ey had had the use of the dresses and the guide just the
same as if they had gone under the Fall; and he refused to recognize
anything misleading in the dressing-room placard: In fine, he left Basil
without a leg to stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars as the
sense of having been swindled that vexed him; and he instantly resolved
not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put
that burden upon her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the
poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her sympathy for the
sake of sparing her needless pain.

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary
unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman
told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a
Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a
stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his
wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It
was so natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the
peculiar circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but
when a few days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband
refused to come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general
regret that he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the
whole fact to Basil's guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had
paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall,
and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a
moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and
then Basil looked at the mother of his children, and registered a vow
that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a similar
excess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act of
spendthrift profusion she committed. The guide pointed out the rock in
the Rapids to which Avery had clung for twenty-four hours before he was
carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband
Isabel's bonnet ribbons seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He
could endure the pretty arbor no longer. "Come, children!" he cried,
with a wild, unnatural gayety; "let us go to Goat Island, and see the
Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother was afraid to walk back on
after she had crossed it."

"For shame, Basil!" retorted Isabel. "You know it was you who were
afraid of that bridge