He had not congratulated her, but she knew he would keep silent; knew, too, that she had comparatively nothing to fear from Maude; and but for one harrowing fear, which yet was not exactly a fear, she would have felt tolerably composed and happy, as she sought her own chamber. Jack’s words, “What if the dead should come back to witness against you?” rang in her ears, and when, as she stood by the window, looking out into the moonlight, a shadow flitted across the grass, she trembled from head to foot, and turned sick with nervous dread. But it was only the watch-dog, Bruno, and as he bounded out into the light, she grew quiet, and even smiled at her own weakness. “That cannot be,” she said; and then, as if to make assurance doubly sure, she opened a trunk which always stood in her closet, and taking from it a box, touched a secret spring, and soon held in her hand three documents,—one, a newspaper, soiled and yellow with time, and containing a paragraph which said that a certain Henry Morton, who had managed to escape from justice, had recently died in a little out-of-the-way village among the Alleghanies, and that his friends, if he had any, could learn the particulars of his death, by inquiring at the place where he died. The other two were letters, one from the dying man himself, who wrote that, from the very nature of his disease, he had but a day or two to live; and one from Jack, who had gone to that out-of-the-way place, among the Pennsylvania hills, and learned that Henry Morton had died there at such a time, and then had written the same to his anxious sister at home. She had kept these papers carefully, and guarded them from every eye but her own, and occasionally she read them over to assure herself of the truth. But now she would keep them no longer, lest in some way they should come to light; and so, holding them to the gas, and then throwing them upon the hearth, she watched them as they crisped and blackened, and turned to a pile of ashes. There was nothing now in her way, and, as was her constant habit, the woman who had sinned so greatly, but who was going to do better, knelt down and said her prayers, and thanked God for Roy, and asked, first, that he might never know what she had been; and, second, that she might be to him all that a good, true wife should be, and that he might be willing for Annie to live with her. This done, she felt as if she really were a very good woman, and that but for Jack, who had such straight-laced notions, she would be confirmed, by way of helping her to keep her resolution! CHAPTER XXXIV. HOW THEY GOT ON AT LEIGHTON. Roy’s first thought on waking the next morning, was to wonder what had happened that he should feel so oppressed, as if a load were bearing him down. Then it came to him that he was engaged, and he wondered why that should affect his spirits as it did.