The second dinner-bell rang five minutes after the softy had left Aurora, and Mr. John Mellish came out upon the lawn to look for his wife. He came whistling across the grass, and whisking the roses with his pocket-hand-kerchief in very gayety of heart. He had quite forgotten the anguish of that miserable morning after the receipt of Mr. Pastern’s letter. He had forgotten all but that his Aurora was the loveliest and dearest of women, and that he trusted her with the boundless faith of his big, honest heart. “Why should I doubt such a noble, impetuous creature?” he thought; “does n’t every feeling and every sentiment write itself upon, her lovely, expressive face in characters the veriest fool could read? If I please her, what bright smiles light up in her black eyes! If I vex her — as I do, poor awkward idiot that I am, a hundred times a day — how the two black arches contract over her pretty impertinent nose, while the red lips pout defiance and disdain! Shall I doubt her because she keeps one secret from me, and freely tells me I must for ever remain ignorant of it, when an artful woman would try to set my mind at rest with some shallow fiction invented to deceive me? Heaven bless her! no doubt of her shall ever darken my life again, come what may.”

It was easy for Mr. Mellish to make this mental vow, believing fully that the storm was past, and that lasting fair weather had set in.

“Lolly, darling,” he said, winding his great arm round his wife’s waist, “I thought I had lost you.”

She looked up at him with a sad smile.

“Would it grieve you much, John,” she said, in a low voice, “if you were really to lose me?”

He started as if he had been struck, and looked anxiously at her pale face.

“Would it grieve me, Lolly!” he repeated; “not for long; for the people who came to your funeral would come to mine. But, my darling, my darling, what can have made you ask this question? Are you ill, dearest? You have been looking pale and tired for the last few days, and I have thought nothing of it. What a careless wretch I am!”

“No, no, John,” she said, “I don’t mean that. I know you would grieve dear, if I were to die. But suppose something were to happen which would separate us for ever — something which would compel me to leave this place never to return to it — what then?”

“What then, Lolly?” answered her husband, gravely. “I would rather see your coffin laid in the empty niche beside my mother’s in the vault yonder”— he pointed in the direction of the parish church, which was close to the gates of the Park —“than I would part with you thus. I would rather know you to be dead and happy than I would endure any doubt about your fate. Oh, my darling, why do you speak of these things? I could n’t part with you — I could n’t. I would rather take you in my arms and plunge with you into the pond in the wood; I would rather send a bullet into your heart, and see you lying murdered at my feet.”

“John, John, my dearest and truest,” she said, her face lighting up with a new brightness, like the sudden breaking of the sun through a leaden cloud, “not another word, dear; we will never part. Why should we? There is very little upon this wide earth that money can not buy, and it shall help to buy our happiness. We will never part, darling, never.”

She broke into a joyous laugh as she watched his anxious, half-wondering face.

“Why, you foolish John, how frightened you look!” she said. “Have n’t you discovered yet that I like to torment you now and then with such questions as these, just to see your big blue eyes open to their widest extent? Come, dear; Mrs. Powell will look white thunder at us when we go in, and make some meek conventional reply to our apologies for this delay, to the effect that she does n’t care in the least how long she waits for dinner, and that, on the whole, she would rather never have any dinner at all. Is n’t it strange, John, how that woman hates me?”

“Hates you, dear, when you’re so kind to her!”

“But she hates me for being kind to her, John. If I were to give her my diamond necklace, she’d hate me for having it to give. She hates us because we’re rich, and young, and handsome,” said Aurora, laughing, “and the very opposite of her namby-pamby, pale-faced self.”

