rden came to see how the wounded man was. As he sat
talking with Mrs. Rudge a tapping came at the window. She went to the
door. The locksmith heard her cry out, and sprang forward to find
standing there, to his astonishment, the robber of the night before. He
grasped at him, but the woman threw herself before him, clasped his arm
and besought him, for her life's sake, not to pursue the man.

The locksmith had known Barnaby's mother all his life, but so strange
was her action now (especially since she refused to answer any question,
begging him to ask her nothing) that he almost wondered if she herself
could be in league with a crime-doer. Her apparent agony touched him,
however, and, raising no alarm, he went home in great puzzle of mind.

He would have been far more disturbed if he had known the whole truth.
For the mysterious stranger he had seen, who by night had haunted the
neighborhood, was none other than Mrs. Rudge's husband, Barnaby's
father, the steward who everybody believed had been murdered with his
master, and whose body had been found in the pond.

Rudge himself had committed that wicked deed. He had killed both master
and gardener, and to cover the crime had put his own clothes, his watch
and ring on the latter's body and sunk it in the pond. When, on the
night of the murder, he told his wife what he had done, she had shrunk
fearfully from him, declaring that, although being his wife she would
not give him up to justice, yet she would never own him or shelter him.
He had fled then with the money he had stolen, and that night, while she
lay sick with horror, Barnaby had been born with his poor crazed brain,
the look of terror in his baby face and the birth-mark of blood on his
wrist.

For many years the guilty wretch had wandered the earth, but he could
not escape the knowledge of his deed. And at last his conscience had
driven him back to the scene of his crime, friendless, penniless,
fearful of the sunlight, slinking by night like a ghost about the house
in which he had murdered his master, and hounding his miserable wife for
money with which to buy food and drink. The poor woman had kept her
terrible secret, giving him every coin she could save, striving so that
Barnaby, unhappily born as he was, should never know the shame of having
his father suffer death on the gallows. When Rudge had come to her house
that day he had thought her alone, and she had saved him from capture
only by begging the locksm