ped into the cottage, when what was her
surprise to find the girl she had come to see with a beautiful diamond
locket about her neck, gleaming in the sunshine from the open door! She
instantly understood what it meant, and upbraiding the girl with her
falseness, quitted the place, and lost no time in telling her son, but
first she took the precaution of hiding his gun. As he could not find
that weapon, after the first storm of his jealous anger had gone over he
shut himself up in his room.

The lady came the same evening to the rendezvous in the orchard, but her
lover did not meet her. She came again next day, and in the evening; and
again the third day, and so all through the week, and for nearly a month
doing all she could without actually entering the house to get access to
him. But he sullenly avoided her; once seeing her in the road, he leaped
his horse over the hedge rather than pass her. For the diamond locket
looked so like a price--as if she valued a glittering bauble far above
true love.

At last one day she surprised him at the corner of the village street,
and notwithstanding that the people (who knew all the story) were
looking on, she would speak to him. She walked by his side, and said:
"George, I have put the locket in the arbour, with a letter for you. If
you will not speak to me, read the letter, and throw the locket in the
brook."

More she could not say, for he walked as fast as he could, and soon left
her behind.

He would not go near the orchard all day, but at last in the evening
something prompted him to go. He went and looked, but the locket and the
letter were not there.

Either she had not left them as she had said, or else some one had taken
them. No one could enter the orchard without a key, unless they went to
the trouble of bringing a ladder from the rickyard, and as it was
spring, there were no apples to tempt them to do that. He thought,
perhaps, his mother might have taken his key and gone to the arbour, and
there was a terrible scene and bitter words between them--the first time
he had ever replied to her. The consequence was that she packed a chest
that very day, took a bag of money, which in old-fashioned style she
kept under her bed, and left her home for ever; but not before she had
been to the cottage, and reviled the girl with her duplicity and her
falseness, declaring that if she had not got the locket, she had not put
it in the orchard, but had sold it, like the hussy she