another, she heard the bell at the gate. She felt as though she would have been glad that it rang on until daylight, but it ceased, and the circles of its last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead again.

She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged. Then she arose, put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark and up the staircase to her brother’s room. His door being shut, she softly opened it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.

She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his face to hers. She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said nothing to him.

He started by-and-by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that was, and what was the matter?

“Tom, have you anything to tell me? If ever you loved me in your life, and have anything concealed from everyone besides, tell it to me.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Loo. You have been dreaming.”

“My dear brother”—she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair flowed over him as if she would hide him from everyone but herself—“is there nothing that you have to tell me? Is there nothing you can tell me if you will? You can tell me nothing that will change me. Oh Tom, tell me the truth!”

“I don’t know what you mean, Loo!”

“As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie somewhere, one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left you. As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am dust. In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!”

“What is it you want to know?”

“You may be certain”—in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom as if he were a child—“that I will not reproach you. You may be certain that I will be compassionate and true to you. You may be certain that I will save you at whatever cost. Oh Tom, have you nothing to tell me? Whisper very softly. Say only ‘yes,’ and I shall understand you!”

She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.

“Not a word, Tom?”

“How can I say yes, or how can I say no, when I don’t know what you mean? Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy, I begin to think, of a better brother than I am. But I have nothing more to say. Go to bed, go to bed.”

“You are tired,” she whispered presently, more in her usual way.

“Yes, I am quite tired out.”

“You have been so hurried and disturbed today. Have any fresh discoveries been made?”

“Only those you have heard of, from—him.”

“Tom, have you said to anyone that we made a visit to those people, and that we saw those three together?”

“No. Didn’t you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you asked me to go there with you?”

“Yes. But I did not know then what was going to happen.”

“Nor I neither. How could I?”

He was very quick upon her with the retort.

“Ought I to say, after what has happened,” said his sister, standing by the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, “that I made that visit? Should I say so? Must I say so?”

“Good Heavens, Loo,” returned her brother, “you are not in the habit of asking my advice. Say what you like. If you keep it to yourself, I shall keep it to myself. If you disclose it, there’s an end of it.”

It was too dark for either to see the other’s face, but each seemed very attentive, and to consider before speaking.

“Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to is really implicated in this crime?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.”

“He seemed to me an honest man.”

“Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.”

There was a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.

“In short,” resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, “if you come to that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour that I took him outside the door to tell him quietly that I thought he might consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he