A week had passed since the fatal birthday of Lovelace Ellsworth, and at the quiet twilight hour he lay among his pillows, a pale, breathing image of the splendid man whose life had been so cruelly blighted on his wedding morn.

It was the strangest thing the medical fraternity had ever heard of—how the young man lingered on with a bullet in his brain; but it was certain, they said, to have a fatal ending soon. The strange, speechless stupor in which he had lain for a week would soon close with death.

And meanwhile, his most faithful nurse was Dainty's mother.

The gentle woman had awakened from her drugged sleep directly after the exciting interview held in her room by Mrs. Ellsworth and her step-son, and her awakening had indeed been a most cruel one.

The news they had to tell her about Dainty was almost a death-blow.

She did not know how to credit the startling story, for she knew that her fair daughter never had a lover before coming to Ellsworth; but she did not know how to contradict the letter they showed her that seemed to be written in Dainty's own hand. She could only weep incessantly, and wonder why Heaven had dealt her so cruel a blow.

Then followed the attempted murder of Ellsworth; and rousing herself from the hopeless despair into which she was sinking, the noble woman gave all her time and attention to caring for the sufferer, trying to lose her own keen sense of trouble in care for another.

And Love owed much to her tender care; for the hired nurse proved very incompetent, and the ladies of the household gave no help, Mrs. Ellsworth continuing so ill for days as to engross the attention of Olive and Ela.

In fact, they took no further interest in Lovelace Ellsworth, now that he lay unconscious and dying, for what could be gained by kindness to him now? It was better to cling to Mrs. Ellsworth, for she would inherit all her step-son's money by his failure to marry, and perhaps they might come in for a share through her favor.

So Mrs. Chase devoted herself to the sick man, weeping, hoping, and praying for him to recover and help her to find Dainty; for in struggling back to consciousness that morning, she had heard vaguely, as in a dream, Love's assertion to his step-mother that he was already the husband of her daughter.

This very day, a week after Dainty's disappearance, she had sought an interview with the now recovered Mrs. Ellsworth, and begged her to use some of her abundant means, as Love's agent, in searching for Dainty.

"It can not be true—that story that Dainty eloped with another for she never had any lover but Mr. Ellsworth. Besides, when I was awakening from my strange sleep that morning, I heard him telling you he had married my daughter two weeks before," she said, wondering why Mrs. Ellsworth gasped and grew so deathly pale before she burst into that strange laugh, declaring that Mrs. Chase had dreamed the whole thing.

"Nothing of the kind was said by my step-son," she declared, firmly; adding, with a sneer: "Your trouble must have turned your brain, causing you to imagine such a ridiculous thing; and I hope you will not mention it to any one else, for Lovelace Ellsworth was the soul of honor, I assure you, and the last person in the world to lead an innocent young girl into anything so disgraceful as a secret marriage."

"I know that he was very noble," faltered the poor little woman, "and I must indeed have dreamed it if you deny that I heard such a statement. Yet the dream was as vivid as a reality."

"Dreams often are, and this was only another instance," replied the haughty woman, coldly, adding: "I see no use trying to find Dainty. She went away of her own free will, and she will not communicate her whereabouts till she chooses. With that you must rest content. As for my part, I am free to confess that I am so indignant at her treachery to Love that I don't care if I never see her face again!"

Mrs. Chase shrank sensitively from the angry flash of her sister-in-law's black eyes, and returned meekly to Love's bedside to watch the slowly sinking life and wipe the moisture from the pale brow that Dainty had so loved to kiss, and her tortured heart prayed hourly:

"Oh, God, give back his life! Raise him up from this bed of illness, that he may unravel the web of mystery that entangles the fate of my lost darling!"

Mrs. Ellsworth was terribly frightened, for Sheila Kelly had promptly told her of Dainty's declaration that she was already married to Love, and her offer that Love would make her rich if she would set her free.

If the proud woman had felt the least pity for Dainty, it all died now in the dread lest she should escape and rob her of the rich inheritance that would be hers if Love died unmarried. She said to herself resolutely that there was no help for it now. Dainty's life must be sacrificed to the terrible exigencies of her position.

Not that Mrs. Ellsworth would have taken the girl's life with her own white hands, or even deputed another to do so. Oh, no, no! Of course she would not be so wicked, she told herself complacently.

But to imprison the poor girl on bread and water in a sunless dungeon, and goad her to despair till she died of persecution, or even took her own life—oh, that was quite another thing! thought the heartless woman, stifling the voice of conscience in her determination to succeed in her wicked aims.

With Sheila Kelly, as with Mrs. Chase, the mistress of Ellsworth laughed to scorn the assertion of Dainty that she was Love Ellsworth's wife.

"She was only trying to work on your feelings—do not pay any attention to her falsehoods," she said; and Sheila, who had half-way determined to make capital some way out of her important secret, stupidly yielded the point, and again became the tool of her wily mistress.

When Dainty had been imprisoned a week, Sheila visited her again, and, as a result, hurried to her mistress with a pale, scared face, whispering:

"I have earned the promised reward, madame. The girl is out of the way!"

"Dead!" whispered the woman, with an uncontrollable shudder.

"Yes, cowld and dead for hours, pore craythur!" answered the woman, displaying at last a touch of natural feeling in something like remorse over her hellish work.

"How?" demanded her mistress, hoarsely.

"By the poison, madame. It was all black on her lips, and spilt on the bed-clothes, and the vial broken on the floor; but she got enough to kill her stone dead."

"That is well. If she chose to die by suicide, we are not accountable," she said, heartlessly, though her frame shook as with an ague chill.

No amount of sophistry could make her believe herself guiltless of this terrible deed.

"Will you come and look at the corp', madame? I want you to be satisfied I'm telling the truth," continued the Irish woman, eagerly; and after a moment of hesitation, Mrs. Ellsworth decided to go.

It was best to make sure of her cruel work.

In the twilight gloom they stole away, and threaded the dark, noisome corridors of the ruined wing down to the underground passages, till they reached the dark cell where poor Dainty's life had ebbed away in untended illness and fever, till, crazed and delirious, she had ended all with the tempting draught that promised oblivion of her sorrows in welcome death.

It was a sight to make the angels weep with pity when Sheila flashed her light in the gloomy place, and revealed to Mrs. Ellsworth's shrinking eyes the pale, still form of the girl she had hated and wronged, lying on the squalid couch, with her golden tresses veiling her wasted form and framing the fair, dead face like sunshine; the blue eyes closed on the world that had been so cruel to her; the pale lips stained with the dark liquid she had drained in the madness of her desperation.

On the chair lay the broken remains of the bread she had been too ill to swallow; but the bottles of water were quite empty, and perhaps they could guess how she had drained them and wept for more in the terrible feverish thirst of her last hours; but they spoke no word to each other of this, only gazed and gazed with a sort of conscience-stricken awe on the dead girl, until at last Mrs. Ellsworth stooped and placed her hand on the white breast.

"Yes, she is gone, poor girl! Her heart is cold and still, her form seems quite rigid; she must have been dead quite a long while," she muttered, in a tone of relief.

In reality, it was but a few hours ago that Dainty had swallowed the laudanum while just sinking into the stupor of a malignant fever; but to all intents and purposes, in the garish light, she looked like a corpse of ten hours' duration.

And now came an important question—how to dispose of the fair, dead girl; for it would never do to leave her here, lest the body be discovered in future, and the crime traced to the door of those who were responsible for her death.

Sheila Kelly had a plan, and she quickly proposed it.

"Yer want iverybody to know she's dead, because if Mr. Ellsworth gets well, he'll be searching for her till kingdom come, unless he knows the truth."

"Yes, you are right; although there is not one chance in a hundred of his recovery. He just lies with closed lips and eyes like a breathing corpse," said Mrs. Ellsworth, impatiently.

"I was a-thinkin' this," said Sheila. "It's a dark night, and there'll be no moon till midnight. I can carry her body in me arrums down to the road, and lay her under the tree by the creek, with the bottle of laudanum in her hand, and a little note, if ye choose to write it, a-sayin' she is deserted by her lover, who refused to make her an honest wife, so she chooses ter die. Then the coroner's 'quest will find the poison in her stomach, and all is over, and no suspicion of our part in her taking off."

"Capital, Sheila!" cried her mistress, approvingly, though she added: "I hate the sensation that will follow the finding of the body; but it is best, as you say, to let the world know she is dead; then, should Lovelace survive, he can not doubt he is a widower, if he was ever married. So you may carry out your plan, Sheila, and come to me at once for your pay."



CHAPTER XXV.

AMONG STRANGERS.

