silent for caution's sake, perhaps for her own pride's sake also, even assuming that she had the means, in his absence, of communicating with the father of her unborn child.

As this surmise floated through my mind, there rose on my memory the remembrance of the Scripture denunciation which we have all thought of in our time with wonder and with awe: `The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children.' But for the fatal resemblance between the two daughters of one father, the conspiracy of which Anne had been the innocent instrument and Laura the innocent victim could never have been planned. With what unerring and terrible directness the long chain of circumstances led down from the thoughtless wrong committed by the father to the heartless injury inflicted on the child!

These thoughts came to me, and others with them, which drew my mind away to the little Cumberland churchyard where Anne Catherick now lay buried. I thought of the bygone days when I had met her by Mrs Fairlie's grave, and met her for the last time. I thought of her poor helpless hands beating on the tombstone, and her weary, yearning words, murmured to the dead remains of her protectress and her friend: `Oh, if I could die, and be hidden and at rest with you!' Little more than a year had passed since she breathed that wish; and how inscrutably, how awfully, it had been fulled I The words she had spoken to Laura by the shores of the lake, the very words had now come rue. `Oh, if I could only be buried with your mother I If I could only wake at her side when the angel's trumpet sounds and the graves give up their dead at the resurrection!' Through what mortal crime and horror, through what darkest windings of the way down to death -- the lost creature had wandered in God's leading to the last home that, living, she never hoped to reach! In that sacred rest I leave her -- in that dread companionship let her remain undisturbed.

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom. Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.