Josephine assured her that he had, and a little bridled at the vapoury insinuation that Sebastian was not perfect. She detailed the whole circumstance with all the facts fully fringed and feathered. He had received the letter just as they were preparing to go to the Louvre; but he had not shown it to her, and she had not asked to see it. She saw though that he was much agitated when he read it; but he had put it in his pocket, and when she looked for it it was not there. All that he had said was, "Leam has left home, Josephine, and we must go back at once.” Of course she had not asked questions, she said with a pleasant little assumption of wifely submission. Her search in her husband's pockets was only what might have been expected from the average woman; but the wifely submission was special.

For this curtailment of their sister's enjoyment Maria and Fanny judged Leam almost more severely than for any other delinquency involved in her flight. They spoke as if she had planned it purposely to vex her father and his bride in their honeymoon, and deprive them of their lawful pleasure; but Josephine never blamed her as they did, and when they were most bitter cast in her little words of soothing, and excused her with more zeal than evidence-excused her sometimes to the point of making her sisters angry with her and inclined to accuse her of her old failing-meek-spiritedness carried to the verge of self-abasement.

But the one who suffered most of all those left to lament or to wonder was poor Alick Corfield. It was a misery to see him, with his hollow cheeks and haggard eyes, like an animal that has been hunted into lone places, terrified and looking for a way of escape, or like a dog that has lost its master. He tried every method known to him to gain information of her directly or indirectly; but Mr. Dundas, ignorant himself, had only to guard that ignorance from breaking out. As for knowledge, he could not give what he did not possess; and the terrible thing that he did know he was not likely to let appear.

One day when the poor fellow broke down, as was not unusual with him when asking about Leam, and Mr. Dundas read him like a book— all save that one black page where the beloved name stood inscribed in letters of his own heart's blood between the words "crime" and "murder" --with a woman's liking for saying pleasant things which soothed those who heard them and did no hurt to those who said them-save for the insignificant manner in which falsehood hurts the soul-Sebastian, laying his hand kindly on the poor fellow's angular shoulder, said: “I am sorry to know as much as I do, Alick. There is no one to whom I would have given her so readily as to you, my dear boy. Indeed, it was always one of my hopes for the future, poor misguided child, and I can see that it was yours too. Ah! how I grieve that it is impossible!" Why impossible?" asked Alick who had the faculty of faith, his pale face flushing.

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Mr. Dundas turned white. A look not so much of pain as of ab horrence came into his face.

"Impossible!" he said vehemently. "I would not curse my greatest enemy with my daughter's hand!"

Alick felt his blood run cold. What did he mean? Did he know all, or was he speaking only with the angry feeling of a man who had been disappointed and annoyed? There was a short pause. Then said Alick, looking straight into Sebastian's eyes and speaking very slowly, but with not too much emphasis:

"I would hold myself blessed with her as my wife, had she even committed murder."

Mr. Dundas started perceptibly.

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'Oh," he answered after a moment's hesitation, with a forced and sickly kind of smile; "a silly girl's wrong-headedness does not reach quite so far as this! She has done wrong-miserably wrong-but between withdrawing herself from her father's house and committing such a crime as murder there is rather a wide difference. All the same I am disgraced by her folly," angrily, "and I will not let any one-not even you, Alick -know where she is."

"That is cruel to those who love her," pleaded Alick, his eyes filling with tears.

"If cruel it is necessary," said Mr. Dundas.

"But she must need friends about her now more than she ever did," urged Alick. "Tell me at least where to find her, that I may do what I can to console her."

Mr. Dundas shook his head.

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'No," he said sternly. "She is dead to me, and shall be dead to my friends. She is blotted out from my love and I will blot her out from my memory; and no one's persuasions can bring back what is effaced! Now, my dear boy, let us understand one another. I have surprised your secret-you love my daughter; and had she been worthy of you I would have given her to you more willingly than to any one I know. But she herself has fixed the gulf between us, which I will not pass nor help any one else to pass. Learn to look on her as dead-for she is dead to me, to you, to the world!"

