vency and anger as he
broke at once into the subject with which his disordered brain was
reeling.

'You will not dare to say, will you, that you do not remember this
song--that these pencil-marks in the margin were not made by you
thirteen years ago?' he menacingly ejaculated.

'I know nothing about the song, Mr Renshawe,' rejoined the young woman
with more spirit than she might have exhibited but for my near
presence. 'It is really such nonsense. Thirteen years ago, I was only
about nine years of age.'

'You persist, then, unfeeling woman, in this cruel deception! After
all, too, that I have suffered: the days of gloom, the nights of
horror, since that fearful moment when I beheld you dragged, a
lifeless corpse, from the water, and they told me you were dead!'

'Dead! Gracious goodness, Mr Renshawe, don't go on in this shocking
way! I was never dragged out of a pond, nor supposed to be
dead--never! You quite frighten one.'

'Then you and I, your sister, and that thrice-accursed Bedford, did
not, on the 7th of August 1821, go for a sail on the piece of water at
Lowfield, and the skiff was not, in the deadly, sudden, jealous strife
between him and me, accidentally upset? But I know how it is: it is
this brat, and the memories he recalls, that'----

Mrs Irwin screamed, and I stepped sharply into the room. The grasp of
the lunatic was on the child's throat. I loosed it somewhat roughly,
throwing him off with a force that brought him to the ground. He rose
quickly, glared at me with tiger-like ferocity, and then darted out of
the room. The affair had become serious, and the same night I posted a
letter to Yorkshire, informing Mr Oxley of what had occurred, and
suggesting the propriety of his immediately coming to London. Measures
were also taken for securing Mrs Irwin and her son from molestation.

But the cunning of lunacy is not easily baffled. On returning home the
fourth evening after the dispatch of my letter, I found the house and
immediate neighbourhood in the wildest confusion. My own wife was in
hysterics; Mrs Irwin, I was told by half-a-dozen tongues at once, was
dying; and the frightful cause of all was, that little George Irwin, a
favourite with everybody, had in some unaccountable manner fallen into
the river Lea, and been drowned. This, at least, was the general
conviction, although the river had been dragged to no purpose--the
poor child's black beaver-hat and feather having been discovered
floated t