“Dear auntie,” Bessie said, “my auntie, because you are Grey’s, how you must have suffered, and how I wish I could have come to you.  There would have been no terror here for me, because, you see, it was not premeditated; it was an accident, not a crime, and God, I am sure, forgave it long ago.  No, Grey;” and now she turned to him, and, winding her arms around his neck, went on:  “It is not a disgrace you ask me to share it is a misfortune, a trouble; and do you think I would shrink from it a moment—­I, who have borne so much that was disgrace?”

He knew she was thinking of her mother, but he said nothing except to fold her in his arms and kiss her flushed, eager face, while she went on: 

“But who was this man?  Where did he live, and had he no friends to make inquiries for him?”

Grey remembered now that he had simply said, the peddler, without giving the name, and he hastened to say: 

“He was Joel Rogers, a Welshman, from Carnarvon, and it was for his sister Elizabeth, or her heirs, that I was searching, when I first came to Stoneleigh.”

“Oh, Grey!” and Bessie sprang up almost as quickly as she had done when he spoke to her of murder; “oh, Grey! what if it should be my great-uncle, whose grave is under the floor?  You once told me you were hunting for Elizabeth Rogers, and I said I would ask Anthony, who knew everybody for fifty miles around and for a hundred years back.  But I forgot it until after father died, when it came to me one day, and I went to Anthony and asked if he knew any one in Carnarvon or vicinity by the name of Elizabeth Rogers.

“‘No,’ he said, ’I never knew Elizabeth Rogers; but I knew your grandmother, Elizabeth Baldwin, before she was married, and she had a half-brother, Joel Rogers, twenty years older than herself.  A queer, roaming kind of chap, who went off to America, or Australia, or some such place, and never came back again.  He was a good bit older than I am,’ Anthony said, ‘and would be over eighty if living now.’

“Then I remembered that when I was a child I once heard my grandmother Allen speak of a brother, who, she said, went to the States when she was a girl, and from whom she had not heard in many years.  He must have been very fond of her, for she had several choice things he had given her, and among them a picture of herself, which, she said, was painted in London the only time she was ever there, and which was very beautiful.”

“A picture, did you say?  Would you know one like it if you were to see it?” Hannah asked, in a constrained voice and Bessie replied: 

“Oh, yes; that portrait is still at Stoneleigh, for when grandma died, six or seven years ago, mother gave it to me, and I hung it in my room.  It was like mother, only prettier, I think.”

While Bessie was speaking Hannah had risen, and going from the room soon returned, bearing in her hand the box, which for so many years she had secreted, and which Grey had not seen since he was a boy, and Hannah told him the sad story which had blighted her life.  He saw it now in his aunt’s hands, and shuddered as if it were a long closed grave she was opening.