The dark, calm, dewy night closed down presently, and Sheila Kelly promptly finished her wicked work.

The reward was immediately paid into her hands, and she departed in haste from Ellsworth to spend it in riotous living.

The night was warm and sultry, and few people strayed abroad; so out in the road, on the grassy bank by a little purling creek, there lay for hours the motionless form of a seemingly dead girl, by her side a bottle of laudanum, and a pathetic little note detailing the reasons for her suicide.

For awhile all was very still. The bending branches of the trees stirred, and fanned the still, white face, the dew kissed it; the light, airy wings of the summer insects brushed it in flying; the winds caressed it with the sweet odors of clover and daisies, and the waters murmured by with a soothing song, all alike unheeded by the beautiful, silent sleeper.

"Softly! She is lying with her lips apart; Softly! She is dying of a broken heart!

"Whisper! She is going to her final rest; Whisper! Life is growing dim within her breast!"

Suddenly the sultry darkness was broken by a flash of lightning, followed by a low rumble of thunder. Swift rain-drops flashed down through the leaves upon that still, white face, and a summer storm broke in startling fury on the heated earth, drenching the motionless form with a steady downpour of water.

The wind howled through the trees, breaking and twisting branches, tossing leaves about like feathers, and swelling the little creek to a brawling stream.

All the while the blue sheets of lightning lighted up the sky with splendor, and gleamed through the tossing tree-branches down on the fair, quiet face seemingly locked in death's awful repose. For half an hour the war of the elements raged, then ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the last faint gleam of lightning showed a startling change.

The lips of Dainty Chase were parted in long, gasping breaths; the blue eyes were dilated in a blank and straining gaze. She rose slowly, staggeringly, to her feet, and as the black clouds parted overhead, and the full moon glimmered through, flooding the wet earth with splendor, as though diamonds strewed every blade of grass, she stepped, slowly, falteringly, down to the road, dragging her drenched body along aimlessly toward the open country that lay beyond.

It would seem as if a miracle had been wrought, giving back life to the dead.

But Dainty's draught of laudanum had been too small to induce death, and the wholesome bath of rain and the electric elements abroad in the air had combined to rouse her from a stupor that might otherwise have terminated fatally. Life—feeble, and faltering, yet still life—stole back along her veins to her numb heart, and set it beating again.

With a strength almost incredible after the terrible week she had endured, she wandered slowly down the road, obeying blind impulse, not reason; for her mind was yet clouded by delirium, and she had as yet no realization of who she was or where she was.

Her mind was a pitiful blank, and her lips babbled vacant nothings as she dragged herself on and on, further and further away from Ellsworth, and into the lonely woods, unconsciously leaving the beaten track, and pursuing a lonely bridle path that led her into the very heart of the forest.

Now and then, when her strength failed, she would drop down and rest; then start up and wander on again, aimlessly and drearily, until she seemed to be lost in a maze of thick woodland that looked like the haunts of savage creatures and crawling serpents, whose dens were fitly chosen among these jagged gray rocks.

"And when on the earth she sank to sleep, If slumber her eyelids knew, She lay where the deadly vine doth weep Its venomous tear, and nightly steep The flesh in blistering dew, And near her the she-wolf stirred the brake, And the copper snake breathed in her ear."

She came staggering out at last from a great thicket of ferns and found herself near a brawling mountain stream—one of those pellucid trout streams dear to the disciples of gentle Isaak Walton. On its green, sloping banks she sank down to rest, lulled by the low murmur of the waters, and presently the gray shadows of dawn were pierced by the sun's bright rays lighting the solitary wilderness with glory.

Higher and higher mounted the sun, and all the woodland dwellers started abroad, while the mists of the night fled at the warmth of the advancing day; but wearily, wearily, slumbered the exhausted girl, crouching on the grass, with her pallid cheek in the hollow of her little hand, her hair a tangle of glory glinting in the sun, as it shone through the branches of the trees.

Heavily, wearily, she slept on as one too exhausted ever to wake again, and presently the deep forest stillness was broken by the dip of oars in the murmuring stream, while a man's voice cried, eagerly:

"Another speckled beauty for our string, Peters! Ye gods, what a royal breakfast we shall have this morning! Is your wife a good cook, say? For it would be a thousand pities to have these spoiled!"

The voice had the shrill twang of the commercial traveler, the daring explorer who penetrates the depths of the forests as well as the heart of the cities, and the answer came in the distinct patois of the West Virginian backwoodsman:

"Stranger, thar mought be better cooks than my Sairy Ann whar you hail from up yon in New Yorrok; but, I swow, thar hain't another saw-mill in West Virginny as can ekal the cookin' in my camp! Wait till Sairy Ann br'ils these mountain trout and slaps 'em on to a pone of sweet corn bread. See?"

"Yes, I see—in imagination—and my mouth waters! Let us go back to the mill at once, Peters, and realize our anticipations. Hal-loo! what is that—over on that bank, man?"

"Gee-whillikins! what, indeed?" roared the saw-mill man, rowing rapidly to the bank and springing out so quickly as to almost upset his companion into the pellucid stream.

Stooping over the sleeping form, the rough backwoodsman scrutinized Dainty with amazement, ending by shaking her vigorously, as he exclaimed, in wonder:

"Wake up, honey; wake up, and tell us whar in thunder you come from, a-sleepin' here like the dead, your clothes all wet and drabbled, and your little feet bare and torn and bloody with the rocks and briars! Why, 'tis a sight to make that soft Sairy Ann cry her eyes out! What's your name, chile, and whar'd you cum from anyway?" as the blue eyes flared wide open and Dainty stared at his kindly, gray-bearded face with a pitiful, unrealizing moan.

The commercial traveler fastened the boat to a tree and came on the bank, too, full of curiosity; but all their efforts failed to elicit anything intelligible from the sick girl, and at length they came to the very intelligent conclusion that she must be some invalid strayed away from home, and that the only thing to do under the circumstances was to take her back to the saw-mill with them and await developments.

They did so, and thus our forlorn heroine found shelter in a rude shanty deep in the forest, among a few sturdy toilers who were camping here for the summer, a half score of rough but kindly men, the husband and sons of a good soul, Sarah Ann Peters, who did all the household work for the crowd, and accepted with open arms and heart this new claimant on her sympathy.



CHAPTER XXVI.

THE MOTHER'S WOE.

The experienced eyes of this motherly woman soon saw that the lovely young stranger was ill of fever, and in a very serious condition; but having successfully raised a family of nine stalwart sons by her own skill and without aid from the doctors, she "was not feazed," as her husband quaintly said, "by the case." She simply put Dainty to bed, and while she was getting breakfast, brewed a decoction of herbs, which she said would do her a world of good.

Meanwhile, she gladdened the drummer's heart by a delicious breakfast of broiled mountain trout, country ham, fresh butter, sweet corn pone, and strong coffee with thick cream, and he presently went on his way rejoicing after his night in the camp, and expressing the hope that the lovely stranger would soon be well again and restored to her friends.

But those cordial hopes did not seem likely of fulfilment soon, for Dainty continued quite ill for weeks in the lonely logging camp; and, to the surprise of the loggers, none of her friends came in search of her, and no inquiry was made for a missing sick girl.

In the stupor of her fever, she continued for weeks to be unconscious of her surroundings, and the busy, stolid family, who cared for her, did not think it their business to seek out her friends. They simply accepted the duty of caring for her as Heaven-sent, and left the rest to a gracious Providence.

As for Mrs. Ellsworth, she was struck with consternation when no dead body was found the next morning where Sheila had placed it beneath the tree; but on viewing the swollen, brawling stream, she concluded that it must have swept Dainty's corpse away during the storm, and she lived in daily expectation of its discovery, and the great sensation it would create in the neighborhood.

Thus the summer days passed away, bringing the bright cool September weather, and still the waters did not give up their beautiful dead; but no search was made for Dainty, though Lovelace Ellsworth had astonished his doctors and disappointed his step-mother by clinging to life in spite of his grievous hurt, and was now on the road to recovery, so that the trial of Vernon Ashley for his attempted murder soon took place, and the prisoner received sentence of a term of years in the penitentiary.

Olive and Ela were now domesticated at Ellsworth as the acknowledged heiresses of their aunt, who, by the failure of her step-son to marry on his twenty-sixth birthday, now claimed to be the mistress of his wealth, and took credit to herself for her charitable spirit in caring for the unhappy invalid, who was now fast regaining health and strength.

As for Mrs. Chase, she had been virtually driven from Ellsworth by the caprices of the two proud, heartless girls who had received so much kindness at her hands in the days when they were poor school-teachers in Richmond.

