nicely up, and told his niece, who was staying with him at the time, to direct it, as he was in a hurry to go out, to Squire Everett, Woodlands Manor-House, Yorkshire, and then take it to the booking-office.  He thought, of course, though he said Squire in a jocular way, that she would have directed it Captain Everett, as she knew him well; but it seemed she had not.  Edwards had returned to Yorkshire only two days since, to get his annuity settled, and fortunately was present in court at the trial of Frederick Mordaunt, alias Everett, and at once recognized the tin flask as the one he had purchased and forwarded to Woodlands, where it must in due course have arrived on the day stated by the butler.  Terrified and bewildered at the consequences of what he had done, or helped to do, Edwards hastened to Mr. Sharpe, who, by dint of exhortations, threats, and promises, judiciously blended, induced him to make a clean breast of it.

As much astounded as elated by this unlooked-for information, it was some minutes before I could sufficiently concentrate my thoughts upon the proper course to be pursued.  I was not, however, long in deciding.  Leaving Mr. Sharpe to draw up an affidavit of the facts disclosed, I hastened off to the jail, in order to obtain a thorough elucidation of all the mysteries.

The revulsion of feeling in the prisoner’s mind when he learned that the man for whom he had so recklessly sacrificed himself was not only not his father, but a cold-blooded villain, who, according to the testimony of Sergeant Edwards, had embittered, perhaps shortened, his mother’s last hours, was immediate and excessive.  “I should have taken Lucy’s advice!” he bitterly exclaimed, as he strode to and fro in his cell; “have told the truth at all hazards, and have left the rest to God.”  His explanation of the incidents that had so puzzled us all, was as simple as satisfactory.  He had always, from his earliest days, stood much in awe of his father, who in the, to young Mordaunt, sacred character of parent, exercised an irresistible control over him; and when the butler entered the library, he believed for an instant it was his father who had surprised him in the act of reading his correspondence; an act which, however unintentional, would, he knew, excite Captain Everett’s fiercest wrath.  Hence arose the dismay and confusion which the butler had described.  He re-sealed the parcel, and placed it in his reputed father’s dressing-room; and thought little more of the matter, till, on entering his aunt’s bedroom on the first evening of her illness, he beheld Everett pour a small portion of white powder from the tin flask into the bottle containing his aunt’s medicine.  The terrible truth at once flashed upon him.  A fierce altercation immediately ensued in the father’s dressing-room, whither Frederick followed him.  Everett persisted that the powder was a celebrated Eastern medicament, which would save, if anything could, his aunt’s life.  The