It has always been a place of pilgrimage, though its full history is not even guessed at. Saint Ruth's-on-the-Hill, my friend, can never buy or borrow such a charm as this." As he paused, we heard the plaintive interruptive note of a pair of wood-doves in the ash. He looked at me again. "I forgot to say that they were content to die, my martyr hero and heroine of Orrinleigh, for they had won four years, at the end, of absolute unbroken bliss. They used to come down here every evening for a talk, or a hymn to Our Lady, arm in arm, and happy as children all the way. Their day of storms was brief, and it had a lovely sunset." "Ah, Nasmith," I exclaimed, like a sentimental girl, "I am glad of that. How did you know?" He drew his foot idly through the soft sward as he spoke. "I had the whole story in the Lord Richard's own hand. He wrote it out during the last night he spent at the manor, with his spurs and sword lying by him ready for the morrow: the whole tender, tragic story, with his curious mental struggles laid bare. He thought the truth due to his father, and to his dead stainless Eleanor, to clear her memory from erring rumor which had early got abroad. The manuscript was put away under a seal; and as soon as his son's will was opened, the Earl knew where to find it; I have seen it all scorched and stained with the old man's tears. No eye, from his to mine, has read it since. You see, the next and fourth Earl, Vivian, grew up a graceless cynic reprobate in London, never visited his estates, and cared nothing for his lineage. His sister was little better. I ought to spare her and her second husband any vituperations, since they did me the courtesy of becoming my great-great-great-great-grandparents! Did I never tell you? The Langhams, bad enough in the beginning, have been a worse crew than before, since the Lord Richard's time. Almost 'every inch that is not fool is rogue,' as Dryden says of his giant. Francis, the ninth of the line, lately dead, and his Countess, being my very distant relatives, and impressed with my virtues, which were then being wasted on the desert air, offered me the benefice. The first thing I did, after setting Saint Ruth's in order, was to look about for materials for a history of the parish from a period before the Conquest. During the summer, they put a world of papers, grants, charters, registries, and so on, into my way, which had been heaped in some old chests in the tool-house. One of these papers was that letter, a pearl in sea-kelp. I took it promptly over to Orrinleigh. The Earl was in his hunting-coat, swearing, over his glasses, at some excellent Liberal news in his morning journal. 'Read this,' I said; 'it is one of your ancestral romances, and ought to be reverently preserved.' He laid it by. A few days afterwards, while I was gathering fruit and vines for a Harvest Sunday, he pulled it from his pocket, and threw it at me over the garden wall, remarking that as my reverend appetite was for