Olive and Ela, who had so vigorously persecuted Dainty, with the able assistance of their aunt, rejoiced without stint when they learned that their machinations had driven their envied cousin to a premature death; and they regretted that the young girl's body had been swept away by the high waters, longing for her death to be made public, that they might exult in secret over the poor mother's woe.

So bitterly had they hated and envied Dainty that it extended to her gentle mother, and even the sight of her pale, sorrowful face, as she moved unobtrusively about the place, giving the most motherly care to Love in his affliction, goaded them to futile rage, until in the malice of their natures they decided that she should no longer remain at Ellsworth.

To further their purpose, they made secret complaints to their aunt that Mrs. Chase was maligning them behind their backs to the servants, and ridiculing them as "beggars on horseback," who had forgotten their former poverty and toil in the sudden accession of riches.

No doubt Mrs. Ellsworth was glad of a pretext for ridding herself of one whose sweet, sad face must have been a constant silent reproach to her for driving her loved daughter to death; for she hastened to assail the astonished creature with reproaches, dismissing her denials with incredulous scorn, and declaring that under the circumstances the roof of Ellsworth could no longer be her shelter.

"I will go this evening, madame," her sister-in-law answered with gentle pride, her pale face flushing as she added: "I should not have trespassed so long on your hospitality but I thought I was making myself useful by nursing Mr. Ellsworth."

"There is a trained nurse," Mrs. Ellsworth said, loftily.

"Yes; but she has been both careless and incompetent."

"I shall dismiss her to-morrow. He will only need his man Franklin now," Mrs. Ellsworth returned; and they parted with cold bows on either side, the heartless woman to return to her nieces with the news of Mrs. Chase's banishment, and the latter to take a sorrowful leave of Lovelace Ellsworth, and pack her trunk and Dainty's for immediate departure.

The hot tears that fell on each dainty piece of clothing as she packed it away only the angels knew, for the mother's heart was breaking over the loss of her child.

She could not bring herself to believe that Dainty had fled with another man, for having accidentally made the acquaintance of the old black mammy, she had been favored with a thrilling narration of all that her daughter had suffered from the persecution of ghosts and the attempt at kidnapping.

It was a terrible shock to the mother's heart, and after that she could not believe that Dainty had eloped. She was sure that the girl had been stolen away, and perhaps murdered.

Oh, the curse of poverty! How it goaded the poor mother's heart!

Too poor to spend a penny in search of the beloved only child who had met such a mysterious fate, alone in the world, and almost friendless, she journeyed sorrowfully back to Richmond, only to find that a fire on the previous night had destroyed the cottage where her furniture was stored, and that she had no shelter for her head and no work for her hands. Was it any wonder her poor brain went wild?



CHAPTER XXVII.

IT SEEMED LIKE SOME BEAUTIFUL DREAM WHEN SHE ENTERED THE GATES IN THE CHILLY SUNSET OF A WINDY OCTOBER DAY.

"Thank Heaven! the crisis, The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last— The fever called 'Living' Is conquered at last!"

The day came, late in September, when the autumn leaves were turning red and gold, that Dainty Chase opened wide her startled blue eyes upon the world again.

She had closed them consciously over six weeks ago in the gloomy dungeon beneath Ellsworth Castle, when, pressing to her desperate lips the bitter draught of death, she had bidden the cruel world farewell.

In the long weeks of illness and delirium that followed, many things had come and gone without her knowledge; and now, when consciousness returned again; there was a dazed look in the beautiful pansy-blue eyes that stared wide and dark out of her wan and wasted face, with the blue veins wandering plainly beneath the transparent skin.

"Where am I?" she gasped, faintly, putting her weak little hands up to her head, and wondering in a bewildered way what made her hair feel so thin and short and curly, like that of a year-old infant.

The fact was, that Sairy Ann Peters had been compelled to cut off all of Dainty's golden tresses to stay the progress of the devastating fever, and she had anticipated with womanly grief the sadness of the hour when the girl should realize her cruel loss.

She came quickly to the bedside and took the little trembling hands in her toil-hardened but motherly ones, and said, tenderly:

"So you've come to yourself at last, dearie, and beginning to worrit the fust thing because all your beautiful long curly hair is cut off! But never mind, chile; it will grow again as pretty as ever all over in shiny leetle rings like a babby's; and I was jest obleeged to crop it off to save your sweet life, you had the fever so miserable bad."

"Where am I?" Dainty repeated, in amazement, her gaze lingering confidently on the homely but gentle face before her and receiving in return the smiling reply:

"Where you are is soon told, honey; you're in a logging-camp, where my husband and nine grown sons are running a saw-mill till the first of October, way up in the mountings, where we hain't seen but two faces besides our own sence we come here the first day of April. It's 'bout six weeks sence my husband found you at day-break, lying sick and raving on the bank of the trout stream where he was fishing for our breakfast, and brought you home with him. I gin you my best bed, and been nussin' you all this while like you was my own darter, which I never had one, but al'ays hankered arter one; but the good Lord He sent me sons every time till I've nine on 'em; and I'm past fifty, and no more hopes of a darter now, though there'll be darters-in-law a-plenty, no doubt, when my boys begin to mate. Well, now you know all you ast me about, chile, and I'm jest as cur'us over you. What mought your name be, and wherever did you drap from, anyway?"

"I—I don't know," Dainty faltered, weakly, with a bewildered air.

"Sho! you don't know? Ah, well! I see how 'tis. Your memory ain't come back clear yet; and no wonder, after sech a hard sickness as you've come through! Never mind, dearie, it'll all come back arter awhile. Are you hungry now?"

"Thirsty!" faltered the girl; and like a flash the past came back to her, conjured up by that single word, presenting to her mind the dark, noisome cell where she had suffered so terribly with the cruel, burning fever and the terrible thirst, until longing for death, she had pressed the bitter poison to her parched lips.

Then all was blank till now, and she wondered feebly how she had escaped death, and still more, how she had been released from her terrible captivity, and been brought here to this remote mountain camp.

The woman gave her a draught of clear, cold, sparkling water that cleared her faculties immensely, and closing her heavy-lidded eyes again, she began to recall the past from the dim shades of memory.

It was a bitter task, and the hot tears flashed beneath her lashes as she remembered that Sheila Kelly had told her that Love, her husband, was wounded and dying.

The next morning she said wistfully to the kind woman:

"I am beginning to remember things now. Do you know a place called Ellsworth?"

"I've heerd tell of it; it's quite seven miles from here."

"Seven miles! Then how on earth did I ever get to this place?" wondered Dainty, but she only said, reticently:

"A lady named Chase is there, and I am her daughter. I was very ill, and I can not remember how I came to be out in the woods; but I would like for you to send word to my mother."

"I will see about it," replied Mrs. Peters; and after consulting her family, she reported that all were too busy to go to Ellsworth now, but they intended to break up camp the first of October, to return to their winter home at the station, and if she could be patient till then, she should have a bed in the wagon, and they could easily leave her at Ellsworth on their way past.

With this she was forced to be content, having no claim on her simple entertainers, save that of humanity; but the week, after all, slipped away quite fast in the delicious languor of returning health; and one day the Peters family loaded up three long wagons with their household goods, and set forth for home, having made Dainty and the mother quite comfortable on a mattress for the long journey over the worst stretch of rocky mountain road known in that section of a very rough country.

It seemed like some beautiful dream at last, when, after kindly farewells from her homely benefactors, she stood at the gates of Ellsworth in the chilly sunset of a windy October day, walking slowly and weakly along the graveled paths, past fading summer flowers and flaunting autumn blooms, on her way to the great house, her heart leaping with joy at the thought of her mother's kiss of welcome, and sinking with pain in the fear that she should find her darling dead and buried, according to Sheila's story.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

MORE BITTER THAN DEATH.

"No—there's nothing left us now But to mourn the past; Vain was every ardent vow— Never yet did Heaven allow Love so warm, so wild to last. Not even hope could now deceive me, Life itself looks dark and cold; Oh, thou never more canst give me One dear smile like those of old!"

Dainty dragged her trembling limbs as fast as her strength would permit toward the great house, lifting her large blue eyes eagerly up to the windows in search of some familiar face, though hope was very weak in her trembling heart.

It was two long, weary months since the first day of August, and what might not have happened in that time?

If Sheila Kelly had told her the truth, her young husband must be dead and buried long ago, and the only friend left to her in the wide, cruel world would be her mother, if indeed that dear mother lived, for what more likely than that she had died of heart-break at her daughter's mysterious disappearance?

Dainty, who knew so well her mother's devotion, feared that such a calamity was but too possible.

