The Weekly Journal. — 1902-01-17 (Hartlepool, Cleveland, England)

YOU. Lie down, Demon! So, quiet, sir ! Now, come," he said again to Marjorie. " Come nearer and let me look at you." Marjorie went forward till she came close to that grim interlocutor. As a sign of amity and confidence she held out her hand. The man was evidently a gentleman by origin, Robinson Crusoe-like as he was now by long neglect, and brutal as to manner and word. Still, there were the unmistakeable signs in gesture and bearing for all his roughness; and when he spoke, his accent was that of an educated man. Almost as if in spite of himself there was a certain faint aura of former gentlebood about him—almost as if ho were doing viqlence to his truer self by his anger. his disregard, his very extravagance of surliness. A less wrathful esieression came into , his face as he rose from the tree-trunk which , served him for bench, to greet the pretty young creature standing there before him, ' like a nineteenth century wood-nymph in a picture hat and pale blue gown. " Who were you before you married ?" he ' asked, more gently than he had yet spoken. He took her ungloved, outstretched band betireen both of his.—his so rough and hardened, yet still so well-shaped, as would naturally belong to a man of good birth. "Marjorie byte," was her answer. "Ah !" he said, drawing a deep breath. It was as if he had said, "1 knew it." "You have Cornish names," he then said, after a pause, in a still gentler voice. "Yes, we are Cornish people," said Marjorie. "We both come from the same p!ace—Sutumer Leas, near Penzance," she added, looking hack to Herbert in the near distance—Rhaicos to her, the llarnadryad. The hands of the strong, rude man trembled AA they pressed hers with a friendly intention in their grasp. "You were Marjorie Hoyte," he repeated softly; "and that whelp there is Herbert Pentreath." His voice, his eyes, his whole bearing changed as he said this. His manifest interest in the girl did not extend to her husband.  "Yes," said Marjorie, startled in that he knew her young lover's name, but with too keen a woman's flair to take up the point. She had instinctively felt that to let sleeping dogs lie was the only wise way of dealing with this formidable Hermit of Lone Head. What mystery soever there might be about this strange familiarity with her husband's Christian name —which she had not told—it was better net to notice it—though his scowl when he looked at her Rhaicos, and the accent which he threw into his voice when be spoke of him, made her tremble and shiver u though it had been the declaration of war and the presage of future sorrow. Yet what harm to Herbert could come from this remote and unknown man? To be sure, their runaway marriage had not improved his I home prospects; but the eldest son of a family which for generations and generations bad been lords of the soil where they were born and bred—owners in times past of the very fives of the tillers of the ground and fishers in the deep, and now proprietors of all the rights that can accrue to stable wealth and solid power—that eldest son, even if he has made a premature marriage, has too firm a 'basis to fear the unformed dangers of a visionary possibility. The Pentreathe bad ever been a strongwilled, hard-handed race, with the inevitable black sheep mixed in among the whiter fleeces. They had been bold buccaneers in times past, and Captain Bobadils and soldiers of fortime—men who swore horribly in Flanders, and who fought for the side that paid best, irrespective of its merits- —but the last who had suffered the penalty of his misdeeds had been Herbert's own uncle Geoffrey, his father's elder brother—he who had murdered Matt lieyte, Marjorie's father, for jealousy, they said. For had he not been engaged to pretty May Wrightson or ever he went to India? and did he not find on his return that she had jilted him and married Matt Hoyte, on the sly as one might say, but as tight and fast as a church—on the sly or in the open as it might be? And Geoffrey, being a wild sort of man, at once dour and passionate, revenged himself on his more fortunate rival by cutting short the thread which had crowd his own —shooting Matt on eight, and then drowning himself in Mount's Bay. His body had never been found, but his coat and hat and stick were all on the eashore. while his sinful battered corpse was tossed about by the wild Atlantic waves—for indeed where else could it be? This affair had created more than a sensation down at Summer-Leas and the country round about, and the loudest and most forward to denounce it was Herbert's father, "old Herbert," as he was now generally called. He had no word too hard to Bing at the Decant brother whose foul crime had sullied the family annals as they had never been sullied before. He had been active in helping on this marriage too, for he bad had the younger brother's jealousy of his elder. As lads they had fought and struggled together; as men they had been rivals on mere Held than one; and, troth to say, Herbert, who bed remained in England reading for the Bar, while Geoffrey had gone with his regiment to India, was not sorry to play his brother this scurvy trick with respect to pretty May Wrightson, helping on the marriage which would be such a blow to the man he hated, and which would take all the sweetness out of his cup of life for ever. He had net foreseen the consequences. Had he done so perhaps he would have hesitated; for murder has an ugly eland in a virtuous country place, and a murder and suicide combined do not tend to raise the repute of a county family. Still, there it was, and the deed ones done eaanot be recalled. The past is as true as the present, and its vices and virtues, its mistakes and its well-doing, remain unaltered by time and untouched in their effects by repentance. Herbert had effectually helped Matt Hoyto to erase his brother's path, and that set mold not be undone; sad Geoffrey had revenged himself in grim fashion enough on the thief who had stokm his treasure. And that set. DO more than the etlssr, wild new be recalled with all the eonsiequesoes banging like a ragged fringe thereto. "Herbert Peottreetb," repeated the Iterinft in the same threatening voice, sad widtthn sae ghosokkied Alf bated Will