e began to cry, and
before we had time to think what it was all about, he had taken his
hat and kissed Lilian and was gone. But he turned back at the door
again.

'I'll write to you,' he says to Lilian, 'but I don't cross this door
again till those words are unsaid,' and so he was gone.

Him being gone, uncle told us what he had heard in Lewes, and what
all folks there believed to be the truth; how young Edgar had
carried on, as men may not, with a young married woman, the grocer's
wife where he lodged, the end of it being that she drowned herself
in a pond near by, leaving as her last word that he was the cause of
it; and so he may have been, but not the way my uncle and the folk
at Lewes thought, I'll stake my soul. God makes His troubles in
dozens; He don't make a new patterned one for every back. I wasn't
the only woman who ever loved Edgar Linley without encouragement and
without hope, and risked her soul because she was mad with loving
him.

But when uncle had told us all this with a black look on his face I
never had seen before, he said--

'Girls, I have always been a clean liver, and I have brought you up
in the fear of the Lord. I don't want to judge any man, and Lilian
is of age and her own mistress. It's not for me to say what she
shall or shan't do, but if she marries that scoundrel, she has my
curse here and hereafter, and not one penny of my money, if it was
to save her from the workhouse.'

After that we were sad enough at Whitecroft. But in two days come a
letter from Edgar to Lilian; and when she had read it, she looked at
me and said, 'O Isabel, whatever shall I do? I never can marry
without dear uncle's consent,' and I turned and went from her
without a word, because I couldn't bear to see her arguing and
considering what to do, when the best thing in the world was to her
hand for the taking.

All the next week she cried all day and most of the night. Then
uncle went to London, my belief being it was to alter his will, so
that if Lilian married Edgar, she should feel it in her pocket,
anyhow, and he was to stay all night, and the farm servants slept
out of the house, and we were without a maid at the time. So Lilian
and me were left alone at Whitecroft.

Lilian and I didn't sleep in one room now. I had made some excuse to
sleep on the other side of the house, because I couldn't bear to
wake up of mornings and see her lying there so pretty, looking like
a lily in her white nightgown and her