"Never to me!" cried Alick. "While she lives she must be always to me what she has been from the first day I saw her. has done I shall always love her as much as I do now."

Whatever she

"You are faithful," replied Sebastian; "but trust me, boy, no woman that ever lived was worth so much fidelity. I will protect you against your own wish, and be your friend in spite of yourself. You shall not know where she is, and you shall not throw yourself away on her. As she has elected to be effaced she shall be effaced-blotted out for ever!" "Then I will consecrate my life to finding her!" cried Alick warmly. Mr. Dundas shrugged his shoulders.

"Who can persuade a wilful man against his folly?" he said coldly. "You are following a marsh-light, my boy, and if you do find it you will only be landed in a bog."

"If I find her I shall have found my reward," Alick answered with boyish fervour. "It will be happiness enough for me if I can bring back one smile to her face, or lighten one hour of its sorrow.”

"Let well alone," said Mr. Dundas; but Alick answered, "Not till it is well; and God will help me!"

Whereupon the interview ended, and Alick left the house, feeling something as one of the knights of old might have felt when he had vowed himself to the Quest of the Holy Grail.

When Mr. Dundas came home naturally the Families called, as in duty bound and by inclination led. Excitement concerning Ford House was at its height, for there were two things to keep it alive-the one to see how the bride and bridegroom looked, the other to try and pick up something definite about Leam. And among the rest came Mr. Gryce, with his floating white locks falling about his bland cherubic face, his mild blue eyes with their trick of turning red on small provocation, and his lisping manner of speech, ingenuous, interrogatory and knowing nothing when interrogated in his turn, somehow gleaning full ears wherever he passed and dropping not even a solitary stalk of straw in return. He expressed his sorrow that he had not seen lately his young friend Miss Dundas.

"In my secluded life," he said, his eyelids reddening, “she is like a beautiful bird that flashes through the dull sky for a moment but leaves the atmosphere brighter than before." He glanced round the room as if looking for her. "I hope she is well?" he added, not attempting to conceal a certain accent of disappointment at her absence.

Quite well when I heard from her," answered Mr. Dundas, doing his best to speak without embarrassment.

Mr. Gryce turned his face in frank astonishment on the speaker. "Ah! She is from home, then?" he asked.

"Yes," said Mr. Dundas curtly.

"But I myself

"I had not heard," lisped the tenant of Lionnet. have been from home for a few days, and have just returned. Though indeed, present or absent, I know very little of my neighbours' doings, as you may see. I did not even know that Miss Dundas was from home."

"Yet it was pretty widely talked about," said Mr. Dundas, with a certain suspicious glance at the cherubic face smiling innocently into his.

"Doubtless the absence of Miss Dundas must have caused a gap," replied Mr. Gryce; "but you see, as I said, I have been away myself, and when I am at home I do not gossip."

"Have- Where have you been?" asked Mr. Dundas abruptly, with that sudden glance as suddenly withdrawn which tells of a halfformed suspicion neither dwelt on nor clearly made out.

"

"To Paris," said Mr. Gryce demurely. "I went to see"Oh! you went to see Notre Dame and la Madeleine, of course!" interrupted Sebastian satirically.

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"No," answered Mr. Gryce with a cherubic smile. Strange to say, I had business connected with that odd drama of Le Sphinx."

There was not much more talk after this, and Mr. Gryce soon took his leave, desiring to be most respectfully remembered to Miss Dundas when her father next wrote, and to say that he was keeping some pretty specimens of moths for her on her return; both of which messages Sebastian promised to convey at the earliest opportunity, improvising a counter-remark of Leam's which he was sorry he could not remember accurately, but it was something about butterflies and Mr. Gryce, though what it was he could not positively say.

"Never mind; I will take the will for the deed," said the naturalist as he smiled himself through the doorway.

