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THE CRIME IN THE NIGHT.
On the evening of the day upon which old Wilson was expected back at Fornside, Ralph Ray turned in at the tailor's cottage.

Sim's distress was, if possible, even greater than before.

It seemed as if the gloomy forebodings of the villagers were actually about to be realized, and Sim's mind was really giving way.

His staring eyes, his unconscious, preoccupied manner as he tramped to and fro in his little work-room, sitting at intervals, rising again and resuming his perambulations, now gathering up his tools and now opening them out afresh, talking meantime in fitful outbursts, sometimes wholly irrelevantly and occasionally with a startling pertinency,--all this, though no more than an excess of his customary habit, seemed to denote a mind unstrung.