might be seen, perhaps, by some farm labourer in the field. The men were ploughing there yesterday, and heard a shot. They told me that last night at the farm. Wait! wait!" cried Jessie, excitedly.

She rushed away, light as a lapwing, flying across the narrow bridge—bounding from stone to stone—vanishing amidst dark autumn foliage. Christabel heard her steps dying away in the distance. Then there was an interval, of some minutes, during which Christabel, hardly caring to wonder what had become of her companion, stood clinging to the hand-rail, and staring down at stones and shingle, feathery ferns, soddened logs, the water rippling and lapping round all things, crystal clear.

Then, startled by a voice above her head, she looked up, and saw Jessie's light figure just as she dropped herself over the sharp arch of rock, and scrambled through the cleft, hanging on by her hands, finding a foothold in the most perilous places—in danger of instant death.

"My God!" murmured Christabel, with clasped hands, not daring to cry aloud lest she should increase Jessie's peril. "She will be killed."

With a nervous grip, and a muscular strength which no one could have supposed possible in so slender a frame, Jessie Bridgeman made good her descent, and stood on the shelf of slippery rock, below the waterfall, unhurt save for a good many scratches and cuts upon the hands that had clung so fiercely to root and bramble, crag and boulder.

"What I could do your husband could do," she said. "He did it often when he was a boy—you must remember his boasting of it. He did it yesterday. Look at this."

"This" was a ragged narrow shred of heather cloth, with a brick-dust red tinge in its dark warp, which Leonard had much affected this year—"Mr. Tregonell's colour, is it not?" asked Jessie.

"Yes—it is like his coat."

"Like? It is a part of his coat. I found it hanging on a bramble, at the top of the cleft. Try if you can find the coat when you get home, and see if it is not torn. But most likely he will have hidden the clothes he wore yesterday. Murderers generally do."

"How dare you call him a murderer?" said Christabel, trembling, and cold to the heart. It seemed to her as if the mild autumnal air—here in this sheltered nook which was always warmer than the rest of the world—had suddenly become an icy blast that blew straight from far away arctic seas. "How dare you call my husband a murderer?"

"Oh, I forgot. It was a duel, I suppose: a fair fight, planned so skilfully that the result should seem like an accident, and the survivor should run no risk. Still, to my mind, it was murder all the same—for I know who provoked the quarrel—yes—and you know—you, who are his wife—and who, for respectability's sake, will try to shield him—you know—for you must have seen hatred and murder in his face that night when he came into the drawing-room—and asked Mr. Hamleigh for a few words in private. It was then he planned this work," pointing to the broad level stone against which the clear water was rippling with such a pretty playful sound, while those two women stood looking at each other with pale intent faces, fixed eyes, and tremulous lips; "and Angus Hamleigh, who valued his brief remnant of earthly life so lightly, consented—reluctantly perhaps—but too proud to refuse. And he fired in the air—yes, I know he would not have injured your husband by so much as a hair of his head—I know him well enough to be sure of that. He came here like the victim to the altar. Leonard Tregonell must have known that. And I say that though he, with his Mexican freebooter's morality, may have called it a fair fight, it was murder, deliberate, diabolical murder."

"If this is true," said Christabel in a low voice, "I will have no mercy upon him."

"Oh, yes, you will. You will sacrifice feeling to propriety, you will put a good face upon things, for the sake of your son. You were born and swaddled in the purple of respectability. You will not stir a finger to avenge the dead."

"I will have no mercy upon him," repeated Christabel, with a strange look in her eyes.