king on her altered looks, he would evade any questions she
put to him on the painful subject, or meet them by an appeal to her
whether she could prove anything against him; and by the observation
that nothing was easier than to spread rumours against a person's
character. She was thus often silenced, but never satisfied.

June had come--a bright sky remained for days with scarce a cloud; the
hay-makers were everywhere busy, and the fields were fragrant with the
sweet perfume of the mown grass. It was on a quiet evening that Mary
was returning home from a cottage where she had been to visit a sick
parishioner of her father's. Her way lay in part through a little
plantation skirting a hay-field belonging to the Greymoor estate. She
had just reached the edge of the plantation, and was about to climb over
a stile into a lane, when she heard loud and discordant voices, which
made her blood run cold; for one of them, she could not doubt, was
Frank's.

"This way, Mr Frank, this way," cried another voice, which she knew at
once to be that of Juniper Graves.

"I tell you," replied the first voice, thickly, "I shan't go that way; I
shall go home, I shall. Let me alone, I tell you,"--then there followed
a loud imprecation.

"No, no--this way, sir--there's Miss Mary getting over the stile; she's
waiting for you, sir, to help her over."

"Very good, Juniper; you're a regular brick," said the other voice,
suddenly changing to a tone of maudlin affection; "where's my dear
Mary--ah, there she is!" and the speaker staggered towards the stile.
Mary saw him indistinctly through the hedge--she would have fled, but
terror and misery chained her to the spot. A few moments after and
Frank, in his shirt-sleeves, (he had been joining the hay-makers), made
his way up to her. His face was flushed, his eyes inflamed and staring
wildly, his hair disordered, and his whole appearance brutalised.

"Let me help--help--you, my beloved Mary, over shtile--ah, yes--here's
Juniper--jolly good fellow, Juniper--help her, Juniper--can't keep
shteady--for life of me."

He clutched at her dress; but now the spell was loosed, she sprang over
the stile, and cast one look back. There stood her lover, holding out
his arms with an exaggerated show of tenderness, and mumbling out words
of half-articulate fondness; and behind him, a smile of triumphant
malice on his features, which haunted her for years, was Graves, the
tempter, the destroyer of his un