Under False Pretences. Sergeant Adeline

with a quiver in her sweet voice. "And Richard is not here! Where is Richard?"

      There was silence.

      "Something has happened to Richard? Some accident—some——"

      She stopped, looked at Brian's averted face, and shivered as if an icy wind had passed over her. Doctor Muir took the candle from her hand, then opened his lips to speak. But she stopped him. "Don't tell me," she said. "I am going to his mother. I shall learn it in a moment from her face. Besides—I know—I know."

      The delicate tinting had left her cheeks and lips; her eyes were distended, her limbs trembled as she moved. Doctor Muir stood aside, giving her the benefit of keen professional scrutiny as she passed; but he was satisfied. She was not a woman who would either faint or scream in an emergency. She might suffer, but she would suffer in silence rather than add by word or deed one iota to the burden of suffering that another might have to bear. Therefore, Doctor Muir let her enter the room in which the widowed mother wept, and prayed in his heart that Angela Vivian might receive the news of her bereavement in a different spirit from that shown by Mrs. Luttrell.

      The noise of shuffling feet, of muffled voices, of stifled sobs, reached the ears of the watchers in the corridor from another part of the house. Doctor Muir had sent a messenger to bid the men advance with their sad burden to a side door which opened into a sitting-room not very generally used. The housekeeper, an old and faithful servant of the family, had already prepared it, according to the doctor's orders, for the reception of the dead. The visitors hurriedly took their departure; Donald Grant's wagonette had been at the door some little time, and, as soon as he had seen poor Richard Luttrell's remains laid upon a long table in the sitting-room, he drove silently away, with Archie on the box-seat beside him, and the three girls in the seats behind, crying over the troubles of their friends.

      Doctor Muir and Brian Luttrell remained for some time in the passage outside the study door. The doctor tried several times to persuade his companion to leave his post, but Brian refused to do so.

      "I must wait; I must see my mother," he repeated, when the doctor pressed him to come away. "Oh, I know that she will not want to see me; she will never wish to look on my face again, but I must see her and remind her that—that—she has one son left—who loves her still." And then Brian's voice broke and he said no more. Doctor Muir shook his head. He did not believe that Mrs. Luttrell would be much comforted by his reminder. She had never seemed to love her second son.

      "Where is Hugo?" the doctor asked, in an undertone, when the silence had lasted some time.

      "I do not know."

      "He will be home to-night?"

      "I do not know."

      All this time no sound had reached them from the interior of the room where the two women sat together. Their voices must have been very low, their sobs subdued. Angela had not cried out as Mrs. Luttrell had done when she received the fatal news. No movement, no sign of grief was to be heard.

      Brian lifted up his grief-stricken eyes at last, and fixed them on the doctor's face.

      "Are they dead?" he muttered, strangely. "Will they never speak again?"

      Doctor Muir did not immediately reply. He had placed the candle on a wooden bracket in the wall, and its flickering beams lighted, the dark corridor so feebly that until now he had scarcely caught a glimpse of the young man's haggard looks. They frightened him a little. He himself took life so easily—fretted so little against the inevitable—that he scarcely understood the look of anguish which an hour or two of trouble had imprinted upon Brian Luttrell's face. It was the kind of sorrow which has been known to turn a man's hair from black to white in a single night.

      "I will knock at the door," said the doctor. But before he could carry out his intention, footsteps were heard, and the handle of the door was turned. Both men drew back involuntarily into the shadow as Mrs. Luttrell and Angela came forth.

      Angela had been weeping, but there were no signs of tears upon the elder woman's face. Rigid, white, and hard, it looked almost as if it were carved in stone; a mute image of misery too deep for tears. There were lines upon her brow that had never been seen there before; her lips were tightly compressed; her eyes fiercely bright. She had thrown a black shawl over her head on coming away from the drawing-room into the draughty corridors. This shawl, which she had forgotten to remove, together with the dead blackness of her dress, gave her pale face a strangely spectral appearance. Clinging to her, and yet guiding her, came Angela, with the white flower crushed and drooping from her hair. She also was ashy pale, but there was a more natural and tender look of grief to be read in her wet eyes and on her trembling lips than in the stony tranquility of Richard Luttrell's mother.

      Brian could not contain himself. He rushed forward and threw himself on the ground at his mother's feet. Mrs. Luttrell shrank back a little and clutched Angela's arm fiercely with her thin, white fingers.

      "Mother, speak to me; tell me that you—mother, only speak!"

      His voice died away in irrepressible sobs which shook him from head to foot. He dared not utter the word "forgiveness" yet. Unintentional as the harm might be that his hand had done, it was sadly irreparable, too.

      Mrs. Luttrell looked at him with scarcely a change of feature, and tried to withdraw some stray fold of her garments from his grasp. He resisted; he would not let her go. His heart was aching with his own trouble, and with the consciousness of her loss—Angela's loss—all the suffering that Richard's death would inflict upon these two women who had loved him so devotedly. He yearned for one little word of comfort and affection, which even in that terrible moment, a mother should have known so well how to give. But he lay at that mother's feet in vain.

      It was Angela who spoke first.

      "Speak to him, mother," she said, tremblingly. "See how he suffers. It was not his fault."

      The tears ran down her pale cheeks unnoticed as she spoke. It was only natural to Angela that her first words should be words of consolation to another, not of sorrow for her own great loss. But Mrs. Luttrell did not unclose her lips.

      "Ye'll not be hard upon him, madam," said the old doctor, deprecatingly. "Your own lad, and a lad that kneels to you for a gentle word, and will be heartbroken if you say him nay."

      "And is my heart not broken?" asked the mother, lifting her head and looking away into the darkness of the long corridor. "The son that I loved is dead; the boy that came to me like a little angel in the spring of my youth—they say that he is dead and cold. I am going to look at his face again. Come, Angela. Perhaps they have spoken falsely, and he is alive—not murdered, after all."

      "Murdered? Mother!"

      Brian raised himself a little and repeated the word with shuddering emphasis.

      "Murdered!" said Mrs. Luttrell, steadily, as she turned her burning eyes full upon the countenance of her younger son; as if to watch the workings of his agitated features. "If not by the laws of man, by God's laws you are guilty. You had quarrelled with him that day; and you took your revenge. I tell you, James Muir, and you, Angela Vivian, that Brian Luttrell took his brother's life by no mistake—that he is Richard's murderer——"

      "No; I swear it by the God who made me—no!" cried Brian, springing to his feet.

      But his mother had turned away.

CHAPTER V.

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THE DEAD MAN'S TESTIMONY.

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      About ten o'clock at night Hugo Luttrell was seen entering the courtyard at the back of the house, where keepers, grooms, and indoor servants were collected in a group, discussing in low tones the event of