er father died, when it came to me one day, and I
went to Anthony and asked if he knew any one in Carnarvon or vicinity by
the name of Elizabeth Rogers.

"'No,' he said, 'I never knew Elizabeth Rogers; but I knew your
grandmother, Elizabeth Baldwin, before she was married, and she had a
half-brother, Joel Rogers, twenty years older than herself. A queer,
roaming kind of chap, who went off to America, or Australia, or some
such place, and never came back again. He was a good bit older than I
am,' Anthony said, 'and would be over eighty if living now.'

"Then I remembered that when I was a child I once heard my grandmother
Allen speak of a brother, who, she said, went to the States when she was
a girl, and from whom she had not heard in many years. He must have been
very fond of her, for she had several choice things he had given her,
and among them a picture of herself, which, she said, was painted in
London the only time she was ever there, and which was very beautiful."

"A picture, did you say? Would you know one like it if you were to see
it?" Hannah asked, in a constrained voice and Bessie replied:

"Oh, yes; that portrait is still at Stoneleigh, for when grandma died,
six or seven years ago, mother gave it to me, and I hung it in my room.
It was like mother, only prettier, I think."

While Bessie was speaking Hannah had risen, and going from the room soon
returned, bearing in her hand the box, which for so many years she had
secreted, and which Grey had not seen since he was a boy, and Hannah
told him the sad story which had blighted her life. He saw it now in his
aunt's hands, and shuddered as if it were a long closed grave she was
opening.

"Here is the watch," she said, with a strange calmness, as she laid in
Bessie's lap the silver time-piece, whose white face seemed to Grey to
assume a human shape, and look knowingly up at him. "You see it stopped
at half-past eight. It has never been wound up since," Hannah continued,
pointing to the hour and minute hands.

Without the slightest hesitancy Bessie took the watch, and examining it
carefully, said, as she fitted the key attached to the old-fashioned fob
to the key-hole:

"Do you think it would go if I were to wind it up?" Then, giving the key
a turn or two, she continued: "It does. It ticks. Look, Grey," and she
held it to his ear.

But he started away from it, as if it had been the heart beat of the
dead man himself, and rising quickly began to pace up