to my ears. Yet after a long while I remember
I knelt down, still looking up into
her terrible face, and groped with my
shaking hand about her feet. It struck
against the satchel, and I started up, and
fled guiltily back to my room, only just
strong enough and prudent enough to lock
the door before my consciousness forsook
me.

It was full day, when I came to myself,
and there was a great stir and commotion
in the house. I dressed, and put on my
bonnet and shawl, for now I had nothing
to do but to get to London, to George,
if my powers did not again fail. I fastened
the satchel safely round my waist,
where I could not lose it, and went down
the stairs, a step at a time, holding by the
banisters. I wished to get away without
seeing any one, but Mrs. Townshend met
me in the hall, too much excited to be surprised
by anything strange in my appearance.

"Do you know," she exclaimed, hastily,
"Townshend has found Mrs. Becket in the
garden, dead, stone dead? It was apoplexy,
the doctor says. Townshend has taken
away her satchel to Haddan Lodge according
to orders; and I daresay Mrs.
Haddan will come over herself about the
funeral."

I made only an incoherent answer, saying
I was going up to London. How I
reached there is a mystery to me to this
day; but the first thing I recollect is
seeing the door of a gloomy sitting–room
opened, and George sitting alone before a
table. He did not move or look round,
and the fancy smote upon me that he, too,
was dead. With a cry which rang through
the hotel, I ran to him, and threw my arms
about him, asking over and over again if
he was alive. But when I came to myself
I told him, sobbing between each word, to
open the satchel for himself. The lock
was a strong one, and he could not unfasten
it, and I bade him cut it open with
his knife.

The missing documents were all there;
George Haddan's letter to his father, his
will and the marriage certificate. After
all, it proved that Mrs. Haddan had not
been married in London, but in a small
church out at Stoke Newington, which
had been sold, and removed stone for stone
to make a chapel for some Dissenters.
There was also Mrs. Haddan's letter to
her Aunt Becket, a simple, girlish letter,
which George keeps to this day. I
carried Mrs. Haddan once, when George
was away, to the chapel which had once
been the church where she was married,
and though the arrangement of the interior
had been a good deal altered, she had that
sensation of its being the very spot so
strongly that I was in great fear of her
fainting.

George took the recovered documents to
Mr. Newill, and together they went to
Haddan Lodge and demanded an interview
with Mrs. Haddan. Of course she had already
discovered that she had lost them,
though she had no notion, and has none to
this day, how or when they went out of
Becket's possession. She was glad to hear
of any arrangement by which the matter
could be hushed up. It was never made
known, but all the world, including Lewis,
believed that George Haddan's children
had only just come forward to lay their
claim to the estate. Instead of dying
Lewis became quite well, and married his
cousin Margaret; but they were by no means
badly off, as he had all the property of his
mother, who had been the only child of a
wealthy banker; they live near to us; but
the dowager Mrs. Haddan has never entered
the doors of Haddan Lodge after once quitting
it, nor even looked on the face of
George's mother. Mrs. Haddan has a suite
of rooms in our house, and continues to be
the meekest and most tearful of women.
This is the end of her history.

OUR LADY OF THE FIR–TREES.

IT was on a winter's afternoon in Lucerne,
that we, three sisters, tired of hanging
listlessly over the little opening of the huge
German stove in the apartments our family
occupied at the Hôtel du Cheval Blanc;
tired of looking out for hard words in the
German dictionary, and forgetting them
next minute; tired of looking through
the double window of snow–rimmed glass,
at other snow–rimmed double windows in
the opposite houses of a narrow street;
at last became desperate, and, casing our
hands and feet in velvet gloves and fur–lined
boots, sallied forth with the intention
of securing at least an up–and–down
walk on the long covered bridges which
stretch from shore to shore across a certain
narrow portion of the lake.

It was a dreary afternoon. Winter, with
its alternate wild and piercing winds, and
its intervals of death–like silence, brooded
over the mountains and over the lake;
turned the blue waters of the gone–by