"To-day, father, I took the bull by the horns. Ruth had been sitting there for some time working without saying a word, when I asked her suddenly, as if it was what I had been thinking over while we were silent: 'What is your opinion, Ruth? Do you think that Captain Mervyn really murdered his cousin?' She turned pale. She has never much colour, you know, but she went as white as a sheet, and then said, 'I am quite sure that he did not do it, but I don't like talking about it.' 'No, of course not,' I said. 'I can quite understand that after the terrible shock you had. Still, it is awful to think that this Captain Mervyn should have been driven away from his home and made an outcast of if he is innocent.' 'It serves him right,' Ruth said, passionately. 'How dare he insult and threaten my dear Miss Margaret? Nothing is too bad for him.' 'I can't quite agree with you there,' I said. 'No doubt he deserved to be punished, and he must have been punished by being tried for his cousin's murder; but to think of a man spending all his life, branded unjustly with the crime of murder, is something too terrible to think of.' 'I dare say he is doing very well,' she said, after a pause. 'Doing well,' I said, 'doing well! What can you be thinking of, Ruth? What sort of doing well can there be for a man who knows that at any moment he may be recognised, that his story may be whispered about, and that his neighbours may shrink away from him; that his wife, if he ever marries, may come to believe that her husband is a murderer, that his children may bear the curse of Cain upon them? It is too terrible to think of. If Captain Mervyn is guilty, he ought to have been hung; if he is innocent, he is one of the most unfortunate men in the world.' Ruth didn't say anything, but she was so terribly white that I thought she was going to faint. She tried to get up, but I could see she couldn't, and I ran and got her a glass of water. Her hand shook so that she could hardly hold it to her lips. After she drank some she sat for a minute or two quiet, then she murmured something about a sudden faintness, and that she would go home. I persuaded her to stay a few minutes longer. At last she got up. 'I am subject to fainting fits,' she said; 'it is very silly, but I cannot help it. Yes, perhaps what you say about Captain Mervyn is right, but I never quite saw it so before. Good-bye,' and then she went off, though I could see she was scarcely able to walk steadily. Oh, father, I feel quite sure that she knows something; that she can prove that Ronald is innocent if she chooses; and I think that sooner or later she will choose. First of all she was so decided in her assertion that Ronald was innocent; she did not say 'I think,' or 'I believe,' she said 'I am quite sure.' She would never have said that unless she knew something quite positive. Then the way that she burst out that it served him right, seems to me, and I have been thinking