letter I sent to you. Richard Storms met me as I was crossing

the park on my way back from London that night. He was in a rage, and said something about you and my daughter Ruth that angered me in turn. In my wrath I knocked him down, and went home, sorry that I had done it, for his father was an old friend, and we had thoughts of being closer related through the young people.

When I got home Ruth seemed shy, and complained that the lad had forced his company on her, for which you had chastised him, as he richly deserved. I got angry again, and went out in haste, meaning to call him to a sharper account for the slander he had hinted against her and you. It may be that in my heart I was blaming you. It seems as if I never could have believed ill of you as I feel now; but the young man's words rang in my ears when I went out, and I might have been rough even with you if we had met first.

Well, I hurried on by the great cedars, thinking to meet Richard on his way home. When I got into the deep shadows a man came suddenly under the branches between me and the light. I saw the face; it was only a second that the moonlight struck it, but I saw the face. It was Richard Storms. I was turning to meet him when he lifted a gun and fired. I felt a flash of fire go through me. I leaped toward him, but he pushed me aside, and reeling till my face turned the other way, I fell. Then it was that I saw you in the edges of the moonlight. The other face came and went like lightning. It was yours that rested in my mind and went with me through the fever, but it was Storms that shot the gun; it was his face I saw, his voice I heard mingling curses with blows as I lay bleeding on the ground. The man who shot me and beat you down with the butt of his gun was Richard Storms, the son of my old friend. I am sure of this now, having questioned Ruth about the gun. He brought it to the house that night, and she saw it behind the door after you thrust him from the house and left it yourself, but when I went out no such thing was there. I had no weapon in my hand that night.

Storms must have come back and got the gun when Ruth saw him peering through the window. Do you know, I think it was not me he meant to shoot. More likely he was waiting for you, and only found out his mistake when I was down and you came in sight; for I can remember a great oath breaking over me, after I fell--and you were near us then.

I am not strong, and this writing tires me; but some how I feel that it must be done, or mischief may come from what I wrote in my fever; which I pray you to forgive.

I know you will burn this letter with the other when you have got it by heart. It must not be brought against the young man, for he was used roughly that night; and both blows and kicks are apt to turn some brave men into wild beasts.

He was to have wedded my daughter Ruth, but she could not bear to hear of it; and when my fever left all these things clear, I broke the old pledge. He loved my Ruth, and this was a blow to him. I wish no greater harm than this to the young man; and beg you to keep all that is against him a secret, for his father's sake.

Always your faithful servant, WILLIAM JESSUP

A great change came over Sir Noel's countenance as he read this letter. He did not thoroughly understand it; but Lady Rose was better informed. How Storms came in possession of the first letter, she could not tell; but that he had used it for his own interest, and the ruin of an innocent man, she saw clear enough. In a few brief sentences she explained this to Sir Noel. Then he understood the persecution that had driven Ruth to the fatal step she had taken.

There was nothing more to learn at the lake house, and with heavy hearts those three persons left it, turning their steps toward "The Rest." Mrs. Hipple, made thoughtful by experience, folded the garments they had found there, and carried them away under her shawl.

As Sir Noel was about to mount the terrace steps, a lad in uniform came up the chestnut avenue, and gave him a telegram, which he tore open with more agitation than such papers had ever produced in him before.

A young relative of ours, the daughter of William Jessup, a gardener at 'Norston's Rest,' is with us, in a state of health that requires immediate attention. I found her, by accident, in the office of the Australian line of packets. She had taken a passage, but not in her own name, and I could only persuade her to go home with me by a promise that I must break, or permit her to depart as she evidently wishes, unknown to her friends. I send this in urgent haste, and confiding in your discretion.

The signature was that of a young artist, whose name was attached to a picture of some promise that Sir Noel had bought because he remembered that the person was a connection of Jessup's.

With his pencil Sir Noel wrote a brief reply, which the boy carried away with him.

Two events of unusual importance happened at "Norston's Rest," the next day. It was given out in the village that Sir Noel and his family had gone up to the London house that the young man might be nearer his physicians, and that Lady Rose had taken Ruth Jessup with her, thinking that change of scene might soften the melancholy into which she had fallen. This sudden movement hardly found general discussion, when something more terrible filled the public mind. The body of Richard Storms had been found floating in the Black Lake, three days after Sir Noel's departure. It had evidently risen from the depths, and become entangled in the broken timbers still swaying from the balcony. When he failed to return from the fair, as he had promised, his mother, remembering the weird visitor who had called her up in the dead of the night, betook herself to the lake, and was at last joined by the old farmer, whose distress was even greater than her own, for he had a deeper knowledge of the young man's character, and this gave ground for fears of which she, kind woman, was made ignorant by her deep motherly love.

Thus fear-haunted, these two old people wandered about the lake day after day, until, one morning, they found a group of men upon the bank, talking solemnly together, and looking down upon the broken timbers still weltering in the water, as if some painful interest had all at once been attached to them.

When these people saw the old man and woman coming toward them, they shrunk back and left a passage by which they could pass into the old building, but no one spoke a word.

No noise, no outcry came from those two people when they saw their only son lying upon the bench where the neighbors had laid him down; but when one of them went in, troubled by the stillness, he found the old man standing against the wall, mournful and dumb, looking upon the dead face, as if the whole world had for him been cast down there. He did not even seek to comfort the poor mother, who was kneeling by the bench, with her arms clasped about all that was left of her son, unconscious that his dripping garments were chilling her bosom through to the heart, or that the face to which she laid hers with such pathetic mournfulness had been frozen to marble in the depths of the lake.

As the kind neighbor drew near and would gladly have offered consolation, the poor old woman looked up with a piteous smile on her lips and said:

"My brave, brave lad lost his life in saving a poor creature, who would have been drowned but for him."

Then she dropped her face again, and was still as the dead she embraced; but as she spoke of her son's bravery, those scant, hot tears that agony forces on old age came to her eyes and burned there.