“O Tom, Tom! what have you done?” interrupts his wife, clasping her hands, and straining her eyes, dilated with horror, upon her husband’s working features. “It’s not---- Tom, I can’t bring myself to say it. You haven’t lifted your hand against another?” “No, no, Rachel,” says he; “not so bad as that, lass, not so bad as that; but it’s fourteen years, anyhow, if they bring it home to me. _I_ must cut and run, whatever happens. Now, there’s some men would be off single-handed, and never stop to say good-bye; but I’m not one of that sort. I couldn’t bear to leave you and the child; and I won’t neither. Rachel, do you mind the time when we sat on the beach at St. Swithin’s, and what you said to me there? Well, dear, that’s past and gone, now; but you’re not changed, anyhow. Will you do it, Rachel, for _my sake_?” The poor woman wavers more and more; she is white as a sheet, and the perspiration stands in beads on her lip and forehead. Tom produces a pen and ink, and a certain document we recognise as having lain in Mrs. Kettering’s writing-case the night she died at St. Swithin’s. But his wife shrinks from the pen as from a serpent, and he has to force it into her fingers. “It’s the _last time_, Rachel,” he pleads; “I’ll never ask you to do such a thing again. It’s the _last time_ I’ll do wrong myself, as I stand here. It’s but a word, and it will be the saving of us both; ay, and the little one yonder, too--think what she’d be growing up to, in such a place as this. You sign, dear, and I’ll witness--I can write my own name, and my old master’s too; he’s dead and gone now, but he didn’t teach me law for nothing.” She does not hear him; her whole being is absorbed in the contemplation of her crime. But she _does it_. Pale, scared, and breathless, she leans over the coarse deal table; and though the dazzling sheet is dancing beneath her eyes, and her hands are icy cold, and her frame shakes like a leaf, every letter grows distinct and careful beneath her fingers, and burns itself into her brain, the very facsimile of her old mistress’s signature. The clock strikes eleven; and at the first clang she starts with the throb of newly-awakened guilt, and drops the pen from her failing grasp. But the deed is done. From that hour the once respectable woman is a felon; and she feels it. To-morrow morning, for the first time in her life, she will awake with the leaden, stupefying, soul-oppressive weight of actual law-breaking guilt; and from this night she will never sleep as soundly again. * * * * *