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down monotonously from a canopy of leaden cloud.

As I rose and dressed, I noticed that the lawn was strewn with broken twigs and branches from the trees, and the last traces of the frozen snow were washed away. Gregory was just issuing from his room as I came out of mine; we met and greeted on the stairs with the usual comments on the wet morning and stormy night; he, like me, had been disturbed by it. "I could have declared,” he said, "that some one was knocking at the front door and throwing up gravel at my window; but it was nothing but the force of the wind."

We went down together, and in the hall found the door set open, and three of the servants standing there, looking at a brown paper parcel which lay across the threshold. Mary, who had come back to us urged by maternal scoldings, was the first to speak it had fallen in, she said, when the door was opened as if set up against it on the outside; and they thought it must have been there all night, as it was soaked with wet. She looked at it, ready to scent a mystery, as if in her opinion it was something uncanny.

The parcel, which was more bulky than heavy, was wrapped in brown paper and tied with stout string. Gregory lifted it and turned it over, but no address was visible, nor any trace of writing that the rain had blurred. "I shall assume," he said, "that it is meant for me;" and carrying it to a side-table in the breakfastroom he cut the fastening strings with his knife and pulled apart the outer wrappings.

The package had been done up carefully in several sheets of thick paper, and an inner string tied together in a tight roll the skirt of a woman's dress. I saw Gregory's face change, and I think he and I recognised it in the same instant; it was the very skirt of shot silken gray that Barbara had worn the night of her disappearance.

His hands trembled as he spread it out, and we looked in each other's faces in dumb amazement. Folded closely within, so as to occupy the least possible compass, was all the other clothing, while still recognisable, pinned to the bodice close above the crimson breast-knot, was a bunch of withered violets which had been her lover's gift, brought from Lynnchester on the fatal day. Janie had come quietly behind us and I heard her exclaim; she seemed both frightened and excited, and hers was the suggestion that there might be a letter. "Surely," she said, she would not send the things back without a word."

Gregory shook his head at this, but we made the search; unfolding everything, turning out the pocket of the dress and examining the protecting papers; but there was not a scrap of handwriting of any sort. The only fresh discovery was a parcel in one of the shoes; a handkerchief with her initials folded round the two rings, Dick Sudeleigh's diamond hoop and the emerald cluster which had been my gift, tied together upon the slender filigree chain she had worn about her throat. The father held them up to me and then dropped them back upon the heap. "That disposes of one of the theories," he said. "Robbery was not the motive. And Barbara never did this. No change, other than a miracle, would have made her send these rags and relics back to mock us in our grief; " and he turned abruptly away from us to hide his tears.

Alas, the ill-omened parcel laid at our door in the night elucidated nothing; the mystery of Barbara's disappearance gathered all the darker for that will-o'-the-wisp of mocking light which gleamed a momentary hope. It was of course examined by the detective, but no clue could be obtained as to whence it had come. There was, as I have said, no address; the sheets of wrapping paper were of the ordinary

kind which might be found in any house; the strong twine with which it had been tied was in no way peculiar. Doubtless it was deposited in the porch by some person in the secret; but at what time of the evening, or night, or early morning, remained unknown. Gregory had fancied he heard knocking at the door and pebbles thrown at his window, but that could only have been the noise of the storm; no one coming secretly on such an errand would desire to call attention

to his presence. The clothing was quite uninjured, and might have been laid aside in the safety of her own home; but there were two points to which the detective drew attention. The thin slippers were scratched and cut as if by walking some distance over a rough road, and the lace edge of the petticoat was soiled and frayed ; this, Evans declared, was not the case with either before that night's use. It was thought to point to Barbara having gone away on foot, rather than being forced away from us in a carriage, which our minds had dwelt upon as probable.

As I have said, the mystery was deeper than ever. Eleanor was very greatly distressed and upset, and would have the clothes brought up to her bedside, and then could scarcely see them for the fast-flowing tears. Evans looked grimly on, and when asked for an opinion said: 'Indeed, ma'am, I should say that something had happened to frighten the persons who had them in charge, within the last day or two, and they were afraid to keep them any longer hid away."

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It was not difficult for me to divine at what her words pointed; and in the conviction that Barbara was dead she was as strong as Gregory himself.

