"Indeed!" was my reply, not choosing to tell her that I had heard the order given by Mr. Chandos. "Hill takes a vast deal too much upon herself. I thought it could be no one else, and taxed her with it, asking how she could presume to lock up me. She coolly replied that she had never thought of me at all in the affair, but of Mrs. Chandos, who was of a timid nature, and would not like the sight of policemen inside the house. Poor thing! she has cause," added Mrs. Penn, in a sort of self-soliloquy. "Mrs. Chandos has!" "No unhappy prisoner escaped from Portland Island, hiding his head anywhere to elude notice, has more cause to dread the detective officers of justice than she. Your friend, Harry Chandos, has the same. I would not lead the life of apprehension he does, for untold gold. Look at the skeleton it makes of him! he is consuming away with inward fever. You were surprised when that London physician was brought down to him; the household were surprised: I was not." "How came you to be so deep in their secrets?" "Had I not been in their secrets, and shown them that I was, I should not have been admitted an inmate of that east wing," she answered. "Do you know, when the police came last night—but I had better hold my tongue, or I may say too much." To avoid doing so, possibly, she quitted the room. But there were few women—as I believed—less likely than Mrs. Penn to be betrayed into speaking on impulse what it might not be expedient to speak. The adventures of the day were not over for me. I wish they had been! I finished my gloves; I practised; I did a little German; and in the afternoon, when it was getting late, I strolled out with my book, the "Heir of Redclyffe," and sat down between the house and the lodge-gates in a sheltered seat; where I could see who passed to and from the house, without being seen. The morning had been very lovely; the evening was setting in less so; a sighing wind whistled amidst the trees, clouds passed rapidly over the face of the sky, and the autumn leaves fell and were whirled about the paths. Did it ever strike you that there is something melancholy in these dying leaves? Many people like autumn the best of the four seasons; but I think there is in it a great deal of sadness. It brings our own autumn of life too forcibly to the mind: as the leaves of the trees decay, and fall, and die; so must we when our time shall come.