make sure that the people at this inn can answer no questions—oh, Uncle Joseph! whatever we do, let us make sure of that!"

"Good," said the old man, nodding his head with a perfectly self-satisfied air. "Be quite easy, my child, and leave it to me to make sure. When you are gone to bed, I shall send for the landlord, and I shall say, 'Get us a little carriage, if you please, Sir, to take us back again to-morrow to the coach for Truro.'"

"No, no, no! we must not hire a carriage here."

"And I say, yes, yes, yes! We will hire a carriage here, because I will, first of all, make sure with the landlord. Listen. I shall say to him, 'If there come after us people with inquisitive looks in their eyes and uncomfortable questions in their mouths—if you please, Sir, hold your tongue.' Then I shall wink my eye, I shall lay my finger, so, to the side of my nose, I shall give one little laugh that means much—and, crick! crack! I have made sure of the landlord! and there is an end of it!"

"We must not trust the landlord, uncle—we must not trust any body. When we leave this place to-morrow, we must leave it on foot, and take care no living soul follows us. Look! here is a map of West Cornwall hanging up on the wall, with roads and cross-roads all marked on it. We may find out beforehand what direction we ought to walk in. A night's rest will give me all the strength I want; and we have no luggage that we can not carry. You have nothing but your knapsack, and I have nothing but the little carpet-bag you lent me. We can walk six, seven, even ten miles, with resting by the way. Come here and look at the map—pray, pray come and look at the map!"

Protesting against the abandonment of his own project, which he declared, and sincerely believed, to be perfectly adapted to meet the emergency in which they were placed, Uncle Joseph joined his niece in examining the map. A little beyond the post-town, a cross-road was marked, running northward at right angles with the highway that led to Truro, and conducting to another road, which looked large enough to be a coach-road, and which led through a town of sufficient importance to have its name printed in capital letters. On discovering this, Sarah proposed that they should follow the cross-road (which did not appear on the map to be more than five or six miles long) on foot, abstaining from taking any conveyance until they had arrived at the town marked in capital letters. By pursuing this course, they would destroy all trace of their progress after leaving the post-town—unless, indeed, they were followed on foot from this place, as they had been followed over the moor. In the event of any fresh difficulty of that sort occurring, Sarah had no better remedy to propose than lingering on the road till after nightfall, and leaving it to the darkness to baffle the vigilance of any person who might be watching in the distance to see where they went.

Uncle Joseph shrugged his shoulders resignedly when his niece gave her reasons for wishing to continue the journey on foot. "There is much tramping through dust, and much looking behind us, and much spying and peeping and suspecting and roundabout walking in all this," he said. "It is by no means so easy, my child, as making sure of the landlord, and sitting at our ease on the cushions of the stage-coach. But if you will have it so, so shall it be. What you please, Sarah; what you please—that is all the opinion of my own that I allow myself to have till we are back again at Truro, and are rested for good and all at the end of our journey."

"At the end of your journey, uncle: I dare not say at the end of mine."

Those few words changed the old man's face in an instant. His eyes fixed reproachfully on his niece, his ruddy cheeks lost their color, his restless hands dropped suddenly to his sides. "Sarah!" he said, in a low, quiet tone, which seemed to have no relation to the voice in which he spoke on ordinary occasions—"Sarah! have you the heart to leave me again?"

"Have I the courage to stay in Cornwall? That is the question to ask me, uncle. If I had only my own heart to consult, oh! how gladly I should live under your roof—live under it, if you would let me, to my dying day! But my lot is not cast for such rest and such happiness as that. The fear that I have of being questioned by Mrs. Frankland drives me away from Porthgenna, away from Cornwall, away from you. Even my dread of the letter being found is hardly so great now as my dread of being traced and questioned. I have said what I ought not to have said already. If I find myself in Mrs. Frankland's presence again, there is nothing that she might not draw out of me. Oh, my God! to think of that kind-hearted, lovely young woman, who brings happiness with her wherever she goes, bringing terror to me! Terror when her pitying eyes look at me; terror when her kind voice speaks to me; terror when her tender hand touches mine! Uncle! when Mrs. Frankland comes to Porthgenna, the very children will crowd about her—every creature in that poor village will be drawn toward the light of her beauty and her goodness, as if it was the sunshine of Heaven itself; and I—I, of all living beings—must shun her as if she was a pestilence! The day when she comes into Cornwall is the day when I must go out of it—the day when we two must say farewell. Don't, don't add to my wretchedness by asking me if I have the heart to leave you! For my dead mother's sake, Uncle Joseph, believe that I am grateful, believe that it is not my own will that takes me away when I leave you again." She sank down on a sofa near her, laid her head, with one long, deep sigh, wearily on the pillow, and spoke no more.

The tears gathered thick in Uncle Joseph's eyes as he sat down by her side. He took one of her hands, and patted and stroked it as though he were soothing a little child. "I will bear it as well as I can, Sarah," he whispered, faintly, "and I will say no more. You will write to me sometimes, when I am left all alone? You will give a little time to Uncle Joseph, for the poor dead mother's sake?"

