him.

In the course of her parish-visiting she lighted on the young girl
without much difficulty, and found her looking pale and sad, and wearing
a simple black gown, which she had put on out of respect for the young
man's memory, whom she had tenderly loved, though he had not loved her.

'Ah, you have lost your lover, Milly,' said Lady Caroline.

The young woman could not repress her tears. 'My lady, he was not quite
my lover,' she said. 'But I was his--and now he is dead I don't care to
live any more!'

'Can you keep a secret about him?' asks the lady; 'one in which his
honour is involved--which is known to me alone, but should be known to
you?'

The girl readily promised, and, indeed, could be safely trusted on such a
subject, so deep was her affection for the youth she mourned.

'Then meet me at his grave to-night, half-an-hour after sunset, and I
will tell it to you,' says the other.

In the dusk of that spring evening the two shadowy figures of the young
women converged upon the assistant-steward's newly-turfed mound; and at
that solemn place and hour, the one of birth and beauty unfolded her
tale: how she had loved him and married him secretly; how he had died in
her chamber; and how, to keep her secret, she had dragged him to his own
door.

'Married him, my lady!' said the rustic maiden, starting back.

'I have said so,' replied Lady Caroline. 'But it was a mad thing, and a
mistaken course. He ought to have married you. You, Milly, were
peculiarly his. But you lost him.'

'Yes,' said the poor girl; 'and for that they laughed at me. "Ha--ha,
you mid love him, Milly," they said; "but he will not love you!"'

'Victory over such unkind jeerers would be sweet,' said Lady Caroline.
'You lost him in life; but you may have him in death _as if_ you had had
him in life; and so turn the tables upon them.'

'How?' said the breathless girl.

The young lady then unfolded her plan, which was that Milly should go
forward and declare that the young man had contracted a secret marriage
(as he truly had done); that it was with her, Milly, his sweetheart; that
he had been visiting her in her cottage on the evening of his death;
when, on finding he was a corpse, she had carried him to his house to
prevent discovery by her parents, and that she had meant to keep the
whole matter a secret till the rumours afloat had forced it from her.

'And how shall I prove this?' said the woodman's daughter, amazed at the
bo