ly; "but
if you have any fear, keep the key yourself: the lock is not one that
can be forced."

She took the key from her bosom, where it hung on a broad black ribbon,
as she spoke, and handed it to him. He accepted it without demur.

"You are so rash," he said; "it will be safer with me: let me take the
box also?"

"No, no!" said Mrs. Damer, hurriedly; "you shall not; and it would be no
use. If it were out of my sight, I should dream that it was found, and
talk of it in my sleep. I often rise in the night now to see if it is
safe. Nothing could do away with it. If you buried it, some one would
dig it up; if you threw it in the water, it would float. It would lie
still nowhere but on my heart, where it ought to be!--it ought to be!"

Her eyes had reassumed the wild, restless expression which they took
whilst speaking of the past, and her voice had sunk to a low, fearful
whisper.

"This is madness," muttered Herbert Laurence; and he was right. On the
subject of the black box Mrs. Damer's brain was turned.

He was just about to speak to her again, and try to reason her out of
her folly, when voices were heard merrily talking together in the hall,
and her face worked with the dread of discovery.

"Go!" she said; "pray, go at once. I have told you everything." And in
another moment Herbert Laurence had dashed through the passage to the
privacy of his own room; and Mrs. Clayton, glowing from her drive, and
with a fine rosy baby in her arms, had entered the apartment of her
cousin.

II

Bella found her cousin sitting in an arm-chair, with the cloak still
over her shoulders, and a face of ashy whiteness, the reaction of her
excitement.

"My dear, how ill you look!" was her first exclamation. "Have you been
out?"

"I went a little way into the shrubberies," said Mrs. Damer; "but the
day turned so cold."

"Do you think so? We have all been saying what a genial afternoon it is:
but it certainly does not seem to have agreed with you. Look at my boy:
isn't he a fine fellow?--he has been out all day in the garden. I often
wish you had a child, Blanchey."

"Do you, dear? it is more than I do."

"Ah, but you can't tell, till they are really yours, how much pleasure
they give you; no one knows who has not been a mother."

"No; I suppose not."

Mrs. Damer shivered as she said the words, and looked into the baby's
fat, unmeaning face with eyes of sad import. Mrs. Clayton thought she
had wounded her cousin,