traw to which she
clung; and the future did not seem quite so cheerless, even when, a few
hours later, she stood with her brother by the side of her dead father,
who had died without a struggle or sigh, just as the chill morning was
breaking in the east and giving promise of a fairer day than the
previous one had been.

CHAPTER XV.

GREY AND THE SECRET.

Breakfast was waiting in the pleasant dining-room at Grey's Park, where
Burton Jerrold sat before the fire, with his head bent down and his face
so white and ghastly that his wife, when she came in and saw him, was
moved with a great pity for him, though she wondered much that his
sorrow should be so acute for the father he had never seemed very fond
of in life. Stooping over him she kissed him softly, and said:

"I am sorry you feel so badly, Burton. Your father was old, and quite
ready to die; surely that should comfort you a little."

"Yes, yes, I know; but please don't talk to me now," he replied, with a
gesture of the hand as if to silence her.

He was not sorry for his father's death, but he was willing, nay glad,
that she should think so, for he could not tell her of the load of shame
from which he should never be free.

"What would she say if she knew?" he asked himself, as he remembered all
her pride of blood, and birth, and family. And Grey, his only boy, of
whom he was so proud, and who, he fully expected, would some day fill
one of the highest posts in the land;--what would he say if he knew his
father was the son of a murderer? Burton would not soften the crime even
in thought, though he knew that had his father been arrested at the
time, he could only have been convicted of manslaughter, and possibly
not of that. But he called it by the hard name murder, and shuddered as
he thought of Grey.

"But he never will know," he said to himself, "Hannah will keep her
promise, and I do not fear Mr. Sanford, though I'd give half my
fortune--yes, all--if he had not been told. Grey will never know. But
_I_ know, and must meet his innocent eyes, and hear him talk of his
grandfather as of saint."

It was at this point in his soliloquy that Grey came slowly in, his face
whiter than his father's, with dark rings around his eyes, which were
heavy and swollen with the tears he had shed. Grey had not slept at all,
for the dreadful words, "I killed a man, and buried him under my bed,"
were continually ringing in his ears, while the ghost of the murdered
man