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letters between her and Eleanor, and deep had been the sympathy and concern expressed by all Dick's relatives for the Alleynes in their grief. later correspondence, however, had related chiefly to the Sudeleighs' wish that Dick should go abroad. While the search for Barbara was still active nothing would have induced him to leave England, but, now that it had been practically abandoned, except for an occasional advertisement in a daily paper, there was no reason for delay; and the yachting-cruise, in company with one or two congenial companions, would help to break through the gloom and despondency which had settled down over him since the fatal night. Lady Sudeleigh was anxious the Alleynes should join in persuading him to go; but though Eleanor would not lift a finger to detain him, I could see she was reluctant. So long as he was coming and going, keeping the police vigilant and fanning the failing hope of the inquiry into a semblance of life, she would not wholly despair; it seemed to her that with Dick's departure Barbara would be lost indeed.

She was greatly altered since I came to Ditchborough, and not alone by the sorrow which weighed equally on her husband; she had given up the struggle to maintain her usual habits, and fallen altogether into an invalid life. The only change between day and night was her removal to a sofa in her room and back again to bed; and though her pains did not appear to increase in violence, they were of frequent occurrence, and the dread and expectation of them was continual. Gregory hoped her friend's visit would rouse her. Lady Sudeleigh was an energetic, active-minded person who looked habitually on the bright side of things; and she would urge Eleanor to consent to the consultation and surgical treatment which Dr. Carpen

Towards the end of February our mournful quietude was disturbed by a visit from Lady Sudeleigh. There had been frequent interchange of ter advised.

There was, however, another alteration in Eleanor which I had begun to notice, perhaps before it was perceptible to any one else, and that was her growing reluctance to have Janie about her. At first it seemed natural that Janie's should on all occasions be the hand to minister; but now, for those little offices in which she did not care to depend on Evans, she began to turn exclusively to me. I was very willing to write for her and read to her, or to sit by her couch and talk when she felt able for the effort; and as we had been companions in youth and had many recollections in common, her wish for my society was not extraordinary; still I felt uneasy for the girl's sake as the difference became more marked. She took it all with her usual gentleness, but I saw a shade of pain cross her face when Eleanor would tell her to "go and send Evans; or to see if her uncle wanted her in the parish, as Susan would read aloud." I wondered at first if Evans had given voice to her suspicions despite the ground Gregory had taken up about that matter, but I do not believe it was so. I do not think Evans ever said a word to her mistress; but is it quite impossible that some emanation of what was in her mind should pass without voice into the moral atmosphere and be vaguely absorbed by another? Certain it is that the maid disliked and suspected the girl, and the mistress's affection cooled.

Eleanor would now and then drop a word, as if in explanation of having been more than usually impatient or ungracious. "You don't know what it is to me, Susan, for that girl to be here alive and well when our darling has been taken from us. You remember where it says, " one shall be taken and the other left'? But oh, why was it not Janie whom nobody wants, instead of Barbara who was the very light of our eyes?"

No. 434.-VOL. LXXIII.

Janie whom nobody wants! Sad that her nineteen summers and her gentle ways should have won no more than this in the house which had been her home.

Gregory wanted her, however; she had always been a useful help to him in parish ministrations, and she continued the work till certain hindrances arose which I shall recount in their own place later on.

As all this will show, I spent much of my time with Eleanor; but Gregory would now and then descend on us and command me to go out. I had no business, he said, to imprison myself in a sick-room when I had so lately left one of my own. I had come into the country for change and rest, and I must remember fresh air was an essential in the prescription. So he would take me drives behind Red Saxon, and long rambles on foot which I liked even better,-over hill and dale, among the Coldhope woods, and over the breezy expanses of the moor. It was a mild February, and before the last days had gone by there became perceptible, thrilling in the air and pulsing through animate nature, the mysterious exaltation of the Spring. And another errand sometimes took me abroad, though only to the little gray church. The schoolmaster, who was also the organist, met with a mischance, laming his shoulder by a rather serious dislocation, and I offered to fill his place in the churchservices while he was disabled. It was years since I had touched the instrument, but a proficiency once acquired is seldom wholly lost, and by dint of weekday practices I was soon able to undertake the Sunday hymns and voluntaries to Gregory's satisfaction, if not altogether to my own. By a stroke of good fortune the organ was. a finer instrument than could have been expected in such a locality as Ditchborough, and a first step in the restoration of the church had been to.

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put it in thorough repair. I cannot say it was a very blissful occupation, accompanying the nasal voices of that drawling choir; but in those solitary practices I did have some happy hours over the yellow keyboard, recalling well-loved harmonies to which my fingers had for long been strangers.

