ue, and Anne Valery. She drew her desk to her,
and gave him paper and pen.

"Write here, that you will pay gradually to certain shareholders I know
of, the money they lost through trust in your name, and in that of the
family. It is hardly a legal claim, or if it be, they are too poor to
urge it--but I hold it as a bond of honour. Will you do this, Frederick?
Then I shall be happy, knowing there is not a single stain on the Harper
name."

In speaking, she had risen and come beside him, looking faded, wan, and
old, now that she stood upright, in her black dress, and close cap. Her
beauty was altogether of the past, but the moral influence remained.

Frederick Harper took the pen, hesitated, and laid it down. "I do not
know what to write."

Anne wrote for him a few plain words, such as a man of honour must
inevitably hold as binding. He watched idly the movement of the hand
that wrote, and the written lines.

"You have the same slender fingers, Anne, and your writing looks just as
it used to do," he said, in a subdued voice.

"There, now--sign."

"Sign!--It is like witnessing a will," said Major Harper, laughing.

"I wish you to consider it so," returned Anne, in a low voice. "Consider
it my last will--my last desire, which you promise to fulfil for me?"

He looked at her, took the pen, and signed, his hand trembling; then
kissed hers.

"Anne, you know, you were my first love."

The words--said half jesting, yet with a certain mourn-fulness--were
scarcely out of his lips, than he had quitted the room. They soon heard
the clatter of his horse along the avenue. Major Harper was gone out
into the busy world again. He never set foot in quiet Thornhurst more.

The three that were left behind breathed freer--perhaps they would
hardly have acknowledged it, but it was so.

"Well, now it is all done," said Nathanael, as he drew closer to
the sofa where Anne lay--with Agatha performing all sorts of little
unnoticed cares about her. "And now I must think about going."

No one asked him where, but Agatha glancing out of the window, thought,
with a shiver, of the dreadful sea curving over into boundlessness from
behind those hills.

"I find I must start at once," he continued, "if I would catch the next
boat to Havre. It sails from Southampton to-morrow morning. I have just
time to ride back to Kingcombe and catch the mail train. No, I'll
not let you come home with me," he added, answering a timid look of
Agatha's,