But she realized that even if her mother lived she was very unlikely to be found at Ellsworth now. Her bitter enemies would have driven her away long ago.

Still a subtle yearning drew her to the home of her beloved, though, as she drew near to the scene of her hopes or fears, her keen emotion almost overwhelmed her, driving the faint color back from her wan cheeks to her weak heart, and making her tremble so that she could scarcely advance one foot beyond the other.

How changed and lonely everything seemed since she had gone away? She did not even meet one of the servants as she hurried on, wrapping closely about her shivering form a thin cashmere scarf that kind Sairy Ann Peters had pressed on her to protect her, in her light summer dress, from the cold autumn winds. Thus panting, trembling, starting, and alternately hoping and despairing, she came close enough at last to gaze at the upper windows of the handsome suite of apartments that belonged to Lovelace Ellsworth.

She paused with a suppressed sob of excitement, and swept her glance rapidly from window to window.

Suddenly, with a cry of ecstatic joy, the girl sank to her knees with clasped, upraised hands.

"God in Heaven, I thank Thee!"

On her pallid, hopeless face had come such a light of joy and gratitude and boundless surprise as can only shine after long grief and pain when the grave seems to give up its dead and our beloved live again.

Her wistful, yearning eyes had been granted the most joyful sight that Heaven could have given—the sight of Lovelace Ellsworth sitting at the open window of his room, gazing with a strange, intent look at the setting sun as it sank below the mountain-tops and left the world in shadow.

"God in Heaven, I thank Thee! He lives; my beloved one, we shall be restored to each other!" repeated the girl in an ecstacy of gladness; and her dark-blue eyes clung rapturously to the handsome face, wondering at its pallor and strange, intent look.

"Dear Love, how pale and thin and sad he looks! He has been ill, perhaps, or it is grief for me that has changed him so! It is strange that he never found me when I was such a short distance away; but there are many mysteries to be unraveled yet," she murmured, rising to her feet, and going in haste to a side entrance, where she could easily gain the upper portion of the house without being detected.

As she mounted the stairs, she was thinking so gladly of the joyful reunion with Love, that she did not observe, until they were face to face, a lady coming out of his room. It was Mrs. Ellsworth; and as she met the pale, trembling girl gliding like a shadow in the semi-darkness of the corridor, a long, loud, wailing cry burst from her startled lips, and making an effort to fly from what she took for a veritable ghost, she tripped, and fell prostrate to the floor.

Dainty saw her cruel aunt distinctly, heard the startled cry and the fall; but she never looked back, but ran eagerly to her darling's room.

She tore open the door, and rushed over the threshold, across the room, with outstretched arms.

"Oh, my love, my darling!"

Her young husband was sitting at the window in an easy-chair, with a velvet dressing-gown wrapped about him, and at the sound of her entrance, he turned his face around, and looked at the intruder blankly.

Blankly!—that was the only word that described it.

If Dainty had been the greatest stranger in the world, her young husband could not have turned upon her lovely, agitated face a more calm, unrecognizing stare.

For a moment she stopped, and regarded him pitifully, sobbing:

"Oh, Love! am I so changed you do not know your own little Dainty, your wife? Oh, look at me closely! I have been ill, and lost my beauty for a little while. They had to cut my hair, but, dearest, it will soon grow again as pretty as ever!"

She moved closer, and timidly clasped her arms about his neck.

"Oh, my darling! do not look at me as if I were a stranger! Oh, do not! That cold, stony stare almost breaks my heart! Oh, Love! it is your own little Dainty! I was stolen away from you, and oh! I have passed through such a terrible experience! You have been ill, too, have you not, my dearest one? Oh, how thin and pale you are, but just as handsome as ever!" and she clasped him close in a warm embrace, and showered fond, wifely kisses on his cold, unresponsive lips.

The door opened suddenly, and an intelligent-looking mulatto man came in very softly, as if into a sick room.

Dainty knew him at once as Love's valued personal attendant Franklin.

Her arms dropped from Love's neck, and she blushed as he exclaimed:

"So it's really you, Miss Chase?"

"Why, Franklin, you knew me at once, but your master looks on me as a stranger!" she answered, in surprise that grew boundless as the man returned, sadly:

"Alas! Miss Chase, you and all the world must ever remain strangers to my poor master now!"

The mulatto was a clever, well-educated person, and his words, strange as they sounded, carried the ring of truth.

"What can you mean?" she faltered.

"Miss Chase, where have you been? Have you heard nothing of Mr. Ellsworth's sad condition?" he asked, respectfully.

Still keeping her arm around Love's neck, the young girl answered, gently:

"I was kidnapped the night before my wedding, Franklin, and the next day I was told Mr. Ellsworth had been shot and was dying. Then I was taken very ill, and knew nothing more till I returned here to-day, when I was overjoyed to learn that he was still alive!"

The man looked at her with genuine sadness.

"Ah, Miss Chase! I do not know whether you should be glad or not. Is not this more cruel than death?"

"I do not understand," she faltered, uncomprehendingly; and he answered, with intense sympathy:

"You have spoken to him, and he does not know you—you, the dearest creature on earth to him, Miss Chase! Neither does he recognize any one else, nor remember anything. There is a bullet in his head that the doctors can not extricate, and it has destroyed his mental faculties completely. His health is good, but he has forgotten the past, and lost even the power of speech. He will never be anything, they say, but a harmless idiot."

She cried out with a terrible anger that it was not true, that she could not believe it; he was trying to deceive her and break her heart.

He was usually a quiet, stolid man, but the tears came to his eyes as she knelt on the floor and wound her arms about Love in passionate embraces, and, with tears that might have moved a heart made of stone, called on him to pity her and speak to her, his love, his Dainty, his true wife, whose heart was breaking for one tender word from his dear lips!



CHAPTER XXIX.

AS WE KISS THE DEAD.

Alas! nor words, nor tears, nor embraces, nor reproaches could move Love Ellsworth from his statue-like repose.

He suffered Dainty's caresses passively, but he did not return them, and his large, beautiful dark eyes dwelt on her face with the gentle calm of an infant whose intellect is not yet awakened.

"You see how it is, Miss Chase, and God knows how sorry I am to see my dear master so," Franklin said, sorrowfully, as she desisted at last, and gazed in silent anguish at the mental wreck in the chair.

A new thought came to her, and she exclaimed:

"Where is my mother?"

"She returned to Richmond almost a month ago, Miss Chase."

"Why did she not remain and nurse poor Love?" she groaned.

Franklin hesitated a moment, then returned in a respectful undertone:

"I can not say for a certainty, miss, but it is whispered among the servants that Mrs. Ellsworth sent her away because the young ladies wished it."

"The young ladies?" inquiringly.

"Miss Peyton and Miss Craye, your cousins. Mrs. Ellsworth has adopted them as her joint heiresses since she came into the fortune that my master lost by his failure to marry on his twenty-sixth birthday."

He gave a great start of surprise when the lovely, sad-eyed girl answered quickly:

"He did not lose it, for in the fear of some such treachery as afterward really happened, your master persuaded me to consent to a secret marriage in the middle of July, so that I have really been his wife going on three months."

"It is false!" cried an angry voice; and there in the door-way towered the tall form of Mrs. Ellsworth, pale to the very lips, but with an ominous flash in her dark eyes.

She had recovered from the faintness that had seized her at first sight of the supposed ghost, on being assured by a servant that she had seen Miss Chase in the flesh entering the room of Mr. Ellsworth. As soon as she could command her shaken nerves, she followed Dainty just in time to hear her avowal of her marriage to Love in July.

"It is false!" she cried, furiously; but Dainty faced her bravely, clasping Love's cold, irresponsive hand in her own, exclaiming tenderly:

"He is my husband!"

"Can you prove it?" sneeringly.

Dainty was very pale, and trembling like a wind-blown leaf, but she summoned courage to reply:

"We were married the middle of July at that little church in the woods where we attended a festival one night. It was in the twilight when we were returning from a long drive into the country."

"Ah! there were witnesses, of course?" anxiously.

"No one was present but the minister who united us," Dainty answered.

"His name?"

"I do not remember it."

"Indeed! that is strange. But perhaps you can remember whether there was a license, without which such a marriage would not be legal?" continued Mrs. Ellsworth, still scornfully incredulous.

Dainty answered, dauntlessly:

"Yes, there was a license. Love went to the county seat to procure it just previous to the marriage."

