But wonders, as we all know, generally ensconce themselves in some snug theory, and die by a kind of pleasant euthanasia; and so it was with this wonder of ours.  The councillor came, as the days passed, to the conclusion that Templeton, wearied out by his long confinement, had become desperate, and had gone abroad.  As good a theory as could be got, seeing that he had not trusted himself in going near his friends; and Annie, whose grief was sharp and poignant, came also to settle down with a belief which still promised her her lover, though perhaps at a long date.  But, somehow or another, Annie could not explain why, even with all the fondness he had to the work of her hands, he should have elected to expose himself to damp feet by making the love-token slippers do the duty of the pair of good shoes he had left in the bedroom.

Even this latter wonder wore away; and months and months passed on the revolving wheel which casts months, not less than moments, into that gulf we call eternity.  The rigour of the Government prosecutions was relaxed, and timid sympathisers began to show their heads out of doors, but Richard Templeton never returned to claim either immunity or the woman of his affections.  Nor within all this time did John Menelaws enter the house of the councillor; so that Annie’s days were renounced to sadness, and her nights to reveries.  But at last comes the eventful “one day” of the greatest of all story-tellers, Time, whereon happen his startling discoveries.  Verily one day Annie had wandered disconsolately into the garden, and seated herself on the wooden form in the summer-house, where in the moonlight she had often nestled in the arms of her proscribed lover, who was now gone, it might be, for ever.  Objective thought cast her into a reverie, and the reverie brought up again the images of these objects, till her heart beat with an affection renewed through a dream.  At length she started up, and, wishing to hurry from a place which seemed filled with images at once lovable and terrible, she felt her foot caught by an impediment whereby she stumbled.  On looking down she observed some object of a reddish-brown colour; and becoming alarmed lest it might be one of the toads with which the place was sometimes invaded, she started back.  Yet curiosity forced her to a closer inspection.  She applied her hand to the object, and brought away one of those very slippers which she had made for Templeton.  All very strange; but what maybe conceived to have been her feelings when she saw, sticking up from beneath the rushes, the white skeleton of a foot which had filled that very slipper!  A terrible suspicion shot through her mind.  She flew to her father, and, hurrying him to the spot, pointed out to him the grim object, and showed him the slipper which had covered it.  Mr. Yellowlees was a shrewd man, and soon saw that, the foot being there, the rest of the body was not far away.  He saw, too, that his safety might be compromised either as having