Welsh Tom was all of a tremble, and his eyes were fixed with a terrified expression upon the stone heart, which lay in his hand.
"Tom!" Richard cried, in alarm.
The Welshman grasped Richard's wrist, and asked, in a husky voice--
"Where did you get this from?"
"That heart! I picked it up on the stairs when I bade Alice good-bye in Melbourne. I thought it was a good omen. What makes you look upon it so?"
As the Welshman gazed upon that little piece of stone, he saw the woodland, lake, and mountain, which lay around his old Welsh home, where love and peace had reigned until the false friend came to wreck their happiness. The heart-shocks, the stern resolves born of desolation, the flight of his sister, the agony of his mother, his pursuit of the villain who had so ruthlessly violated the sacred ties of friendship and hospitality, the promise of reparation, the false charge, the trial, the condemnation: all this he saw in that little stone heart.
"It is like a sign from the grave." he said. "And you don't know to whom it belongs?"
"No."
"It was my sister's--my poor, lost sister's. I gave it to her in Wales, when she was good. I told you I fancied once I saw her in Melbourne. If she should be alive, Dick--if she should be there! Oh, Dick! Dick!"
"When I get to Melbourne, Tom," Richard said, "I will try and find out all about it. Perhaps Alice knows." And then he thought pityingly of the bad character of the house in which he had found the heart. "Take courage, Tom, we will find her if she be alive."