They gazed into each other's eyes, and Mrs. Ellsworth drew a long, shivering breath as she exclaimed, menacingly:

"This sounds very fine, but you can not prove one word of it—not one! It is a plot to wrest a fortune from me, but it will not succeed. It was your falsity in forsaking Love at his wedding-hour that caused all his trouble, and the sight of you is hateful to me. You must leave here at once, and return to your mother at your old home in Richmond, for the roof of Ellsworth shall not shelter you an hour!"

"Madame, after all my wrongs at your hands—" began Dainty, reproachfully; but she was cruelly interrupted:

"Assertion is not proof! Until you can bring proof of all your charges, I decline to admit them. Again, Lovelace Ellsworth is now a pauper dependent on my bounty. Raise but your voice to assert a wife's claim on him, and out he goes to become the wretched inmate of an idiot asylum. On your silence as to this trumped-up charge of a secret marriage, and also of wrongs pretended to be done by my hands, depends the comfort of Lovelace Ellsworth. Now say whether you love yourself better than you do him!"

It was a crucial test; but the girl did not hesitate.

She pressed her lips to Love's pale brow solemnly, as we kiss the dead, murmuring:

"I would sacrifice my very life to purchase any good for him!"

The man Franklin gazed on in keen sympathy for the girl and bitter disdain of the cruel woman, but he did not dare to utter a word lest he should make matters worse.

Mrs. Ellsworth's eyes flashed triumphantly at her easy victory over the broken-hearted girl.

"Very well. You have made a wise decision. You would only come to bitter grief by opposing me," she asserted, loftily; and added: "Now you must go. Here is ten dollars; take it, and go back on the first train to your mother in Richmond."

The girl clung to her husband, sobbing:

"Oh, let me stay and be his slave! I love him so I can not leave him!"

Franklin dared not open his lips, but his blood boiled at the cruel scene that followed, when Mrs. Ellsworth tore the weeping wife from her husband with resolute hands and harsh, cruel words, thrusting her outside the door as she cried:

"Go, now—leave the house at once, or I will send him instantly to an idiot asylum! What! you will not take my money? High airs for a pauper upon my word!"

She slammed the door, shutting the wretched young wife out into the hall, and turned fiercely upon Franklin.

"As you have been a witness to this scene," she cried, "I must also command your silence. Will money purchase it?"

"No, madame," he replied, with secret indignation.

"Then love for your master must be the motive," she cried, with a fierce stamp of the foot. "Do you want me to send him to an idiot asylum, where he can no longer have your faithful care?"

"No, madame, no!" the middle-aged servant replied, trembling with emotion.

"Then you will hold your tongue upon what has just occurred in this room? Do you promise?" she cried, harshly.

"I promise," replied Franklin, sadly.

"Very well. See that you do not violate it on pain of serious results to your master. I am tired of the charge of him anyhow; for who knows how soon his simple idiocy may turn to dangerous insanity? So the least provocation from you would cause me to send him to a pauper asylum for idiots!" she cried, warningly, as she hurried from the room to make sure that none of the officious servants should dare to harbor her persecuted victim.

Dainty had already dragged herself out of the house, passing an open door where Olive and Ela looked out with derisive laughter at her blighted appearance, with the golden curls all shorn away, and the pale face stained with tears, while her faded summer gown and the old-fashioned scarf drawn about her shivering form did not conduce to the elegance of her appearance.

"Ha! ha! she looks like a beggar!" sneered Olive, adding: "Let us follow, and see where she goes for shelter. Of course, she will have shocking tales to tell on us if she can get any one to listen. I should like to prevent her if I could."

"Nothing will shut her mouth but death!" returned Ela, significantly, as, unnoticed by any one, they stole out to track the despairing girl on her wretched exile.

The deep gloom of twilight had now fallen, and Dainty stood irresolute where to go, clinging forlornly to the gate, her wistful, white face turned back to Love's window, her tender heart wrung by the torture of leaving him forever.

"Oh! who could have dreamed of such a strange and cruel fate for my darling? It is indeed worse than death!" she sighed, miserably, thinking how cruel Mrs. Ellsworth had been to drive her away so heartlessly, when she had prayed to her humbly on her knees to let her remain as an humble servant and nurse him.

It seemed like the cruelest irony of fate that she, Love Ellsworth's wife, the real mistress of Ellsworth, should be driven in scorn from its gates, penniless, hopeless, and without a friend, her lips sealed to the truth of her wifehood, lest by speaking she should consign her beloved husband to a more cruel doom than he was already enduring.

Mrs. Ellsworth had carried things with a high hand; but she had been reasonably sure of her position, having investigated Love's story of a secret marriage, and satisfied herself that it would be well-nigh impossible to prove it.

Owing to Love's desire for secrecy, there was no record of the license on the books of the clerk of county court who had issued it. The clerk himself, a feeble, aged man, had died suddenly two months ago—the day previous to Lovelace Ellsworth's birthday.

The minister of the little church where the ceremony had been performed had also died a month previous of a malignant fever contracted in visiting a squalid settlement of shiftless sand diggers.

A terrible fatality seemed to attend poor Dainty; for in all probability these two dead men were the only persons who held the secret of her marriage, and dead men tell no tales.

As the worse than widowed bride clung to the gate, taking that farewell look at her husband's window, she suddenly remembered that she had one true though humble friend in the neighborhood—poor old black mammy.

"I will go to her cabin and stay to-night, and to-morrow I must try to go home to mamma," she sighed, turning toward the dark patch of woods where the lonely negro cabin stood, and followed by relentless fate in the shape of her pitiless rivals, Olive and Ela.

"She is going to old Virginia's cabin, but she does not know that the negroes have all moved away to the station, and that she will find it deserted," whispered Ela. "However, she can shelter herself there for the night, though it will be very cold without a fire."

"Some one ought to build one to keep her warm," Olive returned, with a significance that was not lost on her keen-witted cousin.



CHAPTER XXX.

A TERRIBLE DEED.

John Franklin's manly blood had boiled with resentment at seeing poor Dainty driven away in disgrace from the home of which she was virtually the mistress, for he believed every word of the story she had told Mrs. Ellsworth.

It made his kind heart ache to realize so fully the sad mental plight of his young master, who could sit by in apathy, and suffer such a cruel wrong to be done to his unfortunate young wife.

He gloried in the pride that had made her fling back in the woman's face the offered pittance from her cruel persecutor.

"Yet, poor soul, she looked shabby and penniless. Perhaps she had not the money to pay her fare to Richmond. I wonder if the unfortunate young lady would accept a loan from her husband's servant?" he thought, anxiously.

It pained him to think of her going out into the darkness of the night, friendless and shelterless, knowing how well his master had loved her, and how worthy she was of that love.

He decided that it was his duty to follow her and proffer his services if she needed them, though in so clandestine a manner that wicked Mrs. Ellsworth need not find it out and revenge herself by cruelty to his master.

Leaving Love presently to the care of another attendant, he slipped away through the grounds to the road, wondering which way the unhappy wanderer had gone.

A little incident ended his perplexity.

While pausing under the shade of a tree, gazing anxiously up and down the road, he suddenly saw the cousins Olive and Ela, skulking like criminals out in the dusky woodland path that led to old mammy's cabin; and the light of the rising moon on their faces showed them pallid and scared-looking, as if pursued by threatening fiends. Clasping each other's hands, and panting with excitement, they fled across the road to the gates of Ellsworth, without perceiving that they were detected in something underhand by the lynx eyes of a suspicious watcher.

"They have been up to some mischief, and I will find it out if I can," he thought, darting into the woodland path, and following it with alert eyes until suddenly the darkness was illuminated by the glare of fire, and rushing forward, he discovered old mammy's cabin wrapped in flames.

A startled cry burst from the man's lips as a terrible suspicion drove the bounding blood coldly back upon his heart.

Had the deserted cabin been fired by Olive and Ela?

If so, what had been their motive? Something very important surely, for conscious guilt had looked from their pale faces, had marked their skulking flight from the scene.

If Dainty Chase had gone to the cabin to seek refuge with the old black woman, their motive was not hard to fathom, and as Franklin bounded toward the scene of the fire, it all flashed over his mind like lightning.

The life of Dainty was a menace to Mrs. Ellsworth and her nieces, for if she could prove her marriage to Lovelace Ellsworth on the middle of July, she would wrest from his step-mother the wealth she claimed by reason of his failure to marry before his birthday, and in which she was making her nieces joint sharers.

Yes, all three of them had a terrible interest in the girl's death; the man realized it fully.

And Mrs. Ellsworth but a little while ago had given him a deep insight into her evil nature.

Perhaps she had sent her nieces—as wicked as herself—to follow poor Dainty and devise means for getting her out of the way.

