t to have told you before I asked you to
be my wife, and which I should have told you had I thought the telling
would make any difference in your love for me."

"Nothing could make any difference in that," Bessie said, lifting up her
sweet face to be kissed, and then dropping her head again upon Grey's
arm, just as Hannah came in and took a seat on the other side of her.

Hannah had been up stairs to her room, where she now kept the box in
which lay the picture which was so like Bessie McPherson.

"More like her than I supposed," she whispered, as she gazed upon the
face which seemed each moment to grow more and more like the young girl
to whom Grey was to tell the story.

He was only waiting for her to come in before he commenced, she knew,
and putting the picture back in its place, she went down to the south
room, and taking her seat beside Bessie, as Grey motioned her to do,
waited for him to begin.

"Bessie," he said, and his aim tightened its clasp around her waist,
"there _is_ a skeleton here, and it has darkened all my Aunt Hannah's
life, and thrown its shadow over me as well. Can you bear to have a
little of it fall upon you, too?"

"Yes," she answered, fearlessly, "I have always lived with skeletons
until I knew you loved me; they cannot frighten me."

"But, darling, would you love me as well, think you you knew that, in a
way, there was a disgrace clinging my name?" he asked, and Bessie
replied:

"A disgrace! What do you mean? I cannot imagine you to be in disgrace;
but if you are, I am quite ready to share it with you."

"Even if it be murder?"

Grey spoke the last word in a whisper, as if afraid the walls had ears,
but Bessie heard him distinctly, and with a great start, she drew
herself away from him, and sat rigid as a stone, while she repeated:

"Murder! Oh, Grey, you surely do not mean that!"

"No, not exactly; it was manslaughter, done in self-defense," Grey
answered her, and, with a sigh of relief, Bessie asked:

"Who was the killed, and who the killer?"

"My grandfather did the deed, in the heat of passion, and the victim has
lain under the floor of that room into which I would not let you enter,
for more than forty years. Now you know the skeleton there is in this
old house."

"Ye-es," Bessie said, while a look of terror and pain crept into her
eyes; but she did not move nearer either to Grey or his aunt.

Indeed, it seemed to both that she drew herself into as small a compass
as