already nearly nine o'clock when Margery going from the Cottage
to Mr. Leigh's, on some errand to his housekeeper, brought back with her
the story which a passing acquaintance had carried so far. She came into
the parlour full of the not unpleasant sensation of having a piece of
strange and horrible news to tell.

Mrs. Costello had left the room for a moment and Lucia was alone,
sitting rather drearily looking into the fire, with her work fallen
into her lap, when Margery came in.

"Miss Lucia, there's an awful thing happened."

"What, Margery?" Lucia half smiled, for Margery loved marvels, and made
much of them.

"Doctor Morton is dead."

"Impossible! Hush, don't say it."

"It is true, miss. This afternoon."

"But how? It is incredible."

"He was found, Miss Lucia, lying dead by the roadside a piece beyond
Dawson's mill. And they found the man that did it."

"You don't mean to say that he had been--" she stopped, shuddering.

"Murdered. Yes," and Margery went into all the details she had heard
from her gossip.

Mrs. Costello, attracted by the tone of their voices, had come to the
door between the parlour and her bedroom, and stood there listening.
Both she and Lucia, who, like every one else except perhaps his wife,
had heard of the doctor's proceedings against Clarkson, thought only of
him as the murderer until Margery finished her recital with--

"It all comes of having them savages of Indians about. I never could
abide the sight of them."

Lucia caught a glimpse of her mother's face. She felt her own muscles
stiffen with fear. With desperate strength she steadied her voice.

"What do you mean about Indians?" she said.

"It is an Indian as done it," Margery answered half indignant. "There's
no white man, let him be ever such a brute, would have chopped the body
up like that."

"You said they had taken the murderer?"

"They took him, and he's in gaol. Dawson's men knew him. He has been
working for Dawson lately. They say he comes from Moose Island. Mr.
Strafford would know him most like."

There was nothing further to be asked, and Margery went out of the room,
seeing no more than the natural horror on those two white faces of
mother and daughter, which dreaded to meet and read the thought, in each
other's eyes.

It was for this, then, that they had delayed their journey. Neither
doubted for a moment the guilt of the wretched creature who was the
haunting terror and misery of their lives; and