missive, and her threat of disinheriting her, should she continue recalcitrant, but she did feel that there was truth in her aunt's words when she said that she, Judith, had placed herself in a wrong position—but it was a wrong position into which she had been forced, she had not voluntarily entered it. She had, indeed, consented to become Coppinger's wife, but when she found that Coppinger had employed Jamie to give signals that might mislead a vessel to its ruin she could not go further to meet him. Although he had endeavored to clear himself in her eyes, she did not believe him. She was convinced that he was guilty, though at moments she hoped, and tried to persuade herself that he was not. Then came the matter of the diamonds. There, again, the gravest suspicion rested on him. Again he had endeavored to exculpate himself, yet she could not believe that he was innocent. Till full confidence that he was blameless in these matters was restored, an insuperable wall divided them. Never would she belong to a man who was a wrecker, who belonged to that class of criminals her father had regarded with the utmost horror.
Before she retired to bed, she picked up from under the fender the scrap of paper on which Oliver's message had been written. It had lain there unobserved where Coppinger had flung it, now, as she tidied her room, and arranged the fire-rug, she observed it. She smoothed it out, folded it, and went to her work-box to replace it where it had been before.
She raised the lid, and was about to put the note among some other papers she had there, a letter of her mother's, a piece of her father's writing, some little accounts she had kept, when she was startled to see that the packet of arsenic Mr. Menaida had given her was missing.
She turned out the contents of her work-box. It was nowhere to be found, either there, or in her drawers. Her aunt must have been prying into the box, have found and removed it, so Judith thought, and with this thought appeased her alarm. Perhaps, considering the danger of having arsenic about, Aunt Dionysia had done right in removing it. She had done wrong in doing so without speaking to Judith.
