I don't want you to tell anyone you've seen me until you hear from me
again, Bill."

"All right, sur, I won't do nothin' you do'ant want me to do; you
be'ant goin' away, be 'ee, sur, y'll stay and be squire!"

"I don't know what I shall do yet," I said, "I'm almost mad; but you'll
know by and by."

Then I went away towards the house. I knew Wilfred was home, and I
determined that we should meet, and that he should give an account of
his dealings with the woman for whom I had left my home.

Daylight was nearly gone when I reached the headland so I went to a
spot near the house, where I could watch. It was a glorious September
evening, and nature was on every hand beautiful. The flush of summer
had gone; but the decay of winter had not set in, and the cornfields
which had been shorn of their crops were by no means destitute of
loveliness. The fruit trees were laden with their crimson and golden
clusters, and the first tinge of brown that was just beginning to
appear only added to the beauty of the foliage I felt this rather than
saw it. The spell of the night exists more in my consciousness than in
my memory. The music of the waters comes back to me rather as a
half-forgotten dream than as anything I distinctly remember. My mind
was then too busy with other things. I was thinking of Ruth, Ruth
loving me through long years, and then dying of a broken heart.
Through the wilful deception of my brother and mother I had been bereft
of everything I loved. Through them I had sacrificed love, hope and
comforts; through them my darling--who loved me all the time--was
murdered. Oh! If I had but known. If I had but known we might have
been happy--so happy! But no, they had remorselessly pursued their
course, until they had killed my darling.

If I felt hatred on the morning I left home, I felt it ten times more
now. Then my hatred was blind hatred without knowing the reason, now I
knew that it only foreshadowed what should come after. It was a
prophetic power in my soul, which told me vaguely perhaps, but truly,
what my brother would do; now I realised it. Then, if I may so speak,
it was abstract, now it was concrete. What I had only dimly feared was
become a fact. Ruth, who had loved me, loved me without my knowledge,
had been killed, murdered, as truly as if an assassin had used a knife
or cudgel for his devilish work. Nay, it was worse, it was a slower
and more cruel death. She had died because of the fea