"Don't be in a hurry, my lad," answered uncle Joe; "wickedness is sure to come to light sooner or later. Three years after this poor young woman ran away there was a drunken groom dismissed from Lord Durnsville's stable; and what must he needs do but come straight off to James Halliday, to vent his spite against his master, and perhaps to curry favour at Newhall. 'You shouldn't have gone to London to look for the young lady, Muster Halliday,' he said; 'you should have gone the other way. I know a man as drove Mr. Kingdon and your wife's sister across country to Hull with two of my lord's own horses, stopping to bait on the way. They went aboard ship at Hull, Mr. Kingdon and the young lady—a ship that was bound for foreign parts.' This is what the groom said; but it was little good knowing it now. There'd been advertisements in the papers beseeching her to come back; and everything had been done that could be done, and all to no end. A few years after this back comes Mr. Kingdon as large as life, married to some dark-faced, frizzy-haired lady, whose father owned half the Indies, according to people's talk: but he fought very shy of James Halliday; but when they did meet one day at the covert side, Jim rode up to the honourable gentleman and asked him what he had done with Susan Meynell. Those that saw the meeting say that Montagu Kingdon turned as white as a ghost when he saw Jim Halliday riding up to him on his big, raw-boned horse; but nothing came of the quarrel. Mr. Kingdon did not live many years to enjoy the money his frizzy-haired West-Indian lady brought him. He died before his brother, Lord Durnsville, and left neither chick nor child to inherit his money, nor yet the Durnsville title, which was extinct on the death of the viscount."

"And what of the poor girl?"

"Ay, poor lass, what of her? It was fourteen years after she left her home before her sister got so much as a line to say she was in the land of the living. When a letter did come at last, it was a very melancholy one. The poor creature wrote to her sister to say she was in London, alone and penniless, and, as she thought, dying."

"And the sister went to her?"

I remembered that deprecating sentence in the family Bible, written in a woman's hand.