It was horrible to think of such a crime, but he made haste to verify his suspicions by darting around to an end window not yet wreathed in the leaping flames and peering into the house, though the heat scorched him and the smoke was stifling.

He drew back with a cry of horror and indignation.

Yes, Dainty was there!

On gaining the shelter of the cabin, seeking the protection of the old mammy, whom she counted as her only friend, the girl, in her grief and sorrow and cruel disappointment at finding the place untenanted, had sunk into a heavy swoon on the hard floor.

Doubtless her cruel rivals, following and beholding her piteous plight, had seen their opportunity and taken instant advantage of it.

Roused from her unconsciousness by the crackling flames and stifling smoke, the girl was just rising from the floor, and the despair on her face as she comprehended her terrible environment would haunt John Franklin to his dying day.

The great, sublime pity that rose to flood-tide in the man's tender heart submerged every thought of self in an instant.

No escape seemed possible for Dainty. The inflammable log cabin was surrounded by fire, and she stood in the center of the awful glare like some pale, beautiful martyr at the stake.

Franklin caught up a great bowlder from the ground and dashed it again and again against the sash till it was broken in, then, stripping off his coat, muffled his head in it, and sprang like a hero through smoke and flame to the rescue of his master's bride, catching her up in his strong arms, and bearing her, after a fierce conflict with the fire, back through the broken sash to life and safety.

And not a moment too soon, for the roof of the cabin crashed in on the burning walls ere he had staggered three yards from the scene of his heroic deed, and the fierce flames, leaping higher, conveyed to two anxious watchers at Ellsworth the news that they had succeeded in their damnable crime.

Franklin realized that it was best to let them hug that belief to their hearts, so all that he did afterward that night was under the veil of secrecy.

He succeeded in getting an old buggy and conveying Dainty to the station, where he placed her on the midnight train and bought her a ticket for Richmond.

No one but black mammy was let into the secret, and unseen by any one in the gloom of the midnight hour and in the scarcity of travel that night, she was sent on her way to her mother, Franklin saying to her earnestly:

"Let me advise you, Mrs. Ellsworth, to keep close to your mother, and away from the fiendish enemies who are seeking to compass your death. I will take the best care of your husband, and may God send him recovery from his hurt, that he may restore you to your rightful position, and punish the wretches who have wronged you both!"



CHAPTER XXXI.

LOST! LOST! LOST!

"Stop! stranger; may I speak with you?— Ah, yes, you needn't fear— While I whisper through the grating, I wouldn't have them hear. These jailers, if a body But chance to speak her name, They roll their eyes so savage, As if they meant to tame Some wild beast, and they scare me. Come nearer, nearer yet; Come near me till I whisper, 'Have you seen her?—seen Annette?'

"What did they bring me here for? I say, I want to go! How shall I ever find her When I am locked in so? They lied to me— 'Twas once there in the street, Where I sat on a doorstep To rest my aching feet. They say, 'We'll lead you to her,' And many times said, 'Come,' At last I followed, eager To find my little one. But when I bid them bring her. They answer, 'By and by.' Just turn the key, please, won't you, And let me slip out sly?"

One of the most troublesome patients at the Virginia Asylum for the Insane in Staunton was a pretty, pale little woman named Mrs. Chase.

To look at her sitting very quiet—sometimes with her fair little hands meekly folded, and a brooding sorrow in her tearful, deep blue eyes—you would have said she was a most interesting patient, and could not surely give any one trouble.

But the women attendants in her ward could have told you quite a different story.

Mrs. Chase had a suicidal mania, and had to be watched closely all the time to keep her from taking her own life.

These attendants would have explained to you that all insane people have some hobby that they ride industriously all the time.

There was the man who believed himself to be Napoleon reincarnated, and amused everybody with his military toggery and braggadocio.

There was the lady who called herself Queen Victoria, and was never seen without a huge pasteboard crown.

There were the two men who each claimed to be the Christ, and frowned disapproval on the claims of each other.

There was the youth who imagined himself a violin virtuoso, and fiddled all day long, varying his performance by pausing to pass around the hat for pennies, of which he had accumulated, it was said, more than a gallon already.

There was the forsaken bride who was waiting every day for the false lover to return and bear her away on a blissful wedding-tour.

There was the man who believed himself already dead, and solemnly recounted to you the particulars of the horrible death he had died, adding that he was detained from his grave by the delay of the cruel undertakers in taking his measure for the coffin. He had actually been known to slip into the dead-house one day, and lie down in a casket intended for a real corpse, having to have force employed to eject him from his narrow abode.

Again, there was the man who imagined himself to be a grain of corn, and fled with screams of alarm from the approach of a chicken. These, and scores of others with hobbies, tragic or ridiculous, as the case might be; but not one of them all, said the attendants, needed such care and watching as pale, pretty, meek little Mrs. Chase.

Her hobby was a lost or stolen child.

No one knew whether or not there was any truth in her claim. She had been brought there from Richmond, a friendless stranger, who had been found wandering homeless in the street, raving of a lost child.

Her story was just as likely to be false as true, they said, for lunatics imagined many things. It might be her child had died; for she was always praying for death, that she might find her lost darling again.

It was melancholy madness. The hardest to cure of all, said the doctors, and she had been frustrated in several frantic attempts to end her life. She was so clever and so cunning that they had to watch her constantly; but even the most impatient of the attendants could not give her a cross word, her grief was so pathetic, and she seemed so sorrowfully helpless in her frail, gentle prettiness.

"Have you seen my daughter, my darling little Dainty? She is lost; stolen away from me while I slept," she would say to every strange person she saw, and her pale face would glow as she added, proudly: "She was the prettiest girl in the world. I have often heard people say so. She was as beautiful as a budding rose, with hair like the sunshine, and eyes as blue as the sky. Her little hands were white as lilies, and her feet so tiny and graceful, every one turned to watch her as she passed; and was it any wonder she caught such a grand, rich lover? She would have married him if she had not been lost that night. Oh, let me out! let me go and find my darling! You have no right to lock me in here!"

Then she would fly into paroxysms of anger, trying to batter down the walls and escape from what she called her stony prison; and at other times she would pray for death, crying:

"Oh, God! send me death; for surely my darling must be dead, or she would have come back to me long before they locked me up here! They stole her away and killed her, my sweet Dainty, the cruel enemies who hated and envied her so much for her angelic beauty and her noble lover! Oh, who would keep me back from death, when only through its dark gates can I find my child again?"

But they watched her carefully; they allowed her no means of ending the life of which she was so weary; and so the months flew by from September to spring, and it was almost a year since Dainty had left her home so gladly for the country visit that had ended so disastrously, and with such a veil of mystery over her strange fate.

"Where is Annette? Where is she? Does anybody know?"



CHAPTER XXXII.

IT WAS THE OVERFLOWING DROP OF SORROW IN THE CUP THAT ALREADY BRIMMED OVER.

"Alone with my hopeless sorrow, No other mate I know! I strive to awake tomorrow, But the dull words will not flow. I pray—but my prayers are driven Aside by the angry Heaven, And weigh me down with woe!"

Young, beautiful, penniless, and alone in the world! Oh, what a cruel fate!

Dainty realized it in all its bitterness when she arrived in Richmond that dull October day, and found the first snow of the season several inches deep on the ground, making her shiver with cold in her thin summer gown and straw hat.

But her heart was warm with the thought of the dear mother she was going to rejoin.

What a glad reunion it would be for both in spite of her bitter troubles, when, clasped in that dear mother's arms, she should lay her weary head on that dear breast, and sob out all her grief to sympathizing ears.

She had a little money in a small purse that Franklin had forced her to take as a loan, and she hired a cab to take her to her old home, where she had not a doubt of still finding her mother.

Alas! what was her horror to find the small house burned to the ground!

Dismissing the cab, she started on a round of the neighborhood, seeking news of the dear one.

But there were new neighbors in the sparsely settled place, and no one knew anything about the little lady who had kept boarders at the house on the corner.

Half frozen with the bitter cold, she dragged herself to the corner grocery, thinking that Mr. Sparks could surely give her some information.

His stolid, well-fed face was the first familiar one she had met, and she wondered why he wore that broad band of crape about his coat-sleeve.

"Is it really you, Miss Chase? Well, well! you're quite a stranger! Been ill? You don't look as blooming as when you went away in the summer. Well, it was hard on you losing your little mother in that cruel fashion! But death is no respecter of persons. He robbed me of my ailing wife about the same time your mother was called. What! you don't understand? Bless me! the girl's dropped like I'd shot her! Ailsa! Ailsa!" he called in alarm, as he picked up the unconscious girl, and hurried with her to the back of the store, which was also his dwelling.

