'He didn't leave a parcel for the master?'

asked Norah, wofully at a loss to cover her

retreat.

'No, miss; he left nothin', miss.'

:

'Well take in the things, Eileen, and stay a little to rest and get your dinner.'

Thank ye, miss,' answered Eileen with a curtsey, inexpressibly relieved to get away.

Norah now had no doubt at all that Eileen had not only seen that kiss but had tattled about it; else, why her guilty confusion? Burning with shame, Norah hurried up to her room to make herself miserable over it. Nevertheless, Eileen had said nothing of the kiss to anyone, for the simple reason that she hadn't seen it. The girl's confusion, as we shall see, had a very different cause from any that could have occurred to Norah.

But what if Eileen had seen and spoken about this kiss? It wasn't anything to make oneself wretched over. Yet, as every woman, and nearly every man, knows, such innocent

shames' often burn us with deeper blushes than things truly shameful, and haunt the shrinking memory, too, with a strange persistence long after more guilty things are buried out of sight. But, as our sense of shame is towards man what conscience is towards God, of course we tremble more before the more formidable tribunal. This, however, is rather heavy moralising apropos of a kiss.

The immediate effect of Norah's shame was to confine her outlook for Maurice to her own room, where she stayed most of the day, writing and re-writing over and over again a letter to him, to be sent if he didn't come, and interrupting herself every few lines to rise and go to the window. At last, in the middle of the fifth of her revised letters, she started at the sound of wheels, but felt suddenly so faint and unnerved that she could only sit still, her heart seeming to stop that she might hear the better. Next moment it beat so loudly, and her blood surged in such a rush to her brain

and in her ears, that she could hear nothing for a little time. What she did at last hear was her father's voice in the hall, and then his step on the stairs. It reached the landing, passed his own room, and stopped at her door.

Come in, father,' she said, in a voice that trembled with some indefinite foreboding. Miles entered, and his ashen grey face so startled her that she cried in a tone of terror as though she saw some nameless horror behind him, 'What is it, father?'

My dear, it sounds worse than it is; and it

will be all right in a day or two.'

6

What?' She could say no more, for a kind of choking sensation took her voice away. She knew it was about Maurice.

6

They have caught the murderers of Mr. Estcourt, and have found upon them some papers

that seem to implicate the Land League.' 'You-you mean Maurice?'

'Well, yes, my dear, but it's all—Norah !

Good God!' For she had fainted away in her chair. Shock had followed shock lately in such breathless and merciless succession that a

less terrible blow than this would have so stunned her.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CRITICAL EVIDENCE.

Viewed her own feather on the fatal dart

Which winged the shaft that quivered in her heart.-BYRON.

IF Father Mac's letter to the clergy about those black sheep of their flock, Malachi Burke and Shamus Brennan, had at once been acted upon, Mr. Estcourt's life would have been saved; but, though the clergy passed on to the police the information they had received, no steps were taken to arrest the men until after the commission of the murder. The police are as much given to undervalue 'clues' supplied by others as to overrate those of their own discovery; and they disregarded, therefore, the information conveyed to them until its accuracy seemed to be attested by a murder committed in the district infested by the men accused.