It was strange that from this moment Aurora seemed to regain her natural gayety of spirits, and to be what she had been before the receipt of Mr. Pastern’s letter. Whatever dark cloud had hovered over her head since the day upon which that simple epistle had caused such a terrible effect, that threatening shadow seemed to have been suddenly removed. Mrs. Walter Powell was not slow to perceive this change. The eyes of love, clear-sighted though they may be, are dull indeed beside the eyes of hate. Those are never deceived. Aurora had wandered out of the drawing-room, listless and dispirited, to stroll wearily upon the lawn — Mrs. Powell, seated in one of the windows, had watched her every movement, and had seen her in the distance speaking to some one (she had been unable to distinguish the softy from her post of observation)— and this same Aurora returned to the house almost another creature. There was a look of determination about the beautiful mouth (which female critics called too wide), a look not usual to the rosy lips, and a resolute brightness in the eyes, which had some significance surely, Mrs. Powell thought, if she could only have found the key to that hidden meaning. Ever since Aurora’s brief illness the poor woman had been groping for this key — groping in mazy darknesses which baffled her utmost powers of penetration. Who and what was this groom, that Aurora should write to him, as she most decidedly had written? Why was he to express no surprise, and what cause could there be for his expressing any surprise in the simple economy of Mellish Park? The mazy darknesses were more impenetrable than the blackest night, and Mrs. Powell wellnigh gave up all hope of ever finding any clew to the mystery. And now, behold, a new complication had arisen in Aurora’s altered spirits. John Mellish was delighted with this alteration. He talked and laughed until the glasses near him vibrated with his noisy mirth. He drank so much sparkling Moselle that his butler Jarvis (who had grown gray in the service of the old squire, and had poured out Master John’s first glass of Champagne) refused at last to furnish him with any more of that beverage, offering him in its stead some very expensive Hock, the name of which was in fourteen unpronounceable syllables, and which John tried to like, but did n’t.

“We’ll fill the house with visitors for the shooting-season, Lolly, darling,” said Mr. Mellish. “If they come on the first of September, they’ll all be comfortably settled for the Leger. The dear old dad will come of course, and trot about on his white pony like the best of men and bankers in Christendom. Captain and Mrs. Bulstrode will come too; and we shall see how our little Lucy looks, and whether solemn Talbot beats her in the silence of the matrimonial chamber. Then there’s Hunter, and a host of fellows; and you must write me a list of any nice people you’d like to ask down here, and we’ll have a glorious autumn — won’t we, Lolly?”

“I hope so, dear,” said Mrs. Mellish, after a little pause, and a repetition of John’s eager question. She had not been listening very attentively to John’s plans for the future, and she startled him rather by asking him a question very wide from the subject upon which he had been speaking.

“How long do the fastest vessels take going to Australia, John?” she asked, quietly.

Mr. Mellish stopped with his glass in his hand to stare at his wife as she asked this question.

“How long do the fastest vessels take to go to Australia?” he repeated. “Good gracious me, Lolly, how should I know? Three weeks or a month — no, I mean three months; but, in mercy’s name, Aurora, why do you want to know?”

“The average length of the voyage is, I believe, about three months; but some fast-sailing packets do it in seventy, or even in sixty-eight days,” interposed Mrs. Powell, looking sharply at Aurora’s abstracted face from under cover of her white eyelashes.

“But why, in goodness name, do you want to know, Lolly?” repeated John Mellish. “You don’t want to go to Australia, and you don’t know anybody who’s going to Australia?”

“Perhaps Mrs. Mellish is interested in the Female Emigration movement,” suggested Mrs. Powell: “it is a most delightful work.”

Aurora replied neither to the direct nor the indirect question. The cloth had been removed (for no modern customs had ever disturbed the conservative economy of Mellish Park), and Mrs. Mellish sat, with a cluster of pale cherries in her hand, looking at the reflection of her own face in the depths of the shining mahogany.

“Lolly!” exclaimed John Mellish, after watching his wife for some minutes, “you are as grave as a judge. What can you be thinking of?”

She looked up at him with a bright smile, and rose to leave the dining-room.

“I’ll tell you one of these days, John,” she said. “Are you coming with us, or are you going out upon the lawn to smoke?”

“If you’ll come with me, dear,” he answered, returning her smile with a frank glance of unchangeable affection, which always beamed in his eyes when they rested on his wife. “I’ll go out and smoke a cigar if you’ll come with me, Lolly.”