Then a pretty, brown-eyed girl, sitting with several noisy children, sprang up, and cried in wonder:

"What is the matter?"

"Here's your old neighbor and school-mate, Ailsa, little Dainty Chase. She came into the store, and I was talking to her about the death of my wife and her mother, when she dropped in a sort of fit. See to her, will you, while I run back to my customers?"

Pretty Ailsa Scott hastened to resuscitate her old school-mate, and when she revived, was startled to hear her sob, hysterically:

"I came to find my mother, Ailsa. I have been lost from her for wretched months; but your step-father told me she was dead! Oh, it can not be true! God would not be so cruel!"

Ailsa Scott had passed through the recent loss of her own mother, and she knew what a blow it would be to Dainty when she heard the cruel truth; but there was no escaping it, so she clasped her gentle arms about the stricken girl, saying sadly:

"It makes my heart ache for you, dear Dainty, but it would be useless to deceive you. About the time that mother lay in her last sickness it was rumored that your mother came back here the very day after the house was burned. I did not see her myself, but it was in all the papers that she went suddenly insane, and after wandering wildly about the city all day, calling for you, took poison and died in an alley. I do not know where she is buried, for mother was so very ill, and died the same week. Since then I've had my heart and hands both full with the care of the children, and teaching school, too, for I would not depend on my step-father for a penny. You know"—whispering—"I always hated him, and there wasn't much love lost between us. Indeed, I wouldn't have stayed here a day after mother's death only for my little half-brothers and sisters. He had no relations to help him, and hired help is not very reliable. He keeps a servant, but they tell me she is unkind to the children when I'm at school. If you have no friends to go to, dear, I wish you would stay with me awhile, and look after the little ones while I'm away."

It was a delicate offer of a shelter, for Ailsa's eyes had taken in the poverty of her guest, and Dainty was but too glad of a refuge in which to nurse her deep despair.

When Ailsa informed her step-father questioningly of her offer, he smiled approval, and made Dainty welcome in his simple home, while tender-hearted Ailsa soothed her all she could in the bitterness of her bereavement.

"We are both orphans, dear, and we can sympathize with each other," she said, tenderly, and helped her friend to get some neat mourning gowns, in which she looked so frail and lily-like that she seemed to be fading away like a broken flower.

She tended patiently on the little children and won their love, and the exuberant gratitude of their father, this latter so effusive that it grew irksome to the sorrowful, reserved girl.

"Oh, Ailsa, I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but I dislike the man as much as you do, and his attentions are getting too pointed to be agreeable. I am afraid I shall have to leave you and the dear children, much as I love you," she sighed, in December, after two quiet months in the little house; and her friend rejoined, indignantly:

"I see he is trying to court you, although his wife, my dear mother, has been dead but a few months. Oh, why did she ever marry such a brute? I believe he broke her heart, for it was a strange decline of which she died. He was always flirting with his women customers, and scolded his wife harshly when she objected. He made her bitterly unhappy, the coarse, unfaithful wretch, and that is why I hate him so for my own papa never spoke an unkind word to her up to the day of his death. You will have to repulse him, but not too unkindly to arouse his enmity."

But the crisis came suddenly the next day while Ailsa was at school. Mr. Sparks boldly proposed marriage to the indignant girl.

Her blue eyes flashed disdain upon him, as she cried:

"How can you be so coarse and unfeeling, sir, showing so little respect to the memory of the wife dead but a few months?"

"She is as dead now as she will be in ten years hence!" he replied, with a grin that filled her with disgust; while he added, wheedlingly: "But I know how particular women folks are over these trifles, and I would have waited till spring before I spoke to you on the subject, but the fact is, the neighbors are gossiping about my keeping house with two pretty girls, and neither one any kin to me. So I thought I'd better marry one of them, and shut scandal's mouth. And as for Ailsa, I never liked her. She is always throwing up to me that her pa was a nicer man than I am. But as for you, Dainty, I worship the very ground you walk on, and I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll say the word."

"I can't marry you, sir. I—I—oh I am going right away, Mr. Sparks! I couldn't breathe the same air with a man that was so disrespectful to his first wife's memory as to court another in three months after her death!" the young girl cried, in passionate disgust, arousing such bitter spite that the rejected suitor cast courtesy to the winds, rejoining, hotly:

"Go, then, Miss Pert, and the sooner the better! Shall I call a wagon to take your trunk?" sarcastically.

"You know I have no trunk, Mr. Sparks, but I will pack my valise at once, and perhaps you will let it stay till I can take it away. I must rent a room somewhere first," she murmured.

"No; take it with you, I say. Your clothes might get contaminated breathing the same air with me!" he answered, angrily.

So presently Dainty went away in the teeth of a howling winter storm, without a penny in her purse, or a shelter for her head, while the little ones sobbed out to Ailsa when she returned that bad papa had driven sweet Dainty away.



CHAPTER XXXIII.

A NEW HOME.

Dainty dragged herself slowly along the snowy street, almost exhausted by the weight of the hand-bag; and she wondered pathetically if it might not be best to follow her mother's example, and seek refuge from life's woes by the straight gate of death?

"Dear mother, if I only knew where to find the lonely grave where strangers laid you, I would stretch myself upon it and die!" she sobbed, the tears in her cheeks mixing with the melting snow, as it flew into her pale face, driven by the bleak December gale.

She crept presently into a quiet area-way, and somewhat sheltered from the driving storm, pondered on what she was to do now, without friends and without money, in a cold, suspicious world.

Presently she heard girlish chatter and tittering, and glancing through a window, saw several young girls busy at sewing-machines, directed by an angular spinster whom she took to be a dress-maker.

A sudden temptation seized her, and she rapped timidly on the basement door, bringing the spinster hurriedly to it.

"Do you want a dress made?" she inquired, glancing at Dainty's hand-bag.

"No, madame. I am in search of work. Do you wish another hand to sew?" faltered Dainty.

"Um! yes—I don't know. Bring in your valise, and let us talk it over;" ushering her into a tiny, cozy kitchen, where they could talk in private.

"Now, then, what's your name, and how came you out hunting work in the face of such weather? Tell the truth," she said, suspiciously; and Dainty obeyed.

"I have been employed to help nurse some children, and was discharged to-day. My name is Miss Chase."

"Did you bring a recommendation?" sharply.

"No, ma'am; but I think I can refer you to Miss Ailsa Scott, on this same street. It was her mother's children I was nursing; but the father sent me away."

"I know Mr. Sparks. Why did he send you away?"

"I would rather not tell."

"Then I can not give you work!" curtly.

"Oh, madame, I am ashamed to tell you! The man wanted to marry me, and his poor wife dead but a few months! I refused with scorn, and he drove me away," the girl answered, wearily.

"Humph! I can't see what he wanted with a chit like you for a wife," the spinster returned, tossing her false frizzes disparagingly, and adding: "I do need another hand, but the pay is too much. I can not afford it."

"Oh, madame, I would work for my board awhile, if you will let me stay here!" pleaded Dainty, eagerly; and the woman answered:

"I don't know but that would suit me very well. I live here by myself, all the girls going home in the evenings. You may take off your things, and I'll get some work ready for you. But, mind, I'll call on Ailsa Scott to-night, and unless you have spoken the truth, out you go in the morning."

"I have only spoken the truth, madame," Dainty sighed, as she obeyed the commands, and soon found herself seated among the busy sewing girls, basting away on a ruffle, and thanking God in her heart for even this poor shelter that must be paid for with constant toil.

The girls all seemed to be gay enough, in spite of their poverty; but Dainty, poor, nervous girl, was glad when they went away at sunset, and left her alone with Miss White, as she found the name of her employer to be.

The spinster was not more than forty, and rather good-looking, in spite of her angularity. She asked Dainty many questions about Sparks, betraying quite a lively interest in the widower; and by and by she dressed herself smartly in a black silk gown and red bonnet, and went off to get Dainty's character from Ailsa Scott, leaving the girl alone in the house, save for some tenants in the upper part.

Dainty was very tired and sad; but she washed the tea-things and put them away, and lay down on the lounge in the sewing-room, with a sigh of relief at the chance to rest.



CHAPTER XXXIV.

THROWN ON THE WORLD.

Poor Dainty was always tired and sad now. She had never been very strong since her illness in the mountains.

Her face was always thin and pale, her blue eyes hollow, with dark circles beneath them, while her breath was short and palpitating. She knew that she was strangely ill, and had a fancy that she was going into a rapid decline.

Ailsa Scott wanted her to see a doctor, but she always refused to do so.

