Oblige me, my dear! I cannot sleep, and shall wait and watch.
Perhaps Andrew will be here."

"I can't leave you up, Aggy, and with that thing so near." She locked
toward the front parlor, where, behind the folding-doors, lay the dead.

"I have no fear of _that_. He was always kind to me. My fears are all in
this world. O _darling_!"

She burst into sobs. Her friend kissed her again and again, and knew
that feelings between love and crime extorted that last word.

"Aggy," spoke the light-hearted girl, "I know that you cannot help
loving him, and as long as he is loved by you I sha'n't believe him
guilty. Must I really leave you here?"

Her weeping friend turned up her face to give the mandatory kiss, and
Podge was gone.

Agnes sat in solitude, with her hands folded and her heart filled with
unutterable tender woe, that so much causeless cloud had settled upon
the home of her refuge. She could not experience that relief many of us
feel in deep adversity, that it is all illusion, and will in a moment
float away like other dreams. Brought to this house an orphan, and twice
deprived of a mother's love, she had only entered woman's estate when
another class of cares beset her. Her beauty and sweetness of
disposition had brought her more lovers than could make her happy. There
was but one on whom she could confer her heart, and this natural choice
had drawn around her the perils which now overwhelmed them all.
Accepting the son, she incurred the father's resentment upon both; for
he, the dead man yonder, had also been her lover.

"Oh, my God!" exclaimed the anguished woman, kneeling by her chair and
laying her cheek upon it, while only such tears as we shed in supreme
moments saturated her handkerchief, "what have I done to make such
misery to others? How sinful I must be to set son and father against
each other! Yet, Heavenly Father, I can but love!"

There was a cracking of something, as if the dead man in the great,
black parlor had carried his jealousy beyond his doom and was breaking
from his coffin to upbraid her. A door burst open in the dining-room,
which was behind her, and then the dining-room door also unclosed, and
was followed by a cold, graveyard draft. A moment of superstition
possessed Agnes. "Guard me, Saviour," she murmured.

At the dining-room threshold, advancing a little over the sill, as if to
rush upon her, was the figure of a man, dressed, head to foot, in
sailor's garments--heavy woollens, co