“You foolish old Yorkshireman,” said Mrs. Mellish, laughing, “I verily believe you’d like me to smoke one of your choice Manillas, by way of keeping you company.”

“No, darling, I’d never wish to see you do anything that did n’t square — that was n’t compatible,” interposed Mr. Mellish gravely, “with the manners of the noblest lady, and the duties of the truest wife in England. If I love to see you ride across country with a red feather in your hat, it is because I think that the good old sport of English gentlemen was meant to be shared by their wives rather than by people whom I would not like to name, and because there is a fair chance that the sight of your Spanish hat and scarlet plume at the meet may go some way toward keeping Miss Wilhelmina de Lancy (who was born plain Scroggins, and christened Sarah) out of the field. I think our British wives and mothers might have the battle in their own hands, and win the victory for themselves and their daughters, if they were a little braver in standing to their ground — if they were not quite so tenderly indulgent to the sins of eligible young noblemen, and, in their estimate of a man’s qualifications for the marriage state, were not so entirely guided by the figures in his banker’s book. It’s a sad world, Lolly, but John Mellish, of Mellish Park, was never meant to set it right.”

Mr. Mellish stood on the threshold of a glass door which opened to a flight of steps leading to the lawn as he delivered himself of this homily, the gravity of which was quite at variance with the usual tenor of his discourse. He had a cigar in his hand, and was going to light it, when Aurora stopped him.

“John, dear,” she said, “my most unbusiness-like of darlings, have you forgotten that poor Langley is so anxious to see you, that he may give up your old accounts before the new trainer takes the stable business into his hands? He was here half an hour before dinner, and begged that you would see him to-night.”

Mr. Mellish shrugged his shoulders.

“Langley’s as honest a fellow as ever breathed,” he said. “I don’t want to look into his accounts. I know what the stable costs me yearly on an average, and that’s enough.”

“But for his satisfaction, dear.”

“Well, well, Lolly, to-morrow morning, then.”

“No, dear, I want you to ride out with me to-morrow.”

“To-morrow evening.”

“‘You meet the captains at the Citadel,’” said Aurora, laughing; “that is to say, you dine at Holmbush with Colonel Pevensey. Come, darling, I insist on your being business-like for once in a way; come to your sanctum sanctorum, and we’ll send for Langley, and look into the accounts.”

The pretty tyrant linked her arm in his, and led him to the other end of the house, and into the very room in which she had swooned away at the hearing of Mr. Pastern’s letter. She looked thoughtfully out at the dull evening sky as she closed the windows. The storm had not yet come, but the ominous clouds still brooded low over the earth, and the sultry atmosphere was heavy and airless. Mrs. Mellish made a wonderful show of her business habits, and appeared to be very much interested in the mass of corn-chandlers’, veterinary surgeons’, saddlers’, and harness-makers’ accounts with which the old trainer respectfully bewildered his master. But about ten minutes after John had settled himself to his weary labor Aurora threw down the pencil with which she had been working a calculation (by a process of so wildly original a nature as to utterly revolutionize Cocker, and annihilate the hackneyed notion that twice two are four), and floated lightly out of the room, with some vague promise of coming back presently, leaving Mr. Mellish to arithmetic and despair.

Mrs. Walter Powell was seated in the drawing-room reading when Aurora entered the apartment with a large black lace shawl wrapped about her head and shoulders. Mrs. Mellish had evidently expected to find the room empty, for she started and drew back at the sight of the pale-faced widow, who was seated in a distant window, making the most of the last faint rays of summer twilight. Aurora paused for a moment a few paces within the door, and then walked deliberately across the room toward the farthest window from that at which Mrs. Powell was seated.

“Are you going out in the garden this dull evening, Mrs. Mellish?” asked the ensign’s widow.

Aurora stopped half way between the window and the door to answer her.

“Yes,” she said coldly.

“Allow me to advise you not to go far. We are going to have a storm.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What, my dear Mrs. Mellish, not with that thunder-cloud yonder?”

“I will take my chance of being caught in it, then. The weather has been threatening all the afternoon. The house is insupportable to-night.”

