I took an opportunity of questioning Sam, asking whether he had seen the appearance. It was as we were coming away from the grave after the funeral. Oliver was buried in Duck Brook churchyard, close under the clock which had told him the time when he stood with his father posting the letters that past afternoon at Dame Sym's window. "We are too late, father," he had said. But for being too late the tragedy might never have happened, for the letter, which caused all the trouble and commotion, would have reached Mr. Paul's hands safely the next morning. "No, sir," Sam answered me, "I can't say that I saw anything. But just as Miss Jane spoke, calling out that Mr. Oliver was there, a kind of shivering wind seemed to take me, and I turned icy cold. It was not her words that could have done it, sir, for I was getting so before she spoke. And at the last Inlet, when she called it out again, I went almost out of my mind with cold and terror. The horse was affrighted too; his coat turned wet." * * * * * That was the tragedy: no one can say I did wrong to call it one. For years and years it has been in my mind to write it. But I had hoped to end the paper less sadly; only the story has lengthened itself out, and there's no space left. I meant to have told of Jane's brighter fate in the after days with Valentine, the one lover of her life. For Val pulled himself up from his reckless ways, though not at Islip; and in a distant land they are now sailing down the stream of life together, passing through, as we all have to do, its storms and its sunshine. All this must be left for another paper. IN LATER YEARS I I think it must have been the illness he had in the summer that tended to finally break down Valentine Chandler. He had been whirling along all kinds of doubtful ways before, but when a sort of low fever attacked him, and he had to lie by for weeks, he was about done for. That's how we found it when we got to Crabb Cot in October. Valentine, what with illness, his wild ways and his ill-luck, had come to grief and was about to emigrate to Canada. His once flourishing practice had run away from him; no prospect seemed left to him in the old country. "It is an awful pity!" I remarked to Mrs. Cramp, having overtaken her in the Islip Road, as she was walking towards home. "Ay, it is that, Johnny Ludlow," she said, turning her comely face to me, the strings of her black bonnet tied in a big bow under her chin. "Not much else was to be expected, taking all things into consideration. George Chandler, Tom's brother, makes a right good thing of it in Canada, farming, and Val is going to him." "We hear that Val's mother is leaving North Villa." "She can't afford to stay in it now," returned Mrs. Cramp, "so has let it to the Miss Dennets, and taken a pretty little place for herself in Crabb. Georgiana has gone out as a governess." "Will she like that?"