CHARLOTTE F. BATES.

THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS.

BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON, AUTHOR OF “PATRICIA KEMBALL.”

CHAPTER XXI.

CHANGES.

Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant.  For it was to an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner’s inquest had assigned the cause of poor madame’s awful and sudden death; though why the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was no solution.  Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been bought or where procured.  Alick Corfield, who understood it all, was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew.  On the contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is sometimes seen in the ingenuous, “I broke it by accident, father, and forgot to tell you.”

As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly, “That was a bad job, my boy,” laid the matter aside as a caput mortuum of no value.

To be sure, he thought more than once that it was an odd coincidence, but he could see no connection between the two circumstances of madame’s sudden death and Alick’s fracture of that bottle of hydrocyanic acid; and even if there should be any, he preferred not to trace it.  So the inquest was a mere show so far as getting at the truth was concerned, and madame died and was buried in the mystery in which she had lived.

Meantime, Leam had been sent to school, whence she was expected to return a little more like other English girls than she had been hitherto, and Mr. Dundas shut up Ford House—­he went back to the original name after madame’s death—­and left England to shake off in travel the deadly despair that had fallen like a sickness on him and taken all the flavor out of his life.  He had never cared to search out the real history of that fair beloved woman.  Enough had come to his knowledge, in the bills which had poured in from several Sherrington tradesmen on the announcement of her marriage and then of her death, to convince him that he had been duped in facts if not in feeling.  For among these bills was one from the local geologist for “a beginner’s cabinet of specimens,” delivered just about the