arently in falling from the cliff. The coroner's inquest
returned an open verdict.

There the matter rested. The mystery had not been explained. There
were, however, low whispers, that Will Watch's lugger had run along
the shore the night Mr. Ashton was missed, and that the country lanes
were alive with active traffic. But if it were so, those who could be
explicit on the matter if they chose, found it more expedient to hold
their tongues.

For a time the event gave, as has been said, new vigour to the
suspicions concerning poor Margaret's marriage. Her mother was the
only witness remaining. But when a son and heir was born to Mr.
Trevethlan, and there came no formal impeachment of the union, the
rumours gradually died away. The peasant-lady, by her meekness and
modesty, won the regard of all the inmates of the castle, except--her
husband. He exacted, indeed, the utmost deference towards her from
others, but treated her himself with cold indifference, and seemed
jealous of her influence with her children, even in their cradle. She
foresaw what would come, pined away, and died. Her bliss had been her
bane.

Michael Sinson said nothing to his patroness of the mode in which Mr.
Trevethlan behaved to his wife's relations. He did not tell how
bitterly old Maud resented the death of her daughter, nor how his own
expulsion from the castle rankled even yet in his heart. But he dwelt
with much craft on the singular circumstances of the marriage, and the
mysterious disappearance of the evidence; hinted at times, that the
rite would have been pronounced a mockery, if its purpose had not
been achieved, and suggested, not very indistinctly, that it might yet
be proved to have been so in reality.

These hints and inuendos were the main novelties of the story to Mrs.
Pendarrel. Of her own knowledge, she recollected the leading facts of
the case, and was well aware that, whatever might be the prejudices of
the vulgar, there was not the slightest public ground to doubt the
perfect formality of the marriage. Moreover, she felt certain, from
her acquaintance with Henry Trevethlan's character, that he would
never be a party to an artifice like that suggested by Sinson. If
there were anything irregular, she was sure it was no fault of his.
But there was a confidence in her informant's manner which seemed to
intimate that he spoke on no light grounds.

"Sinson," she said, after some consideration, and with an air of the
most unreserve