Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/558

 that I must have nothing to do with Lewis Carlton; that if I valued my own happiness, perhaps my life, I should not.”

“Some envious fool who has penetrated our secret, and who would step between us,” interrupted Mr. Carlton in a tone of bitter scorn.

“Hear me out,” she continued. “It told me to ask you what you had done with Clarice; to ask if you dealt in poison.”

Mr. Carlton stood as one transfixed—as one confounded. “What Clarice?” he presently asked, “Who is Clarice?”

“I don’t know,” said Laura Chesney, her sobs subsiding into a wail. “Do you know any one of the name?”

“I do not know any Clarice in the world,” he answered.

“But about the poison?” shivered Laura; “what could the words mean? ‘Ask him if he deals in poison!

“I suppose they meant ‘deals in drugs, was the answer. “A medical man, in general practice, must deal in such.”

There was something in Mr. Carlton’s tone that frightened Laura worse than anything that had gone before. She started away to gaze at him. He was looking forward with a vacant stare, as if he had lost all consciousness of the present.

“Was it a pale face, Laura, with black whiskers,” he presently asked.

“I could see nothing distinctly, except that the face was ashy pale—or perhaps it only looked so in the moonlight. Why? Have you seen it?”

“I believe I have seen it twice,” returned Mr. Carlton. He spoke in a dreamy tone of self-communing, quite as if he had forgotten any one was present; and indeed it seemed that he had lost self-control just as much as Laura had lost it. “I saw it outside that room. the night of the death,” he continued, and I saw it again this minute as I was coming back to you.”

The particular information, and the associations it conjured up, did not tend to reassure Miss Laura Chesney.

“The face you saw outside the lady’s room in Palace Street?” she said, with a faint shriek. “It never could be that face,” she added, relapsing into another fit of trembling.

“What should bring that face here?”

“I know not,” cried Mr. Carlton; and it seemed that he was trembling too. “I am not sure, Laura, that it is either man or woman; I am not sure but it is a ghostly apparition.”

“Where did you see it? Where did it go?”

“I saw it in the path, but I did not see where it went. It seemed to vanish. It is either that, or—or—some base villain, some sneaking spy, who steals into houses for his own wicked purposes, and deserves the halter. What should bring him here? here on your father’s premises. Was he dodging my steps? or yours?”

“Lewis, whose was the face, that night?”

“I would give half my allotted life to know.”

“There was a suspicion that he poisoned the draught. I am sure I heard so.”

“Just as he would poison the happiness of our lives,” exclaimed Mr. Carlton, in agitation;—“as he would have poisoned your mind against me. Laura, you must choose between me and him; between his insidious falsehoods and my love.”

“Do not speak in that way,” she passionately uttered; “the whole world could not poison me against you. Oh, Lewis, my best-beloved, soon to be my husband, do not be angry with me that I repeated his words; had I kept them to brood over alone, they would only have rankled in my heart.”

“Angry with you,” he murmured, “no, no. I am not angry with you. I am angry with—with that wicked one, who would have tried to separate us. One more night and day, my love, and then we may defy him and all the world.”

Laura stole back to the house by the path she had come, the side-path leading to the kitchen. Mr. Carlton stood and watched her safely in-doors, and then departed on his way to his home. The garden, for all that could be seen of it, was perfectly free from intruders then, and Mr. Carlton could only believe it to be so.

But as he went down the road, lying so fanciful and still—still in the calm night, in its freedom at that hour from passengers, fanciful with its quaint patches of light and shade—Mr. Carlton walked as though he feared an enemy at every turn. Now he peered before him, now he glanced over his shoulder behind him, now he half turned to see what might be by his side; and once, as an old hare, lurking in the hedge, sprang out before him and scudded to the field opposite, he positively started from it with a sudden cry. Strangely uunerved that night was Mr. Carlton.

And Laura, after all, did not escape without detection. It happened subsequently to the removal of the tea from the drawing-room that Miss Chesney wanted an embroidery pattern, and went to Laura’s bed-room, to ask her for it. Laura was not there: and Jane, fancying she