wford had yet closely scanned the face
before her. Now the troubled eyes looked closely into those that were
sometimes so radiant with mischief, but now so solemnly earnest. The
look was very long and silent--an evident acceptance of the strange
invitation given. Before it was ended, that subtle magnetism which truth
and goodness radiate to the true, had done its work. She cast down her
eyes.

"I believe you to be true and good!" she said.

"Thank heaven that you do!" spoke Josephine. "Now sit down in that chair
once more, and do not rise again until I have spoken what I must speak
and you must hear. Do not shrink, faint or shudder, though I may say a
few terrible words!" She led the young girl back to her chair, pressed
her down into it, and drew her own still closer. She did not release her
hand when she had placed her in that position, and she fixed her eyes
full upon those of the other, which made an effort to escape, and then
surrendered to the influence.

"Let me show you that I know _all_," she said. "Yet stop--let me first
assure you that neither Richard Crawford nor his sister knows of my
presence in this place--that neither of them has the least suspicion
that I know one word of your family relations."

Mary Crawford's eyes looked into hers with one instant of close
question; then again they surrendered, and were gently reliant though
still full of trouble.

"I said that I would prove to you that I knew _all_," Josephine went on.
"I will do so. You loved Richard Crawford, I think, and he loved you
with his whole heart. You were to be married, and the large property of
your father would thus be kept in the family. A few months ago he ceased
coming here any more, and you heard of him as plunged into riot and
dissipation. Then you heard of him as sick, and that his sickness was
the result of the foulest excesses, that had broken down his
constitution and made him unfit for the society of any true woman. You
began to answer his letters briefly and coldly, and then you ceased
answering them at all. You heard those reports--you scarcely knew
yourself how you heard them, but I _do_,--through another cousin, Egbert
Crawford, who has taken the place of Richard."

The young girl's eyes stared, now, and she moved as if to rise, but the
hand of Josephine on her arm held her gently down, and her words went
on, that steady gaze still fixed upon her as before:

"Every one of those words was a lie, and Egbert Crawford