f her meanness. The woman whom she had
supposed on the other side the hill, stood smiling quietly upon her. Not
a word was spoken. The woman took out her taper box, dropped some fresh
wax beneath the seal, and smiling all the time, handed the note back
again.

Agnes turned her face, now swarthy with shame, aside from that smiling
look, and began to plunge her little foot down angrily into the moss,
biting her lips till the blood came. At last, she lifted her head with a
toss, and turning her black eyes boldly on the woman, said, in a voice
of half-tormenting defiance, "Very well, what if I did open it? My first
lesson was, when you and I read Mrs. Harrington's letter. If that was
right, this is, also."

"Who complained? Who, in fact, cares?" was the terse answer, "only it
was badly done. The next time you break a seal, be sure and have wax of
exactly the same tint on hand. I thought of that, and came back. It
would ruin all, if General Harrington saw his letters tampered with."

"You are a strange woman!" said Agnes, shaking off the weight of shame
that oppressed her, and preparing to go.

"And you, a strange girl. Now go home, and leave the note as I directed.
In a day or two we shall meet again. Almost any time, at nightfall you
will find me here. Good night!"

"Good night," said Agnes, sullenly, "I will obey you this once, but
remember my reward."

Again the two parted, and each went on her separate path of evil--the
one lost in shadows, the other bathed in the light of a warm sunset.

It did not strike the woman, as she toiled upward to her solitary
dwelling, that she was training a viper which would in the end turn and
sting her own bosom. Her evil purposes required instruments, and without
hesitation, she had gathered them out of her own life. But, even now,
she found them difficult to wield, and hard to control. What they might
prove in the future remained for proof.

CHAPTER XXVII.

GENERAL HARRINGTON'S CONFESSION.

General Harrington had spent a good many years of his life abroad, and
no American ever went through that slow and too fashionable method of
expatriation with more signal effect. While walking through the rooms
peculiarly devoted to his use, you might have fancied yourself intruding
on the privacy of some old nobleman of Louis the Fourteenth's court.

His bed chamber was arranged after the most approved French style, his
dressing-room replete with every conceivable invention of t