“Here is the watch,” she said, with a strange calmness, as she laid in Bessie’s lap the silver time-piece, whose white face seemed to Grey to assume a human shape, and look knowingly up at him.  “You see it stopped at half-past eight.  It has never been wound up since,” Hannah continued, pointing to the hour and minute hands.

Without the slightest hesitancy Bessie took the watch, and examining it carefully, said, as she fitted the key attached to the old-fashioned fob to the key-hole: 

“Do you think it would go if I were to wind it up?” Then, giving the key a turn or two, she continued:  “It does.  It ticks.  Look, Grey,” and she held it to his ear.

But he started away from it, as if it had been the heart beat of the dead man himself, and rising quickly began to pace up and down the room, while Bessie next took the picture to which she bore so striking a likeness.

“It is grandmother! It is!” she exclaimed.  “He must have had two taken, one for himself and one for her.  Is she not lovely?”

“She is like you,” Hannah replied, “and it was this resemblance which started me so when I first saw you this morning.  Oh, Bessie, my child, your coming to me has cleared away all the clouds, and I can make restitution at last, for you are the rightful heir of the money I have saved so carefully—­heir of that and everything.”

“I do not think I understand you,” Bessie said, and then Hannah handed her the will, executed in Wales, about a year before Joel Rogers’ death, and in which he gave all he had to his sister Elizabeth and her heirs forever.

“Still I do not quite see it.  Explain it to me, Grey,” Bessie said, with a perplexed look on her face.

Thus importuned, Grey sat down beside her, and, as well as he could, explained everything, and told her of the gold, to which his aunt had added interest every year, so that the heirs, when found, should have their own, and of the shares in the slate quarries in Wales, dividends on which must have amounted to quite a fortune by this time, and all of which was hers, when she was proven to be the lawful heir of Elizabeth Baldwin, sister of Joel Rogers.

“Yes, I understand now,” she said, with a quivering lip, and the great tears rolling down her cheeks.  “There is money for me somewhere, but, oh, I wish it had come in father’s life-time.  We were so poor then; but,” she added, as a bright smile broke over her face, “I am glad for you, Grey, that I shall not be a penniless bride.”

Did she not then appreciate the position, or see the gulf which her relationship to the dead man had built between them?  If not, he must tell her, and rising again to his feet, and standing over her, Grey began with a choking voice: 

“Bessie, you do not seem even to suspect that, in the eyes of the world, the fact that you are Joel Rogers’ grand-niece ought to separate you from me.  Don’t you know that the blood of your kinsman is on my grandfather’s hands, and does that make no difference with you?”