gue terror.

"Is she your wife--the woman who was called Rachael Closs?"

"It is Lady Hope, my wife. Why do you ask?"

"_Because it was this woman who murdered your first wife, Lady Carset's
daughter!_"

More than the stillness of death settled upon that room. The two girls
hushed their sobs, and clung closer together in awful silence. The man
and the woman, on whom these words had fallen like a rock hurled from
some great high stood living and human, but struck into marble by a
single blow. The man could not move; the woman did not seem to breathe.
Hannah Yates went on, her voice low, but ringing out clear and
distinctly like a funeral knell:

"On the twenty-first of June, now more than fifteen years ago, I saw
you, Lord Hope, come out of a house in Forty-third Street, in New York.

"You know the house, and can never forget who lived in it. That day I
had carried your child to see its mother, and left word at home for my
son, Daniel Yates, to go after her; for I had business with a woman at
one of the theatres, and was not sure of coming back in time. The woman
I expected to see was not there; but it took me a long time to walk
back, and it was about ten o'clock when I reached the house in
Forty-third Street. Thinking it possible that Daniel might not have come
home from his work till late, I was crossing the street to go in and
inquire about the child, when the front door opened, and you came down
the steps, with a fierce, angry air, such as I had seen many a time on
this side the water. I knew that your presence in that house could have
no peaceful meaning, and went over. I had a latch-key, and did not need
to ring.

"The hall was dark--everything was still below; but a sound of weeping
and moans of distress came from my lady's chamber. I went up and found
her in the dark, lying across her bed, trembling dreadfully. She
shrieked when I bent over her, and it was not till I got a light that
she would be satisfied that it was only me. Then she sat up, and, in a
rapid way, told me that you had been there after the child, and would
have it but that the little creature had crept away and could not be
found anywhere in the house. She must have got into the street, and you
would find her, or she might be lost. She begged me to go at once and
look for the child, and wanted to go with me; but I would not let her
do that. I took her arms from my neck--for, in her joy at seeing the old
woman, she had flung them there--ma