But I have wandered from Lady Sudeleigh's visit, which was fixed for the end of February, and Dick had promised to come over, while she was with us, for a single night, to bid farewell both to the Alleynes and to his mother before setting sail. The Rector's brougham went all the way to Lynnchester to bring her over with her maid and luggage, as the expresses from the south did not at all regard our nearer wayside station; and she arrived, as I had done, on the edge of dusk, though later in the evening by all the advance of the year.

I had vaguely expected a large imposing person, something after the mould of Eleanor, a feminine prototype of the tall wide-shouldered stature of her son; but the figure that emerged from the brougham, and was disembarrassed in the hall of a heavy travelling-cloak enriched with sable, was altogether small in its proportions, imposing only by virtue of an erect and stately carriage which made the most of every inch of her diminutive height. She was taken straight to Eleanor, who was anxiously awaiting her, and what the two mothers found to say to each other in that meeting so full of sadness to the one, I know not; but they were shut in alone together for the best part of an hour. After that Lady Sudeleigh rested in her room till dinner-time, and I felt it was really my first sight of her when she and Janie came together into the lighted drawing-room

where Gregory and I were awaiting them.

She was a beautiful little old lady, quite past all pretensions to youth; who might indeed have been taken for Dick's grandmother rather than his mother, and have walked in the character of a white witch godmother out of the pages of a fairy-book. She used an ebony stick for some slight lameness which hardly disfigured her gait, and her hair, which was silver-white, was turned back over a cushion from her small face with its aquiline features and still delicate complexion of ivory and pink. There was a brilliance and vivacity about her that one does not usually associate with the decline of life, and I should think those black eyes of hers could hardly have been more piercing in her girlhood than now when she had counted five and sixty years. She made no secret of her age, rather taking pride in it, perhaps with the feeling that she bore it to the full as gracefully as younger women did their youth. Her gown of gray brocade became her, and so did the black laces which crowned her silver hair and draped her throat, with the flash of a diamond among them here and there. As we stood together at the fire waiting for dinner, I noticed how every movement of her silken draperies shook out a subtle odour of sandalwood, a perfume which ever since in my mind has been associated with the vivacious personality of that imperious little dame. Dick's mother was completely different from my expectations; but as Janie and I followed into the

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(To be continued.)

OXFORD IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

FROM a variety of causes, and in particular from the immense amount of ancient documentary evidence which has survived, and the unwearied labour which has been devoted to its elucidation by successive generations of archæologists, it is easier to reconstitute the Oxford of the thirteenth century than any other English city of that era. Fortunately no great disaster has obliterated its principal lines, and, roughly speaking, its chief streets run to-day precisely as they ran six hundred years ago. Yet, for all that, a modern visitor, familiar as he might be with the city of the nineteenth century, might well be excused if, on stepping back into the Oxford of 1295, he found himself in no small danger of losing his way. Once out of the four or five chief thoroughfares, he could scarcely avoid being entangled in a multitude of narrow lanes and alleys intersecting the city in all directions, and whose modern representatives and survivors are such passages as Frewen Court, Logic Lane, and Friars' Entry. There would be some strange alterations even in the streets he knew.

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nothing of the gates and posterns which blocked every exit from the city, of the rows of butchers' stalls which were ranged down the centre of Queen Street, of unknown churches here and there, of the city moat extending halfway across Broad Street, he would be still further confused by the loss of almost every landmark familiar to him. He would recognise the towers of no more than two churches, St. Frideswide's and St. Michael's. The ground now occupied by the Shel

donian and the Printing-House was then covered by the waters of the Canditch. Where now stands the Town-Hall he would see the huddled tenements of the Lesser Jewry, whose owners had five years before been expelled from the kingdom. But what would astonish him most would be the apparently complete absence of the colleges. In place of Magdalen there was a more or less dilapidated hospital standing in the meadows by the roadside. Instead of New College he would stumble upon the city rubbishheap. Similar surprises would await him as he sought the sites of all but three of the modern colleges, for only Merton, University, and Balliol were in existence; and he might well be pardoned for failing to trace in so much of them as was then visible any resemblance to the colleges of the present day. In lieu of them, scattered about the streets and alleys of the town, were scores of houses dignified with the names of halls, each nominally under the control, though a control of the most shadowy character, of a Master of Arts, where the predecessors of the modern undergraduate lodged, and fed, and quarrelled with each other and the citizens.

Still more impressive would have been the change which the visitor would have found in the suburbs. Suburbs indeed, in the modern sense of a couple of fair-sized towns to north and south-east of the ancient city, there were none. A sparse line of houses straggled up each side of St. Giles'; there was a tiny cluster of tenements beyond Cherwell, among which stood in the roadway the church

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