ulder, held securely in her place by my
strong, loving, encircling arm.

Nor were these all to assure me that, after a year of melancholy and
eventful absence, I looked again upon the precincts of home. A little
farther on rose the gray wall and tower of the library and belfry, half
concealed by its heavy coating of ivy, glossy and dark, and shutting
away all other view of the mansion. Beyond these last was the pavilion
my father had built for the playhouse of his children, through the open
lattice-door of which I saw a girl seated at her work, with graceful,
bending neck, and half-averted face. A moment later, Claude Bainrothe
lounged across the sward, cigar in hand. At his approach, the face
within was turned, and I recognized, at a glance, that of my young
aurora-like companion of the raft, Ada Greene. Then gazing cautiously
around, as if to elude observation (never dreaming of the eye dropped
like a bird's upon him), he lifted the rosy face in his hand and kissed
it thrice right loverly!

I saw no more--I would not witness more--for had I not learned already
all that I asked or ought to know? Well might the dear old chimes ring
out their Sabbath welcome to one who had obeyed their summons from her
childhood up to womanhood! Well might the summer air bear on its wings
greeting of familiar odors, lost and found!

This was no idle dream, no mirage of a vagrant brain like that
sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad,
and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment,
geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner in the house of
Basil Bainrothe (while he, perchance, reigned lordly in my own); that
house whose hidden arcana I had never explored, and which, beyond its
parlor and exterior, was to me as the dwelling of a stranger.

Derisively deferential, he had resigned to me this secluded chamber in
the ell--his own particular sanctum, I remember to have heard--and
betaken himself, in all probability, to the more spacious mansion of his
former neighbor.

Far wiser, even if sadder, than I went up its rounds, did I descend that
ladder!

Half an hour after I had entered it, and with new hope, I emerged from
the bath-room as fresh as a naiad, having first abstracted from the
tool-box of the glazier two tiny chisels of different sizes, and a
small lump of putty, which I secreted, on my first opportunity, in my
favorite hiding-place--a hollow in the post of my bedstead--