“But you will not surely go far?”

Mrs. Mellish did not appear to overhear this remonstrance. She hurried through the open window, and out upon the lawn, striking northward toward that little iron gate across which she had talked to the softy.

The arch of the leaden sky seemed to contract above the tree-tops in the Park, shutting in the earth as if with a roof of hot iron, after the fashion of those cunningly contrived metal torture-chambers which we read of; but the rain had not yet come.

“What can take her into the garden on such an evening as this?” thought Mrs. Powell, as she watched the white dress receding in the dusky twilight. “It will be dark in ten minutes, and she is not usually so fond of going out alone.”

The ensign’s widow laid down the book in which she had appeared so deeply interested, and went to her own room, where she selected a comfortable gray cloak from a heap of primly-folded garments in her capacious wardrobe. She muffled herself in this cloak, hurried down stairs with a soft but rapid step, and went out into the garden through a little lobby near John Mellish’s room. The blinds in the little sanctum were not drawn down, and Mrs. Powell could see the master of the house bending over his paper under the light of a reading-lamp, with the rheumatic trainer sitting by his side. It was by this time quite dark, but Aurora’s white dress was faintly visible upon the other side of the lawn.

Mrs. Mellish was standing beside the little iron gate when the ensign’s widow emerged from the house. The white dress was motionless for some time, and the pale watcher, lurking under the shade of a long veranda, began to think that her trouble was wasted, and that perhaps, after all, Aurora had no special purpose in this evening ramble.

Mrs. Walter Powell felt cruelly disappointed. Always on the watch for some clew to the secret whose existence she had discovered, she had fondly hoped that even this unseasonable ramble might be some link in the mysterious chain she was so anxious to fit together. But it appeared that she was mistaken. The unseasonable ramble was very likely nothing more than one of Aurora’s caprices — a womanly foolishness signifying nothing.

No! The white dress was no longer motionless, and in the unnatural stillness of the hot night Mrs. Powell heard the distant, scrooping noise of a hinge revolving slowly, as if guided by a cautious hand. Mrs. Mellish had opened the iron gate, and had passed to the other side of the invisible barrier which separated the gardens from the Park. In another moment she had disappeared under the shadow of the trees which made a belt about the lawn.

Mrs. Powell paused, almost terrified by her unlooked-for discovery.

What, in the name of all that was darkly mysterious, could Mrs. Mellish have to do between nine and ten o’clock on the north side of the Park — the wildly-kept, deserted north side, in which, from year’s end to year’s end, no one but the keepers ever walked.

The blood rushed hotly up to Mrs. Powell’s pale face as she suddenly remembered that the disused, dilapidated lodge upon this north side had been given to the new trainer as a residence. Remembering this was nothing, but remembering this in connection with that mysterious letter signed “A” was enough to send a thrill of savage, horrible joy through the dull veins of the dependent. What should she do? Follow Mrs. Mellish, and discover where she was going? How far would this be a safe thing to attempt?

She turned back and looked once more through the windows of John’s room. He was still bending over the papers, still in an apparently hopeless confusion of mind. There seemed little chance of his business being finished very quickly. The starless night and her dark dress alike sheltered the spy from observation.

“If I were close behind her, she would never see me,” she thought.

She struck across the lawn to the iron gate, and passed into the Park. The brambles and the tangled undergrowth caught at her dress as she paused for a moment looking about her in the summer night.

There was no trace of Aurora’s white figure among the leafy alleys stretching in wild disorder before her.

“I’ll not attempt to find the path she took,” thought Mrs. Powell; “I know where to find her.”

She groped her way into the narrow footpath leading to the lodge. She was not sufficiently familiar with the place to take the short cut which the softy had made for himself through the grass that afternoon, and she was some time walking from the iron gate to the lodge.

The front windows of this rustic lodge faced the road and the disused north gates; the back of the building looked toward the path down which Mrs. Powell went, and the two small windows in this back wall were both dark.

The ensign’s widow crept softly round to the front, looked about her cautiously, and listened. There was no sound but the occasi............