He had been gone but a few minutes; the elder Nichols was silently meditating the perilous position in which he had placed himself, when a noiseless step approached him from behind, and a heavy hand was suddenly placed upon his shoulder. He started wildly to his feet, and confronted the stern and triumphant glance of the once humble and submissive Charity Symons. The suddenness of the shock overcame him, and he fainted. Mary Lovegrove, whose child had sobbed itself to sleep, was sitting in solitude and darkness in the lower room of the cottage, her head bowed in mute and tearless agony upon the table, when, as on a previous evening, a tap at the back window challenged her attention. It was once more Charity Symons. "What do you here again?" exclaimed the wretched wife with some asperity of tone: "you no doubt intended well; but you have nevertheless ruined, destroyed me." "Not so," rejoined the deformed clerk, his pale, uncouth, but expressive features gleaming with wild exultation in the clear starlight. "God has at last enabled me to requite your kindness to a contemned outcast. Fear not for to-morrow. Your husband is safe, and you are rich." With these words he vanished. On the next morning a letter was placed in the magistrate's hands from Mr. Nichols, stating that circumstances had come to the writer's knowledge which convinced him that Edward Lovegrove was entirely innocent of the offense imputed to him; that the letter, which he had destroyed, bore quite another meaning from that which he had first attributed to it; and that he consequently abandoned the prosecution. On further inquiry, it was found that the attorney had left his house late the preceding night, accompanied by his son, had walked to Christchurch, and from thence set off post for London. His property and the winding up of his affairs had been legally confided to his late clerk. Under these circumstances the prisoner was of course immediately discharged; and after a private interview with Symons, returned in joy and gladness to his now temporary home. He was accompanied by the noisy felicitations of his neighbors, to whom his liberation and sudden accession to a considerable fortune had become at the same moment known. As he held his passionately-weeping wife in his arms, and gazed with grateful emotion in her tearful but rejoicing eyes, he whispered, "That kind act of yours toward the despised hunchback has saved me, and enriched our child. 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy!'" [From Dickens's Household Words.] THE GAMBLERS OF THE RHINE.