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knew well by feeling as well as sight, and lay back on his pillow, with his eyes upon the note as if they read even in the darkness the words he knew so well - Catherine's last words to him—her little, almost illegible note she had been frightened into writing by his incessant watching and too evident alarm and suspense concerning her.

Waiting once, as usual, in the dusk, outside the wall of Dola' Hudol, by a spot where he knew she often stood at that hour, to watch the lights of the town so far below, and of the village so high above, kindling one by one, waiting at this place, Rymer heard her coming by herself. Then he heard her pause, and in an instant his arms were on the low wall, his eyes and voice chaining her to the spot by their misery.

"Catherine, I cannot bear it-I must know. -How is he treating you? Did he see me? You are deadly pale, Catherine. Did he see me, then? Are you suffering for it?"

She stood still, her white face leaning a little forward, like the face of one who has had the voice of a dead person recalled to her memory, suddenly, startlingly.

He held his hand out, but at that movement she started, turned, and walked quickly away. He lost sight of her as she went among a little group of trees. Would he see her no more?

Yes-the light dress fluttered out again. She came quickly to the wall, and went from it as quickly, without a word, a look to him.

But that little note had fallen at his feet. It contained few words, and none that gave him comfort-only such words, indeed, as drove him far from the only place he cared for in the world, and being banished from which made him hate every other place.

"I cannot tell," Catherine had written, "what he knows or thinks-he is kind, but seems different from what he has ever been before. Suspense is killing me. Keep away, if you have any pity; do not add this constant alarm which your presence about here gives me, to my other misery."

For several days Rymer had kept out of sight of the walls and windows of Dola' Hudol; and had wandered on the mountains, exposed to all the fierce winds, and the frequent rains of the time, and only returned to seek the

shelter of a home, when he found himself at the last stage of exhaustion.

As he had sat leaning towards the fire, watching Hirell's five knitting-needles glittering in its light, there came for him one of those intervals of peace and quietness which will come, and sometimes inexplicably, to the greatest sufferers; a breathing-space in which one can look upon one's own pain, and think of it almost as if it were another's. The delirious patient has some moment of the day or night when he remembers whose step has fallen lightest in the sick room, whose hand has been most kind, whose eyes have longest kept awake for him-or whose heart has been

wounded most by his impatience. It is a merciful subsiding of the waters that we may see our own hearts for a little while, and discover there and comfort ourselves with the gifts of human grace and tenderness that sorrow's tide has brought us.

Such an interval had come just now for Rymer; and he found his heart's storm-beaten shore plenteously strewn with such gifts, and he looked upon and tried to count them with tenderness and remorse.

But he could not count them; they were innumerable-the delicate kindnesses that had been offered to and brutishly spurned by him, or churlishly accepted, since he first came to Bod Elian. To the gentle housekeeper, Kezia Williams, he knew that he owed many; to Hugh some; to Elias also a few; but he knew that the lightest step, gentlest hand, and most watchful eye in the sick room of his soul all this time had been

What was her strange name? he asked; and a second time he said it softly to himself -it and its meaning as Chamberlayne had told it to him—

"Hirell-beam of light-angel."

CHAPTER II.

A WELSH ANTIQUARY.

WHEN Hirell and Kezia went to meet Elias returning from his work in the lower fields next morning, they both asked anxiously about the lodger; and Elias told them it seemed to him Mr. Rymer was in some kind of fever; that he was quiet, and willing to see Dr. Robarts when he should come.

"There is good in him," said Elias; "he entreated me like a child to raise the blind, that he might see Criba Ban from where he lay."

Hirell and Kezia both looked at Rymer's little window, and from it to the mountain standing, kinglike, above the rest; and both agreed there must be good in thoughts that could like to climb so high. Hirell felt too, in her own heart, that they would hardly be

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