conclusion, hints--nay! not hints, but statements--that some strange secrets which had long lain hidden in the past must now be instantly revealed, or remain still hidden--forever?

It was not a long letter; yet it told enough, was pregnant with matter.

"If," the writer said, after the usual form of address, "your ship, the Caractacus, does not get back with the rest of the Squadron ere long, I am very much afraid we have seen the last of each other; that--and Heaven alone knows how hard it is to have to write such words!--we shall never meet again in this world. And this, Julian, would make my death more terrible than I can bear to contemplate. My boy, I pray nightly, hourly, that you may soon come home. I saw the specialist again yesterday and he said----Well! no matter what he said. Only, only--time is precious now; there is very little more of it in this world for me."

Julian Ritherdon gazed out of the open window as he came to these words, still seeing nothing that his eyes rested on, observing neither swift flowering pink nor white may, nor budding chestnut, nor laburnum bursting into bloom, nor hearing the larks singing high up above the cornfields--thinking only again and again: "It is hard. Hard! Hard! To die now--and he not fifty!"

"And I have so much to tell you," he read on, "so much to--let me say it at once--confess. Oh! Julian, in my earlier days I committed a monstrous iniquity--a sin that, if it were not for our love for each other--thank God, there has always been that between us!--nothing can deprive the past of that!--would make my ending even worse than it must be. Now it must be told to you. It must. Already, because I begin to fear that your ship may be detained, I have commenced to write down the error, the crime of my life--yet--yet--I would sooner tell it to you face to face, with you sitting before me. Because I do not think, I cannot think that, when you recall how I have always loved you, done my best for you, you will judge me hardly, nor----"

The perusal of this letter came, perforce, to an end now, for the train, after running through a plantation of fir and pine trees, had pulled up at a little wayside station; a little stopping-place built to accommodate the various dwellers in the villa residences scattered all around it, as well as upon the slope of the hill that rose a few hundred yards off from it.

Here Julian Ritherdon was among home surroundings, since, even before the days when he had gone as a cadet into the Britannia and 

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