Turning his horse quickly round, after nodding to me, in the direction of the shows and drinking booths, he nearly turned it upon a tall, gaunt skeleton in a red cloak--Ketira the gipsy. She must have sprung out of the crowd. But oh, how ill she looked! Hyde was strangely altered; but not as she was. The yellow face was shrivelled and shrunken, the fire had left her eyes. Hyde checked his horse; but the animal turned restive. He controlled it with his hand, and sat still before Ketira. "Yes, look at me," she burst forth. "_For the last time._ The end is close at hand both for you and for me. We shall meet Kettie where we are going." He leaned from his horse to speak to her: his voice a low sad wail, his words apparently those of deprecating prayer. Ketira heard him quietly to the end, gazing into his face, and then slowly turned away. "Fare you well, Hyde Stockhausen. Farewell for ever." Before leaving the course Hyde had an accident. While talking to Jim Massock, some drums and trumpets struck up their noise at a neighbouring show; the horse started violently, and Hyde was thrown. He thought he was not much hurt and mounted again. "What else could you expect?" demanded Duffham, when Hyde got back to Virginia Cottage. "You have not strength to sit a donkey, and you must go careering off to Worcester races on a fiery horse!" But the fall had done Hyde some inward damage, and it hastened the end. He died that day week. "Some men's sins go before them to Judgment, and some follow after," solemnly said Mr. Holland the next Sunday from the pulpit. "He who is gone from among us had taken his to his Saviour--and he is now at rest." * * * * * "All chance and coincidence," pronounced Duffham, talking over the strange threat of Ketira the gipsy and its stranger working out. "Yes; chance, I say, each of the three times. The woman, happening to be at hand, must have known by common report that the child was in peril; she may have learnt at Malvern that the wife was dying; and any goose with eyes in its head might have read coming death on _his_ face that afternoon on Pitchcroft. That's all about it, Johnny." Very probably. The reader can exercise his own judgment. I only know it all happened. THE CURATE OF ST. MATTHEW'S. I. "No, Johnny Ludlow, I shall not stay at home, and have the deeds sent up and down by post. I know what lawyers are; so will you, some time: this letter to be read and answered to-day; that paper to be digested and despatched back to-morrow--anything to enchance their bill of costs. I intend to be in London, on the spot; and so will you be, Mr. Johnny." So said Mr. Brandon to me, as we sat in the bay-window at Crabb Cot, at which place we were staying. _I_ was willing enough to go to London; liked the prospect beyond everything; but he was not well, and I thought of the trouble to him. "Of course, sir, if you consider it necessary we should be there. But----"