CHAPTER XXI.

CHANGES.


Four years had come and gone since Mr. Dundas had laid his second
wife in the grave beside his first, and the county had discussed
the immorality of taking cherry-water as a calmant. For it was to
an overdose of this that the verdict at the coroner's inquest had
assigned the cause of poor madame's awful and sudden death; though why
the medicine should have been found so loaded with prussic acid as
to have caused instant death on this special night, when it had been
taken so often before with impunity, was a mystery to which there was
no solution. Not a trace of poison was to be found anywhere in the
house, and no evidence was forthcoming to show how it might have been
bought or where procured. Alick Corfield, who understood it all,
was not called as a witness, and he told no one what he knew. On the
contrary, he burdened his soul with the, to him, unpardonable crime
of falsehood that he might shield Leam from detection; for when his
father, missing the sixty-minim bottle of hydrocyanic acid, asked him
what had become of it, Alick answered, with that wonderful coolness
of virtue descending to sin for the protection of the beloved which is
sometimes seen in the ingenuous, "I broke it by accident, father, and
forgot to tell you."

As the boy had never been known to tell a falsehood in his life, he
reaped the reward of good repute, and his father, saying quietly,
"That was a bad job, my boy," laid the matter aside as a _caput