And when he had gone Josephine declared that she did not care if he never came again-there was something she did not like about him. Pushed for a reason by her husband who always assumed a logical and masculine tone to her, she had not one to produce; but she stumbled as if by chance on the word "sinister," which was just what Mr. Gryce was not. So Sebastian made her go into the library for the dictionary, and hunt up the word through all its derivations; and thus proved to her incontestably that she was ignorant of the English language and of human nature in about equal proportions.

It was soon remarked at the post-office that no letter addressed to Miss Dundas ever left North Aston, and that none came to Mr. Dundas, or any one else, in the queer cramped handwriting which experience had taught Mrs. Pepper, postmistress as well as the keeper of the village general shop, carried the sentiments of Leam Dundas. This caused a curious little buzz in the lower parts of the hive when Mrs. Pepper mentioned it to her friends and gossips; but as no fire can live without fresh fuel, and as nothing whatever was heard of Leam to stimulate curiosity or set new tales afloat, by degrees her name dropped out of the daily discussions of the place, and she was no longer interesting, because she had become used up and talked out.

Only Mr. Gryce wrote more frequently than had been his wont to Miss Gryce, at Windy Brow, in Cumberland-conjectured to be his sister; and only Alick never ceased in his attempts to discover where his lost queen was hidden; though these attempts had hitherto been hopelessly baffled, partly because he had not an inch of foothold whence to make his first spring, nor the thinnest clue to tell him which path to take.

And as a purchaser, the final cause of whose existence seemed to have been the unquestioning possession of Ford House, came suddenly on the scene and took the whole thing as it stood, Sebastian and his wife left the place, taking Fina with them, and migrated to Paris to finish their interrupted honeymoon. So now it was supposed that the last link connecting Leam with North Aston was broken, and that she was indeed blotted out and for ever.

True love is faithful; and Alick Corfield's love was true. Had all

the world forsaken her he would have remained immovable in his old place and attitude of devotion ;-the one fixed idea always possessing him to find her in her retreat, and restore her to self-respect and happiness by his undying love. But how to find her? All sorts of mad projects passed through his brain, but mad projects need some methods, and methods in harmony with existing conditions, if they are to bring success; and Alick's vague resolves to go out and look for her had no more meaning in them than the random moves of a bad chessplayer.

Had Sir Lancelot lived at the present time he would have gone to Camelot by express, like meaner souls; and had Sir Galahad set out on his Quest in the latter half of the nineteenth century he would have either advertised in the newspapers or have employed a detective for the first part of his undertaking. So, had Alick gone to Scotland Yard and taken the police into his confidence, Leam would have been found in less than a week; but as he shrank from bringing her into contact with the force mainly associated with crime, he was left to his own devices unassisted; and these devices ended only in constantly recurring disappointment, and consequent increase of sorrow.

His sorrow indeed was so great, and told on him so heavily, that every one said he was going to die. He had been left thin and gaunt enough by his illness, but distress of mind coupled with weakness of body reduced him to a kind of sketchy likeness of Don Quixote-his pure soul and honest nature the only beautiful things about him-while his mother's heart is as nearly broken as his own.

CHAPTER XIX.

WINDY BROW.

WHILE North Aston was employing its time in wondering, and Alick Corfield was breaking his heart in sorrowing, Leam was doing battle with her despair and distress at Windy Brow; doing the best she could to keep her senses clear and to live through the penance which she had inflicted on herself.

So far Mrs. Pepper's conclusions, based on a badly-gummed envelope, were right-Miss Gryce, of Windy Brow, was the sister of Mr. Gryce, of Lionnet; though even Mrs. Pepper did not know that Leam Dundas, under the name of Leonora Darley, was living with her.

It is not the most obvious agents that are the most influential. The greatest things in nature are the work of the smallest creatures, and our lives are manipulated far more by unseen influences, known only to ourselves, than by those patent to the world. In all North Aston Mr. Gryce was the man who had apparently the least hold on the place and the slightest connection with the people. He had come there by accident, and by choice lived in retirement; though also by choice he had not been there a month before he knew all there was to be known of every individual for miles round. The merest chances had made him