debtedness to Lord Ellerbie, she was stricken with a sense of bewilderment that bordered on despair.

"I will go and see Mary Kirk," she said, by-and-by.

When she expressed that intention to her father, Mr. Hardwick promptly agreed with her wish, making a mental determination that, while she was in the neighbourhood of Brackenbury Towers, he would call upon her with Lord Ellerbie, and make her pay a visit to that historic place.

In the meantime, Mr. Septimus Dobbs, reclining upon his leather chair in his private office, in the midst of his papers and parchments, like a spider in the middle of his web, waiting for victims, decided, like the human spider he was, that he must. spin a connecting link between Chesterfield and London. His plans had extend

ed lately, and his web must be enlarged

accordingly.

It was not necessary that he should walk out of the town and let the coach overtake him at Hasland. They knew at the Angel he had booked a seat by the mail. It is true, he said it was for one of Lord Ellerbie's guests; but he was crooked and mysterious by nature. He sometimes even cheated himself, pretending that he was going to do one thing, and ending in quite an opposite course. It was as if that proverb of his, "Don't criminate yourself," had been ground into his constitution. "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth," was a text which he chuckled over. In some situation of legal dishonesty, he would put his left hand into his pocket, and sign a document with a grin of pretended secrecy, backing his right hand against his left at

two to one, as if they were horses running a race. Nobody knew in Chesterfield that he had a correspondent in London who conducted betting transactions for him. Nobody quite knew why they disliked him, though Oliver North, who had once, out of curiosity, been to hear him preach, said irreverently, to the person who had taken him to chapel, that the lawyer impressed the congregation so fearfully with his picture of the horrors of the lower regions because he was so much like old Nick himself that you might have fancied him suddenly developing wings and a tail, belching forth fire, seizing half a dozen of his congregation, and disappearing with them. through the window.

"Hi, there! stop!" shouted a voice in the darkness of the highway beyond Hasland, as the flashing lights of the mailcoach for London fell upon the white road.

"All right, Jack," said the guard, in a re-assuring tone to the driver, "it's our insider from Chesterfield."

The lights stood still for a minute, the horses champed their bits, the door was opened, and inside crept the human spider, to spin a treacherous thread between that complicated web in the shadow of the crooked steeple and the great mysterious city of London.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LONDON: PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.