shining cloud would have vanished away. I have seen Hester, in her play, touch the shadowy hand without knowing it.

"But one day I went down to my master's room with some finished work, and there was a girl with him, a laughing, giddy, flaunting girl, who was standing close beside him. I . felt all at once a horrible dread and hatred creep through me. Something said, either in my ear, or only in my heart, 'That woman will be John Morley's second wife!' They had not seen me, and I stole away with the cold sweat upon my face. After that the appearance was as of a woman in great sorrow, who looked at me with trouble in her eyes. But what could I do?

"It was a dreadful misfortune to happen. If my master had died, there was a little fortune for Hester, and I would have managed to carry on the business for her. But another wife, and other children, may be! I saw Hester about to become a to become a step-child, a forlorn little drudge, forgotten and neglected by her father.

"I loathed that woman; I abhorred her. I hated the jingle of her piano, and her loud

singing, which reached me up in my quiet. room, and scared away the shining vision. Then the money kept flying like sparks from an anvil. She must have her silks and satins and laces, and a drawing-room, and more servants. My master was befooled by her. I saw Hester would come to poverty. She was not unkind to her; she even made believe to love her, and whenever the child came to see me, we heard her shrill, hateful voice calling, 'Hester, Hetty!' Perhaps it was because she no longer played there, that her mother never came to my workroom.

"But I saw her once again, and I told Hester of it. I saw her sitting by my fire, with her head bowed down upon her hands, as one in very sore trouble of mind.

"Then my master's second wife brought disgrace upon him.

"I thought I could not hate her more than I had done, but I hated her a hundred-fold more after that. I saw my master the night after she left him go into Hester's room in the dead of the night, ready to take her life and his own. I had stayed in the house for very fear of that, to save the child. I remember striking

a boy a heavy blow for saying that Hester was

her daughter.

"Ten years or so after that I saw the man who had been our ruin, prowling about our house, and I stole back to my room for one of the press-pins. He walked up and down, with his head bent, until he came close to where I stood in the entrance of the side-passage, and I struck him, as I would have set my heel upon any venomous snake. He fell in an instant, and I hurried home. My mother was come to live with me then. I cleaned the press-pin with ashes, and carried it back the next morning. I was not altogether sorry that I had missed killing him.

"But I missed killing her, too. My hand betrayed me a second time. It came about in this way. I was staying late on the Saturday night, and my master was gone out of the house, when all at once I heard the old jingle of the piano coming up to my room. I knew it could be no one else save her. I had waited for this hour many years. I took up my presspin again, and crept down-stairs through the old printing rooms into the other part of the house. The drawing-room door was ajar, and

I looked in. She was sitting at her piano, with her back towards me, and she did not hear me go in. I thought she was dead after I struck her; and I felt glad that I had revenged Hester. my master, and myself. Then I went home.

"Hester came in just now. They are come back, her and her father, and are going down to their own house though they know she is there. I shall never enter it again. Sometimes I think it would be well for me to go, as my mother wishes me, to Burgundy; but then I have no money. We are all poor; my master, Hester, and myself. I am writing this to explain to my master, and to any other persons he may think fit to show it to, how all these things have come about.

"I did everything for the sake of Hester, who has been as the apple of my eye ever since I saw her first, a small, white creature, in her mother's arms."

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHECK-MATED.

ROBERT WALDRON read the papers before him with an aching heart. Where was his punishment to cease? At what other points in his career was the ever-widening circle of his early sin to reach him? He had never suspected Lawson's enmity all these years; and now it had wrought so strongly, being baffled and thrown back upon itself, that it had driven him to suicide. The sound of Grant's foot upon the stairs was welcome, yet when he entered Robert could not look him in the face. He only spoke in a broken and smothered voice.

"The poor fellow has destroyed himself," he said.

No," answered Grant, almost cheerfully, "I have been expecting this any time for the last twelve months. He consulted me for a heartdisease, for which he was using opium, the only relief he could have. I knew he could not last long; but it is possible he may have met with a little excitement which hastened the end. This is no case of suicide."

VOL. III.

R