olved
not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put that
burden upon her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the
poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her sympathy for the
sake of sparing her needless pain.

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary
unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman
told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a
Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a
stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his
wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It was so
natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar
circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but when a few
days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to
come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that
he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to
Basil's guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar
for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been
ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse
and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at
the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from
Niagara without being forced to a similar excess he would confess his
guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she
committed. The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery
had clung for twenty-four hours before he was carried over the Falls, and
to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel's bonnet ribbons
seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He could endure the pretty arbor
no longer. "Come, children!" he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety;
"let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that
your mother was afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it."

"For shame, Basil!" retorted Isabel. "You know it was you who were afraid
of that bridge."

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at
the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon
paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

"What extortion!" cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly
unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he h