"Special edition. Frightful murder of a nobleman by burglars. Flight of the murderers. Further horrible details." The red-coated men's harvest was a precarious one, and they made the most of it; they even succeeded in selling some of their papers at a shilling a-piece. But the purchasers were disappointed, for though the newspaper reporters had swelled their description of what they called "The Tragedy in High Life in St. John's Wood," into two columns of leaded type, yet nothing more was to be gained from it all than that the heir to the Pit Town title had been brutally murdered by a midnight thief, that the assassin had escaped with his plunder, and as yet had succeeded in baffling the efforts of the police. Ere nightfall every police station in the metropolis displayed a hand-bill headed by the startling word "MURDER," in big black letters, and offering a reward for the apprehension of a man wearing an Inverness cape and carrying a Gladstone bag. For days the police stations were besieged by anxious informers, desirous to give information about men with Gladstone bags and Inverness capes. Both cabmen came forward, and the murderer was traced as far as Matilda Street, but here the scent failed utterly; and though the old lord offered a further and larger reward, and smug-looking men, in slop clothes and billycock hats, hung about Matilda Street at all hours of the day and night, yet they failed to come upon any trace of Lord Hetton's murderer. Twelve good men and true, his lordship's butcher, baker and candlestick maker and nine others of the same kidney, found a verdict of "Wilful Murder;" and two days after the inquest the body of the unhappy nobleman was conveyed to Walls End Castle and interred with due pomp in the family vault. The old lord, Mr. Haggard of the Home Office and Reginald Haggard, followed it to the grave. Mr. Haggard had had a rather painful interview with a lady dressed in deep mourning in the dining-room of Azalea Lodge, on the morning of the removal of his lordship's body. The lady's grief was evidently unfeigned. When Mr. Haggard had informed her that the dead man had left her all he had to give, she was in no way consoled, and merely continued to sob and wring her hands in the bitterness of her grief. A fortnight afterwards Azalea Lodge was in the hands of an auctioneer. The first-rate modern furniture, by Gillow, was eagerly inspected by the curious, and fetched fancy prices. Six months afterwards Lord Hetton's very existence was forgotten, save by his father and a lady dressed in deep mourning, who gambled with feverish energy at Monte Carlo, vainly striving, poor thing, in that way to drown the remembrance of the past. The wicked man's epitaph, as a rule, may be generally appropriately written in the pithy words "He was, and is not." Like a stone dropped into the water he disappears and leaves no trace. END OF VOL. II.