Murdoch followed him in silence. He was thinking of what was going to happen to himself scarcely as much as of the dead man in whose name he was called upon. He was brought near to him again as if it were by a fate. "If you are Stephen Murdoch's son," had moved him strongly. Their destination was soon reached. It was a house in a narrow but respectable street occupied chiefly by a decent class of workmen and their families. A week before he had seen in the window of this same house a card bearing the legend "Lodgings to Let," and now it was gone. A clean, motherly woman opened the door for them. "Tha'st earnt thy shillin', has tha, tha young nowt?" she said to the lad, with friendly severity. "Coom in, Mester. I wur feart he'd get off on some of his marocks an' forget aw about th' paper. She's i' a bad way, poor lady, an' th' lass is na o' mich use. Coom up-stairs." She led the way to the second floor, and her knock being answered by a voice inside, she opened the door. The room was comfortable and of good size, a fire burned on the grate, and before it sat a girl with her hands clasped upon her knee. She was a girl of nineteen, dark of face and slight of figure to thinness. When she turned her head slowly to look at him, Murdoch was struck at once with the peculiar steadiness of her large black eyes. "She is asleep," she said in a low, cold voice. There was a sound as of movement in the bed. "I am awake," some one said. "If it is Stephen Murdoch's son, let him come here." Murdoch went to the bedside and stood looking down at the woman who returned his gaze. She was a woman whose last hours upon earth were passing rapidly. Her beauty was now only something terrible to see; her breath came fast and short; her eyes met his with a look of anguish. "Send the girl away," she said to him. Low as her voice was, the girl heard it. She rose without turning to right or left and went out of the room. Until the door closed the woman still lay looking up into her visitor's face, but as soon as it was shut she spoke laboriously. "What is your name?" she asked. He told her. "You are like your father," she said, and then closed her eyes and lay so for a moment. "It is a mad thing I am doing," she said, knitting her brows with weak fretfulness, and still lying with closed eyes. "I--I do not know--why I should have done it--only that it is the last thing. It is not that I am fond of the girl--or that she is fond of me," she opened her eyes with a start. "Is the door shut?" she said. "Keep her out of the room." "She is not here," he answered, "and the door is closed." The sight of his face seemed to help her to recover herself. "What am I saying?" she said. "I have not told you who I am." "No," he replied, "not yet." "My name was Janet Murdoch," she said. "I was your father's cousin. Once he was very fond of me." She drew from under her pillow a few old letters. "Look at them," she said; "he wrote them."