She turned toward him suddenly, and threw both her arms round his neck with a passionate energy that was strangely at variance with her naturally quiet self-repressed character. "I will write often, dear; I will write always," she whispered, with her head on his bosom. "If I am ever in any trouble or danger, you shall know it." She stopped confusedly, as if the freedom of her own words and actions terrified her, unclasped her arms, and, turning away abruptly from the old man, hid her face in her hands. The tyranny of the restraint that governed her whole life was all expressed—how sadly, how eloquently!—in that one little action.

Uncle Joseph rose from the sofa, and walked gently backward and forward in the room, looking anxiously at his niece, but not speaking to her. After a while the servant came in to prepare the table for supper. It was a welcome interruption, for it obliged Sarah to make an effort to recover her self-possession. After the meal was over, the uncle and niece separated at once for the night, without venturing to exchange another word on the subject of their approaching separation.

When they met the next morning, the old man had not recovered his spirits. Although he tried to speak as cheerfully as usual, there was something strangely subdued and quiet about him in voice, look, and manner. Sarah's heart smote her as she saw how sadly he was altered by the prospect of their parting. She said a few words of consolation and hope; but he only waved his hand negatively, in his quaint foreign manner, and hastened out of the room to find the landlord and ask for the bill.

Soon after breakfast, to the surprise of the people at the inn, they set forth to continue their journey on foot, Uncle Joseph carrying his knapsack on his back, and his niece's carpet-bag in his hand. When they arrived at the turning that led into the cross-road, they both stopped and looked back. This time they saw nothing to alarm them. There was no living creature visible on the broad highway over which they had been walking for the last quarter of an hour after leaving the inn.

"The way is clear," said Uncle Joseph, as they turned into the cross-road. "Whatever might have happened yesterday, there is nobody following us now."

"Nobody that we can see," answered Sarah. "But I distrust the very stones by the road-side. Let us look back often, uncle, before we allow ourselves to feel secure. The more I think of it, the more I dread the snare that is laid for us by those people at Porthgenna Tower."

"You say us, Sarah. Why should they lay a snare for me?"

"Because they have seen you in my company. You will be safer from them when we are parted; and that is another reason, Uncle Joseph, why we should bear the misfortune of our separation as patiently as we can."

"Are you going far, very far away, Sarah, when you leave me?"

"I dare not stop on my journey till I can feel that I am lost in the great world of London. Don't look at me so sadly! I shall never forget my promise; I shall never forget to write. I have friends—not friends like you, but still friends—to whom I can go. I can feel safe from discovery nowhere but in London. My danger is great—it is, it is, indeed! I know, from what I have seen at Porthgenna, that Mrs. Frankland has an interest already in finding me out; and I am certain that this interest will be increased tenfold when she hears (as she is sure to hear) of what happened yesterday in the house. If they should trace you to Truro, oh, be careful, uncle! be careful how you deal with them; be careful how you answer their questions!"

"I will answer nothing, my child. But tell me—for I want to know all the little chances that there are of your coming back—tell me, if Mrs. Frankland finds the letter, what shall you do then?"

At that question, Sarah's hand, which had been resting languidly on her uncle's arm while they walked together, closed on it suddenly. "Even if Mrs. Frankland gets into the Myrtle Room," she said, stopping and looking affrightedly about her while she replied, "she may not find the letter. It is folded up so small; it is hidden in such an unlikely place."

"But if she does find it?"

"If she does, there will be more reason than ever for my being miles and miles away."

As she gave that answer, she raised both her hands to her heart, and pressed them firmly over it. A slight distortion passed rapidly across her features; her eyes closed; her face flushed all over—then turned paler again than ever. She drew out her pocket-handkerchief, and passed it several times over her face, on which the perspiration had gathered thickly. The old man, who had looked behind him when his niece stopped, under the impression that she had just seen somebody following them, observed this latter action, and asked if she felt too hot. She shook her head, and took his arm again to go on, breathing, as he fancied, with some difficulty. He proposed that they should sit down by the road-side and rest a little; but she only answered, "Not yet." So they went on for another half-hour; then turned to look behind them again, and, still seeing nobody, sat down for a little while to rest on a bank by the way-side.

After stopping twice more at convenient resting-places, they reached the end of the cross-road. On the highway to which it led them they were overtaken by a man driving an empty cart, who offered to give them a lift as far as the next town. They accepted the proposal gratefully; and, arriving at the town, after a drive of half an hour, were set down at the door of the principal inn. Finding on inquiry at this place that they were too late for the coach, they took a private conveyance, which brought them to Truro late in the afternoon. Throughout the whole of the journey, from the time when they left the post-town of Porthgenna to the time when they stopped, by Sarah's desire, at the coach-office in Truro, they had seen nothing to excite the smallest suspicion that their movements were being observed. None of the people whom they saw in the inhabited places, or whom they passed on the road, appeared to take more than the most casual notice of them.

