“Don’t ask me that, Doctor, I dassent,” replied Toner, shivering with superstitious fear.

“Let me go with him,” said the minister to the Captain; “we’ll not be a minute away.”

“Look sharp, then!” growled Mr. Thomas.  “Are you loaded?”

The two explorers looked to their revolvers, and then climbed the bank, which was no easy task, as it was a mass of felled timber and dead brush; but the notes of a woman’s voice led them on, and, at last, they found themselves on the shore of the fourth lake.  They saw nothing, so they crouched down listening for the voice.

“Steve, Stevy dear, wake up and let us go away.  Oh, why are you sleeping when every moment is precious?  He will come, Stevy, I know he will, and kill you, dear!” The voice was very near.  Simultaneously the intruders looked up the bank, and, at the foot of a standing hemlock, saw a woman, with gray hair hanging loose over her shoulders, who knelt by a recumbent figure.  “Steve, dear brother,” she continued, “do wake up!  You used to be so good and sensible.”  Coristine crept nearer behind some bushes till he was within a very short distance of the pair.  With a white, sad face, trembling in every limb, he came back as silently to the minister, and whispered:  “It’s poor Nash, and she calls him brother; Mr. Errol, he’s murdered, he’s dead.”  The warm-hearted Errol, who had come out to look after the detective’s safety, at once became a hero.

“Bide you there, Coristine,” he said, “bide there till I call you.”  Then he arose and went to the spot, but the woman, though he was in full view, took no notice of him.  He stooped and touched her.  For a moment she shrank, then looked up and saw it was not the person she dreaded.  “Matilda Nagle,” whispered the minister, “we must get poor Steevie away from here.”  Then he saw that her intellect was gone; no wonder that she was the mother of an idiot boy.  “Oh, I am so glad you have come, Mr. Inglis,” she cried, softly; “won’t you try and wake Stevy, perhaps he will mind you better than me.”  The minister brushed the tears from his eyes, and strove to keep the sobs out of his voice.  “I have a friend here and will call him,” he said, “and we will carry Steevie away to the boat, and all go home together.”  So he called Coristine, and they picked the dead man up, the dead man from whose smooth, girl-like face the disguise had been torn away, and bore him painfully but tenderly over the rough fallen timber safely to the other side, the woman following.  Ben shivered, as he saw the strange procession come down the hill, but, like the Captain, he uttered neither word nor cry.  The bearers propped the dead man up against the middle thwart with the face towards the bow, and then set the woman down beside the Captain, who said:  “Come along, my dear, and we’ll see you both safely home.”  The old man’s honest face won the poor sister’s confidence, as she took her seat beside him and left her Stevy to the care