Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1904-05-28 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

NORTHERN WEEKLY GAZETTE.  to endure it, when you could have proved me guiltlees with a word." She sank into a chair slowly, and as if yielding to a spasm ctialrysioal weakness. Mr George Ly smiled and sat down by her. "But all that is past," she said hastily. "I will forget the fresh crimes you have committed, I will forget the diabolioal plot in which you sought to entangle myself and that unsuspecting girl. I will remember only that you are Nora's father, and that the knowledge of your sins would crush her to the earth with shame and horror. Go and hide yourself in some wild land, where such as you are sale from British justice!" Mr George Lynch looked at her unfalteringly. "Control yourself," he answered and there was a ring of almost contemptuous command in his lowered voice—" it is not I but you who jeopardise Nora's peace of mind. Once for all, I tell you that I a.m not your husband, but merely George Lynch, an okl acquaintance of his." Gertrude East sneered. "Tell me what lie you choose," she said, "so long as you go. But beware how you try my patience. If you are not out of Inglefieild within a week, I will send for Colonel Rutherford who is my friend and Mr Marsden's executor, as well as a Justice of the Peace and Chairman of Quarter Sassions—place the whole matter in his hands, identify you as George Ferris, and let events take their course." _  The other polished abstractedly the broad gold ring on his stiff, artificial forefinger. "A well-put situation," he retorted; "but I shall not be out of Inglefield in a week, nor yet in a month. Nee.- ertheles, seven days hence you will not have made your threatened confession to Colonel Rutherford. I will tell you why. Because men in love are desperate, and I am a man in love—in love with Violet Marsden. Therefore, you will not render me desperate." He leaned negligently in his chair and tapped with his finger-nails on the carved oak of a neighbouring cabinet. It was the cabinet from which Gertrude East had taken the derringer pistol that George Ferris, not a moment too soon, had plucked from her grasp, by way of beginning and end to a certain extraordinary niterview.  "You have," lie added, "as have most women, more courage than powers of reflection. Consider the position. Suppose myself identified by you as your husband. I deny it. You refer to some mysterious jewels and aigar-case with initials on it. If I were George Ferris and the owne.r of that ease, I might have placed the stones in it, and if I did so, would no doubt be obviously inplicated in the disappearance of the person so remarkably discovered in Colonel Rutherford's ancestral cabin. But you have, you recollect, dispcsed of both the jeweLs and the cigar-case in a way that will not permit of your producing them in evidence. If you did, however they would not necessarily incriminate me.'" His demeanour was bland and imperturbable. No one watohing him from a distance could have divined the highly unusual nature of his observations. _  "With you," be said, "it would be otherwise. low would you account for your exploration of the pit on the moors—that tour of discovery which brught the unset stones into your possession? As a matter of fact., you went to see if your husband were dead, twenty-four hours after you had thrust him bodily over a precipice. But you can hardly explain that to Colonel Rutherford. Still is can you admit your anxiety to discover that you were free to marry your deluded parson-lover. That would be to brand yourself as in intention a murderess."