It was five o'clock when they entered the office at Truro to ask about conveyances running in the direction of Exeter. They were informed that a coach would start in an hour's time, and that another coach would pass through Truro at eight o'clock the next morning.

"You will not go to-night?" pleaded Uncle Joseph. "You will wait, my child, and rest with me till to-morrow?"

"I had better go, uncle, while I have some little resolution left," was the sad answer.

"But you are so pale, so tired, so weak."

"I shall never be stronger than I am now. Don't set my own heart against me! It is hard enough to go without that."

Uncle Joseph sighed, and said no more. He led the way across the road and down the by-street to his house. The cheerful man in the shop was polishing a piece of wood behind the counter, sitting in the same position in which Sarah had seen him when she first looked through the window on her arrival at Truro. He had good news for his master of orders received, but Uncle Joseph listened absently to all that his shopman said, and hastened into the little back parlor without the faintest reflection of its customary smile on his face. "If I had no shop and no orders, I might go away with you, Sarah," he said when he and his niece were alone. "Aïe! Aïe! the setting out on this journey has been the only happy part of it. Sit down and rest, my child. I must put my best face upon it, and get you some tea."

When the tea-tray had been placed on the table, he left the room, and returned, after an absence of some little time, with a basket in his hand. When the porter came to carry the luggage to the coach-office, he would not allow the basket to be taken away at the same time, but sat down and placed it between his feet while he occupied himself in pouring out a cup of tea for his niece.

The musical box still hung at his side in its traveling-case of leather. As soon as he had poured out the cup of tea, he unbuckled the strap, removed the covering from the box, and placed it on the table near him. His eyes wandered hesitatingly toward Sarah, as he did this; he leaned forward, his lips trembling a little, his hand trifling uneasily with the empty leather case that now lay on his knees, and said to her in low, unsteady tones—

"You will hear a little farewell song of Mozart? It may be a long time, Sarah, before he can play to you again. A little farewell song, my child, before you go?"

His hand stole up gently from the leather case to the table, and set the box playing the same air that Sarah had heard on the evening when she entered the parlor, after her journey from Somersetshire, and found him sitting alone listening to the music. What depths of sorrow there were now in those few simple notes! What mournful memories of past times gathered and swelled in the heart at the bidding of that one little plaintive melody! Sarah could not summon the courage to lift her eyes to the old man's face—they might have betrayed to him that she was thinking of the days when the box that he treasured so dearly played the air they were listening to now by the bedside of his dying child.

The stop had not been set, and the melody, after it had come to an end, began again. But now, after the first few bars, the notes succeeded one another more and more slowly—the air grew less and less recognizable—dropped at last to three notes, following each other at long intervals—then ceased altogether. The chain that governed the action of the machinery had all run out; Mozart's farewell song was silenced on a sudden, like a voice that had broken down.

The old man started, looked earnestly at his niece, and threw the leather case over the box as if he desired to shut out the sight of it. "The music stopped so," he whispered to himself, in his own language, "when little Joseph died! Don't go!" he added quickly, in English, almost before Sarah had time to feel surprised at the singular change that had taken place in his voice and manner. "Don't go! Think better of it, and stop with me."

"I have no choice, uncle, but to leave you—indeed, indeed I have not! You don't think me ungrateful? Comfort me at the last moment by telling me that!"

He pressed her hand in silence, and kissed her on both cheeks. "My heart is very heavy for you, Sarah," he said. "The fear has come to me that it is not for your own good that you are going away from Uncle Joseph now!"

"I have no choice," she sadly repeated—"no choice but to leave you."

"It is time, then, to get the parting over." The cloud of doubt and fear that had altered his face, from the moment when the music came to its untimely end, seemed to darken, when he had said those words. He took up the basket which he had kept so carefully at his feet, and led the way out in silence.

They were barely in time; the driver was mounting to his seat when they got to the coach-office. "God preserve you, my child, and send you back to me soon, safe and well. Take the basket on your lap; there are some little things in it for your journey." His voice faltered at the last word, and Sarah felt his lips pressed on her hand. The next instant the door was closed, and she saw him dimly through her tears standing among the idlers on the pavement, who were waiting to see the coach drive off.

By the time they were a little way out of the town she was able to dry her eyes and look into the basket. It contained a pot of jam and a horn spoon, a small inlaid work-box from the stock in the shop, a piece of foreign-looking cheese, a French roll, and a little paper packet of money, with the words "Don't be angry" written on it, in Uncle Joseph's hand. Sarah closed the cover of the basket again, and drew down her veil. She had not felt the sorrow of the parting in all its bitterness until that moment. Oh, how hard it was to be banished from the sheltering home which was offered to her by the one friend she had left in the world!

While that thought was in her mind, the old man was just closing the door of his lonely parlor. His eyes wandered to the tea-tray on the table and to Sarah's empty cup, and he whispered to himself in his own language again—

"The music stopped so when little Joseph died!"