impulse which had urged me to seek for him in the forest. I asked him to accompany me back to Patricia, but he said that was impossible, and that he could not endure the agony of it. I put myself in his place, and recognised that his refusal was natural. But I could not entirely dismiss my fears for his safety. Eric, however, refused to share them. 'What is to be will be,' he said; 'otherwise it would not have been fated that our father and his brother--twins, as we are--should have loved the same woman, and that we should have done the same.'

"I was anxious to get back to Patricia, and I left him in the forest. I knew nothing further until I was arrested and thrown into prison."

"An innocent man?" said Doctor Louis.

"As innocent as yourself," was Emilius's reply.

 IX.

Throughout this narration Doctor Louis was impressed by the suspicion that something was hidden from him. He pressed Emilius upon the point, and his suspicion was strengthened by the evasive replies he received.

"Enough, for the present, of myself," said Emilius; "let me hear something of the outside world--of the world that is dead to me."

"What do you wish to know?" asked Doctor Louis sadly.

"Of yourselves," replied Emilius. "Of your good wife, whom I used to look upon as a second mother. She is well?"

"She is well," said Doctor Louis, "but in deep unhappiness because of these terrible events."

"How does she regard me--as innocent or guilty?"

"She has the firmest belief in your innocence. When I told her I was about to visit you, she desired me to give you her love and sympathy."

"It is like her. And Lauretta?"

"I did not inform her that I was coming. She is in great distress. You and Eric were as brothers to her."

"And now," said Emilius, with a certain recklessness of manner which puzzled Doctor Louis, "one is dead and the other disgraced. But she will live through it. She has a happy future before her?"

He put this somewhat in the form of 

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