musty parchments, he did not know but what I had best have this one, especially as his wife and niece, having glanced at it, would not give it house-room! So I had the keepership of that mournful secret of the Lord Richard's wonderful love and patience, which came near altering the local annals I was to write. It was like the unburied dead; it tormented me. Not one of those vulgarians to whom it really belonged was fit to touch it, much less understand it; and I did not wish to add it to any collection, mine or another's. I hesitated a good bit, and then I stole off, on a chilly Martinmas eve, and piously burned it here in Lovers' Saint Ruth's, on this tomb, and scattered the ashes into the grass." A gust of wind came into the choir, and the clock half a mile away struck one. At the sound, we reached for our hats, which we had instinctively laid aside, and crossed the little transept to the door, Nasmith first, I following, as we had entered. Once more, as we left the porch, dark with ivy and weather-stains, we heard the wood-doves, over our heads in the nave, utter a slow musical moan, one to the other. "Their souls," I whispered suddenly. "Peace to all such, after pain," said poetic Cyril. "_Amen_," I answered. We both smiled. How we two were enjoying our renewed society, back in a bygone England! Hardly had we gained the road, when a carriage rolled by, with a single figure on horseback clattering alongside. A black-bonneted girl in mourning, handsome, if furtive, under her parasol, and both her companions, the younger of whom sat beside her, saluted Nasmith in what I thought to be a cold, perfunctory manner. I guessed something, for his honest cheek flushed. "I fear these are the great folk of Orrinleigh," I remarked. "The men have selfish, stupid faces, more's the pity." "Yes," he replied; "you have seen some of the Lord Richard's degenerate descendants. I once meant to give his manuscript to Audrey--to the young lady in the carriage. I hoped she might value it. But, as I said, I destroyed it instead. You are the only person to whom I ever repeated the tale, and almost in the original words. Go put it in a book, if you like, Holden; make what you can of it; develop and proportion it; I trust your handling." I thanked him. "No. Your chivalrous Cavalier is too complex a subject for me," was my frank reply; "I feel safer with a history than with a mystery." I was a hardened republican novelist even then, and his senior, and not blind to the "human document," neither of the seventeenth century, nor of the nineteenth. "Nasmith," I began cunningly, "you were in love with the Honorable Audrey, and she refused you. How fortunate for you! Yours was the neatest and most spiritual revenge I ever heard of: to keep from her what might have helped transform her woman's nature, stifled in an ill atmosphere,--the knowledge that she was of the blood of the saints, 'Tho' fallen on evil days, On evil days tho' fallen, and evil tongues.'"