Mr Ralph tried to keep what had happened from the ears of his sister, but she was always making inquiries about the ships on foreign stations. At last one day she heard what it would have been better she had never known. We found her in a dead faint. She was brought to, but the colour had left her cheeks and lips, and she never again lifted up her head. Mr Ralph came to see her. "It was all your doing," she said to him in a reproachful tone. "He might have been wild, he might have been what you say he was, but he promised me that he would reform and be all I could wish." "Of whom do you speak, Ellen," asked Mr Ralph. "Of him who now lies dead beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, of Martin Goul," she said, and uttered a cry which went to our hearts. "That scoundrel's name is unfit to come out of your lips, Ellen," he answered with an oath. "He met a better fate than he deserved, for he died with honest men. Now put him away from your thoughts altogether, and never defile your lips by speaking of him." Poor Miss Ellen made no reply. Nothing would induce her to leave her room. She grew weaker and weaker, and soon was laid beside her mother in the family vault. A few months afterwards Mr Castleton died, and the place was sold. Mr Ralph, who had become a barrister, went away to live in London and married, and has been there ever since. The death of his son was known to many others before Lawyer Goul heard of it, for it was no one's business to tell him, and few would have been willing to do so. At last, one day in an old newspaper which contained an account of the loss of the _Resistance_, his eye fell on the announcement. He let the paper drop, sank back in his chair, and never spoke again. His crazy wife took it up, and she, seeing what had happened to her son, not even stopping to learn whether her husband was dead or not, or trying to assist him, rushed away no one knew where. "Some say," said Dame Halliburt, as she finished her long story, "that she has long since been dead, and others that she is `Mad Sal,' as the boys call her; but she does not look to me like old Goul's wife; and I cannot fancy that one brought up as a sort of lady, as she was, could live the life that poor mad woman does, all alone in a wretched hovel by herself among the cliffs, without a neighbour or a soul to help her." "Well, it's a sad story, wife; I wonder you never told it me before." "To say the truth, Adam, it's not a matter I ever liked talking about, and I don't know scarcely what made me tell it you now. It's not that I care about Lawyer Goul and his crazy wife and their son; but even now I cannot bear to think of poor Miss Ellen. It was a sad thing that a sweet innocent creature like her should have been cut off in her young days." CHAPTER EIGHT. GAFFIN, THE MILLER.