n to smoke hard himself.

Ralph's pipe, however, went out unheeded in his fingers. He sat quite
still with his back against the side of the truck, his eyes fixed upon
the gray horizon. Once he turned suddenly to his brother, and said, as
if unable to keep silence on what was in his mind, "What was her
object?"

Charles shook his head.

"They were hers already!" he went on. "She would have had them all. If
she had had debts, I would have paid them. What could her object have
been?" And seemingly, without expecting a reply, he relapsed into
silence.

We had left the suburbs now, and were passing through a lonely country.
Here and there a village of straggling cottages met the eye, clustering
round their little church. In places the hedge-rows alone marked the lie
of the hidden lanes; in others men were digging out the roads through
drifts of snow, and carts and horses were struggling painfully along. In
one place a little walking funeral was laboring across the fields from a
lonely cottage, in the direction of the church, high on the hill, the
bell of which was tolling through the quiet air. The sound reached us as
we passed, and seemed to accompany us on our way. I heard the men
talking among themselves that there had been no snow-storm like to this
for thirty years; and as they spoke some of them began shading their
eyes, and trying to look in the direction in which we were going.

We had now reached a low waste of unenclosed land, with sedge and gorse
pricking up everywhere through the snow, and with long lines of pollards
marking the bed of a frozen stream. Near the line was a deserted
brick-kiln, surrounded by long uneven mounds and ridges of ice, with
three poplars mounting guard over it. Flights of rooks hung over the
barren ground, and wheeled in the air with discordant clamor as we
passed--the only living moving things in the utter desolation of the
scene. As I looked there was an exclamation from one of the workmen, and
the engine began to slacken. We were there at last.

CHAPTER XIII.

The engine and trucks stopped, the men shouldered their tools and
tumbled out, and we followed them. A few hundred paces in front of us
was a railway bridge, over which a road passed, and under which the rail
went at a sharp curve. The snow had drifted heavily against the bridge,
with its high earth embankment, making manifest at a glance the cause of
the disaster.

The bridge was crowded with human figures, and