“If she had told me,—if I had known,” he kept repeating to himself, without finishing the sentence, for he did not know what the result might have been if he had known that the woman he thought to make his wife was the widow of his hired workman, the sister-in-law of Jenny Nesbit, among the Alnwick Hills. “If I had loved her then as I do now, it would have made no difference,” he said to himself at last, “and in any event I should have respected her for a truthful, conscientious woman, which I cannot do now. Oh, Edith, Edith, how you have fallen, and I thought you so true!” This was the third day when he sat exhausted by the table where the letter lay. He kept it there constantly in his sight, though he had not read it since he came, but he took it up now and turning to the first page began to read it again, when, on the margin in the lower corner his eve caught, for the first time, a few faint pencil marks, almost erased, but which could still be made out with care. It was not Edith’s handwriting, and in looking closely he recognized the peculiar style of Mrs. Barrett, whose writing he had seen on the back of Edith’s letters received from her. What had she written there,—she who, at her daughter’s instigation, had lied so foully to him on the day when she came with that smooth story of an _early love_ and nothing more! He asked himself this question, and as he asked it, there flashed over him a light of revelation even before he made out the pencil lines. LONDON, _October_ 10th, 18—. “_This letter Edith bade me carry to Col. Schuyler, but I kept it back and told him what I liked, and she never knew of the deception until just after she was married, when I accidentally let it out, and she fainted away._ “M. BARRETT.” The words were finely written, but the colonel made them out, while the sudden revulsion from despair to joy was almost too much for him, and he sat for a moment half fainting in his chair. Then he roused himself, and his first words were: “Thank God! I have my Edith back again!”