“Agnes,” returned Frederick, smiling sadly as he observed the sudden alarm visible in her father’s face at these enthusiastic words, “you know me perhaps better than others do and are prepared to believe my words and my more than unhappy story.  But there are few like you in the world.  People in general will not acquit me, and if there was only one person who doubted “—­Mr. Halliday began to look relieved—­“I would fail to give any promise of the new life you hope to see me lead, if I allowed the shadow under which I undoubtedly rest to fall in the remotest way across yours.  You and I have been friends and will continue such, but we will hold little intercourse in future, hard as I find it to say so.  Does not Mr. Halliday consider this right?  As your father he must.”

Agnes’s eyes, leaving Frederick’s for a moment, sought her father’s.  Alas! there was no mistaking their language.  Sighing deeply, she again hung her head.

“Too much care for people’s opinion,” she murmured, “and too little for what is best and noblest in us.  I do not recognise the necessity of a farewell between us any more than I recognise that anyone who saw and heard you to-day can believe in your guilt.”

“But there are so many who did not hear and see me.  Besides” (here he turned a little and pointed to the garden in his rear), “for the past week a man—­I need not state who, nor under what authority he acts—­has been in hiding under that arbour, watching my every movement, and almost counting my sighs.  Yesterday he left for a short space, but to-day he is back.  What does that argue, dear friend?  Innocence, completely recognised, does not call for such guardianship.”

The slight frame of the young girl bending so innocently toward him shuddered involuntarily at this, and her eyes, frightened and flashing, swept over the arbour before returning to his face.

“If there is a watcher there, and if such a fact proves you to be in danger of arrest for a crime you never committed, then it behooves your friends to show where they stand in this matter, and by lending their sympathy give you courage and power to meet the trials before you.”

“Not when they are young girls,” murmured Frederick, and casting a glance at Mr. Halliday, he stepped softly back.

Agnes flushed and yielded to her father’s gentle pressure.  “Good-bye, my friend,” she said, the quiver in her tones sinking deep into Frederick’s heart.  “Some day it will be good-morrow,” and her head, turned back over her shoulder, took on a beautiful radiance that fixed itself forever in the hungry heart of him who watched it disappear.  When she was quite gone, a man not the one whom Frederick had described, as lying in hiding in the arbour, but a different one, in fact, no other than our old friend the constable—­advanced around the corner of the house and presented a paper to him.

It was the warrant for his arrest on a charge of murder.