oor at the back of the farthest room, and rushing
through this, he opened the windows in that part of the house which had
evidently been lately inhabited. He next came into the hall by which he
had entered, and out again at the front door, with no doubt that he was
chasing some one, but he did not gain in the pursuit. He went down the
path to the road, looking up and down it; he came back, in and out among
the bushes, searching the cemetery and river bank, vexed beyond measure
all the time to perceive how easy it would be for any one to go one way
while he was searching in another, for the garden was large.

He had good reason to feel that he was the victim of most annoying
circumstances, and he naturally could not at once perceive how it
behoved him to act in relation to this new scene in the almost forgotten
drama. Cameron was dead; the old preacher was dead; whether they were
one and the same or not, who was this person who now for the second
time suddenly started up in mysterious fashion after the death? Alec
assumed that it could be no one but Cameron's daughter, but when he
tried to think how it might be possible that she should be in the
deserted house, upon the track of the old preacher, as it were, his mind
failed even to conjecture.

The explanation was comparatively simple, if he had known it, but he did
not know it. Someone has said that the man most assured of his own
truthfulness is not usually truthful; and in the same sense it is true
that the man most positive in trusting his own senses is not usually
reliable. Alec Trenholme flagged in his search; a most unpleasing doubt
came to him as to whether he had seen what he thought he saw and was not
now playing hide-and-seek with the rosy evening sunbeams among these
bushes, driven by a freak of diseased fancy. He was indeed provoked to a
degree almost beyond control, when, in a last effort of search through
the dense shrubbery, he skirted the fence of Captain Rexford's nearest
field, and there espied Sophia Rexford.

Those people are happy who have found some person or thing on earth that
embodies their ideal of earthly solace. To some it is the strains of
music; to some it is the interior of church edifices; to the child it is
his mother; to the friend it is his friend. As soon as Alec Trenholme
saw this fair woman, whom he yet scarcely knew, all the fret of his
spirit found vent in the sudden desire to tell her what was vexing him,
very much as a child d