rk and shameful story he had to tell. She never once faltered, she
never spoke nor stirred; but her face was whiter than her dress, and her
great dark eyes dilated with a horror too intense for words.

The voice of the dying man sank lower and lower--it fell to a dull,
choking whisper at last.

"You have heard all," he said, huskily.

"All?"

The word dropped from her lips like ice--the frozen look of blank horror
never left her face.

"And you will keep your promise?"

"Yes."

"God bless you! I can die now. Oh, Ada! I cannot ask you to forgive me;
but I love you so much--so much! Kiss me once, Ada, before I go."

His voice failed even with the words. Lady Thetford bent down and kissed
him, but her lips were as cold and white as his own.

They were the last words Sir Noel Thetford ever spoke. The restless sea
was sullenly ebbing, and the soul of the man was floating away with it.
The gray, chill light of a new day was dawning over the Devonshire
fields, rainy and raw, and with its first pale ray the soul of Noel
Thetford, baronet, left the earth forever.

An hour later, Mrs. Hilliard and Dr. Gale ventured to enter. They had
rapped again and again; but there had been no response, and alarmed they
had come in. Stark and rigid already lay what was mortal of the Lord of
Thetford Towers; and still on her knees, with that frozen look on her
face, knelt his living wife.

"My lady! my lady!" cried Mrs. Hilliard, her tears falling like rain.
"Oh! my dear lady, come away!"

She looked up; then again at the marble form on the bed, and, without
word or cry, slipped back in the old housekeeper's arms in a dead
faint.

CHAPTER II.

CAPT. EVERARD.

It was a very grand and stately ceremonial, that funeral procession from
Thetford Towers. A week after that stormy December night they laid Sir
Noel Thetford in the family vault, where generation after generation of
his race slept their last long sleep. The gentry for miles around were
there; and among them came the heir-at-law, the Rev. Horace Thetford,
only an obscure country curate now, but failing male heirs to Sir Noel,
successor to the Thetford estate, and fifteen thousand a year.

In a bed-chamber, luxurious as wealth can make a room, lay Lady
Thetford, dangerously ill. It was not a brain fever exactly, but
something very like it into which she had fallen, coming out of that
death-like swoon. It was all very sad and shocking--the sudden death of
the gay