Through the blinding rain, which fell in torrents, she had caught a glimpse of the stranger’s face, as he sprang toward the horses, and that glimpse had frozen her with horror for a moment, and made her very teeth chatter with fear, and her hair prickle at its roots. Then, as she remembered how impossible it was for the dead to rise and assume a living form, she tried to reassure herself that she had not seen aright. It was a resemblance, nothing more; a mere likeness which she in her weak, nervous state had magnified into a certainty. _He_ was dead, the curse of her life; she had nothing to fear; she was Roy’s wife, or would be in a few days, and there was no lawful reason why she should not be so. Thus she tried to reassure herself, until she became more quiet, and dressed for the evening, and met Roy, when he came, with a kiss and smile, and asked him in a rather indifferent manner if he knew who the stranger was who had come so bravely to their aid. Roy did not know, but thought it very possible he was some workman on the farm near by, though his appearance was not quite that of a common laborer. “Didn’t he have queer eyes? Wasn’t one of them turned, or put out, or something?” was Georgie’s next query, and Roy answered laughingly: “Really, you were more observing than I was. Why I don’t know whether the man had two eyes or four. I only know that we owe our lives to him, whoever he may be.” He did not tell her all that had transpired at Leighton with regard to the stranger, or how, when he left home, Russell was busy nailing windows which had no fastenings, and barricading doors, and doing numerous things, which indicated that from some quarter he was apprehending a night attack upon his master’s property. Russell, too, had seen the stranger’s face more distinctly than Georgie had, and he could have sworn, ay, did swear, that he had seen it before, and had his fingers on that throat down in the basement of his master’s house, years before, in New York. “I know it is the same, and he’ll be here to-night, maybe, to try his luck again,” he said, to Roy and Edna, who made light of his fears, and told him he was always seeing burglars in the shade of every tree and around every corner of the house. Remembering Georgie’s nervousness, Roy kindly suggested that she should not be told of Russell’s suspicion, and so he answered her lightly when she questioned him of the stranger, but felt a little startled when her description of the disfigured eye tallied so exactly with what Russell had said. He did not stay late at Oakwood that night, but returned earlier than usual to Leighton, which he found bolted, and barred, and locked, as if it had been some fortified castle ready to be besieged; but Russell’s burglar did not make his appearance, a little to the disappointment of the good man, who narrated to Edna the particulars in full of his encounter with the midnight robber, who managed to break away, and escape from justice after all.