Hannah had been up stairs to her room, where she now kept the box in which lay the picture which was so like Bessie McPherson.

“More like her than I supposed,” she whispered, as she gazed upon the face which seemed each moment to grow more and more like the young girl to whom Grey was to tell the story.

He was only waiting for her to come in before he commenced, she knew, and putting the picture back in its place, she went down to the south room, and taking her seat beside Bessie, as Grey motioned her to do, waited for him to begin.

“Bessie,” he said, and his aim tightened its clasp around her waist, “there is a skeleton here, and it has darkened all my Aunt Hannah’s life, and thrown its shadow over me as well.  Can you bear to have a little of it fall upon you, too?”

“Yes,” she answered, fearlessly, “I have always lived with skeletons until I knew you loved me; they cannot frighten me.”

“But, darling, would you love me as well, think you you knew that, in a way, there was a disgrace clinging my name?” he asked, and Bessie replied: 

“A disgrace!  What do you mean?  I cannot imagine you to be in disgrace; but if you are, I am quite ready to share it with you.”

“Even if it be murder?”

Grey spoke the last word in a whisper, as if afraid the walls had ears, but Bessie heard him distinctly, and with a great start, she drew herself away from him, and sat rigid as a stone, while she repeated: 

“Murder!  Oh, Grey, you surely do not mean that!”

“No, not exactly; it was manslaughter, done in self-defense,” Grey answered her, and, with a sigh of relief, Bessie asked: 

“Who was the killed, and who the killer?”

“My grandfather did the deed, in the heat of passion, and the victim has lain under the floor of that room into which I would not let you enter, for more than forty years.  Now you know the skeleton there is in this old house.”

“Ye-es,” Bessie said, while a look of terror and pain crept into her eyes; but she did not move nearer either to Grey or his aunt.

Indeed, it seemed to both that she drew herself into as small a compass as possible, so that she might not touch them, and her face was very white and still as Grey commenced the story, which he made as short as possible, though he dwelt at length upon the life-long remorse of his grandfather, and the heavy burden which his Aunt Hannah had carried for years.

At this part of the story, Bessie’s face relaxed, and one of the hands, which had been clasped so tightly together at first, went over to Hannah’s hand, which it took and held until Grey told of the lonely days and dreary nights passed by the young girl in the old horror-haunted house, with no one but Rover for her companion.  Then the hand went up with a soft, caressing motion to the face which Grey had once said looked as if Christ had laid his hands hard upon it, and left their impress there.  It was pallid now, as the face of a corpse, and there were hard lines about the mouth, which quivered with pain.  But, at the touch of Bessie’s soft fingers, the hardness relaxed, and, covering her eyes, Hannah burst into a paroxysm of weeping.