"I want to die! I would rather not take any medicine from the best doctor in the world!" she exclaimed, rebelliously.

She had not told her friend the strange story of her secret marriage, fearing lest the threatened revenge of Mrs. Ellsworth should find her out even this far away; but Ailsa guessed well at some sad secret, and pitied the poor girl with all her gentle heart.

By and by Miss White returned in a very good humor indeed, saying that Miss Scott said everything was all right, and she would call to see her friend on her way from school the next day.

"I saw Mr. Sparks, too, and really, he is the most charming man I ever met," she simpered, adding: "I don't see how you could repulse his addresses, Miss Chase; he is so handsome and agreeable. Then, too, poor man, his sweet little children stand so much in need of a mother that he was excusable for haste, though he ought to have picked an older woman than you."

"I should say that you, Miss White, would be the most suitable woman in the world for him," Dainty ventured, with a faint smile.

"Thank you for the compliment. I wonder if he thinks so, too? He was certainly quite attentive, and I didn't let him guess I knew he was looking for a wife; but I made up my mind to buy my groceries from him in future," smirked the delighted spinster, thinking what a little fool that girl was to refuse such a man.

Ailsa came next day, and was indignant when she heard how her step-father had treated Dainty, while she rejoiced that the girl had found such a refuge, for she believed that Miss White was in the main a very good woman.

"But, oh! Dainty, she has set her cap at Sparks, and I believe her flatteries have made an impression on him that will heal the wounds your scolding gave. Depend on it, that will be a match, and, as I believe she would make a real good step-mother to my little half-brothers and sisters, you and I will rent rooms and live together like sisters after the wedding!" she cried, cheerfully, trying to bring a smile to the pale, lily-like face over which the tears streamed as the girl sighed:

"Oh, Ailsa, you are like an angel to me!"

"I am very sorry," continued Ailsa, "that you have promised to work for your board, for you need a little money as you go along—all girls do—and when I found you were gone without a cent I was nearly crazy. I gave old Sparks such a lecture as he will never forget, and I fairly hugged that primpy old maid when she came to tell me where you were. Now, dear, take this ten dollars from your sister Ailsa, and use it in time of need. No, you shall not refuse it, or you may be sorry for it if Miss White should turn you out in the streets some day as heartlessly as old Sparks did."

She had not the least idea of such a thing happening again, but she wanted to frighten Dainty into taking the gift, and she succeeded, after which she left, promising to see her friend often.

The weeks came and went, and Dainty toiled at her sewing with aching limbs and a heavy heart filled with dire forebodings that she dare not utter aloud to any human being, even gentle Ailsa, and at night her lonely pillow was wet with tears, and her piteous cry was ever:

"Oh, mother, mother, if only you were with me now to pity and help me in my trouble!"

For awhile Miss White was quite kind, for at the bottom of her heart she felt secretly grateful to the girl for having in a way brought about her acquaintance with Sparks—an acquaintance that she prosecuted with much vigor, running in and out daily for trifles from the store, till her broad flatteries and fondness for the children awakened a warm sentiment in his heart, and he began to pay her such pleasing attentions as calling on Sunday evenings for social chats, Dainty always keeping out of the way, reluctant to meet him again, and quite unaware that in his spite he was doing all he could to turn Miss White's heart against her hapless protege.

March came with its bleak winds and occasional hints of spring, but Dainty's heart sank heavier day by day, her cheeks grew more pale, her eyes more heavy, as she drooped over her work shivering, with the thick cape always wrapped about her form, and looking as if death would soon claim her as its own.

They were dark, sad days for Dainty, for the gay young girls, Miss White's assistants, began to shun her, and to look askance at the form always bundled up so closely from the winter cold. Two hands quit work abruptly and never returned, and the three others held private conversations with their employer, after which she came straight to Dainty, saying harshly:

"You wicked girl, you have imposed on me!"

Dainty was putting away the tea-things, and she started so violently that a china cup fell through her thin fingers and crashed upon the floor.

Miss White continued, angrily:

"I took you in as an honest girl and treated you kindly. In return you imposed on me, disgraced my house, and broke up my business!"

"Oh, madame!"

"Two of my best hands have quit me in disgust, and the other three threaten to go unless I turn you away at once. Do you know the reason, pray?"

Crimson with shame, Dainty dropped forlornly before her with down-dropped eyes, speechless with fear, and the woman continued, sharply:

"Take off that cape you've been shrouded in all the winter, pretending to suffer from the cold, and let me see if it is really hiding your disgrace."

"Oh, spare me!"

"Do as I bid you! There! I've dragged it off in spite of you! Oh, for shame—shame! How could you be so wicked with that innocent face?"

"Oh, I am not as bad as you think! I—I—"

"Hush! You can't excuse your disgrace. Mr. Sparks told me all along you were a bad girl, and told me when we became engaged I must send you to the right-about before we were married. But, somehow, I couldn't believe ill of you, till I see it now with my own eyes."

"Oh! may I stay till to-morrow? You will not drive me out into the streets to-night?" imploringly.

"I ought to do it to pay you for cheating me so; but I'm a Christian woman, and, somehow, I pity you, and I can't be hard on you. You may stay to-night; but you must leave in the morning directly after breakfast. There's a hospital in this city for poor girls that's gone astray like you. You can go there, and the good doctor will take you in and let you stay till your child is born. Then you can put it in the foundlings' home and some good people may adopt it."

"Merciful God, have pity!" shrilled over the girl's tortured lips, as she sank on her knees, overcome by the horror of her thoughts.

Her child—Love Ellsworth's lawful heir—to be born in a home for "girls gone astray," and placed in a foundlings' home, to be "adopted by some good people." Had she come to this? She, whose future had promised so radiantly nine brief months ago! A wild prayer to Heaven broke from her pallid lips:

"Oh, God! take us both—the forsaken mother and child—to heaven!"

"It's too late to take on now. Better behaved yourself right at first," the old maid admonished her; adding, soothingly: "Go to bed now, and I'll send to-morrow for the good doctor to come and take you to the lying-in hospital."

But in the gray dawn of the cold morning she found the bed empty, and poor Dainty gone.



CHAPTER XXXV.

GRAND COMPANY.

A strange chance, or, perhaps, a kindly Providence, brought Sarah Ann Peters and old black mammy together that spring at the railway station near Ellsworth, where both were then living.

The indefatigable white woman was laid low with la grippe, and her husband, in seeking a maid-of-all-work to fill her place, could find no one to take the situation but the aged Virginia.

As six of the large brood of sons were away at school, mammy undertook "to do for the rest," as she expressed it; and the last of March found her domesticated at the six-roomed frame house on the edge of the woods, a mile from the station.

Here the thrifty Peters family had lived for ten years throughout the winters, removing each spring to the lonely saw-mill in the mountains, where by hard, unremitting toil they succeeded in earning enough money to send their children to good schools in the cold weather.

Already Peters was making his arrangements to remove to the woods in April, when his good wife was stricken with a heavy cold that laid her low during the last three weeks of March; though her sturdy constitution triumphed then, and she sat up the first day of April, a little pale and wasted, but, as she expressed it, "feeling just as stout as ever, but glad to have mammy there awhile yet to take the heft of the work off her tired shoulders."

In her secret heart black mammy felt cruelly hurt at having come down, in her old age, to work for ordinary "po' w'ite trash;" but she had fallen on evil days in this latter end of her pilgrimage.

After the terrible misfortune that had befallen Love Ellsworth, his heartless step-mother had made full use of her power to oppress all who had taken the part of poor Dainty Chase.

For many years mammy, with her son and her daughter-in-law, had inhabited rent free, their cabin on the Ellsworth estate, Love also allowing them the use of a patch of ground for their garden. The negroes having belonged to his ancestors in slavery times, he felt that this kindness was but their honest due.

But no sooner had Mrs. Ellsworth usurped the reins of government than she proceeded to drive away the poor negroes from the cabin. Thereupon mammy's son and his wife removed to the coal mines of Fayette County, and left the old woman to shift for herself.

Though she did her work faithfully for Mrs. Peters, she did not fail to impress on the good woman the superiority of the position from which she had fallen, and the grandeur of the family that had formerly owned her, always adding that "Massa Love wouldn't a let her kem to sech a pass ef he had kep' his mind."

Mrs. Peters, with the kindest heart and warmest sympathies in the world, listened patiently to black mammy's tales, till the loquacious old negress at last confided to her the whole story of her young master's blighted love dream, down to the moment when Franklin had brought Dainty Chase to the station, bought her ticket, and sent her on to her mother in Richmond.

Then the interested Mrs. Peters also had a story to tell, for she had recognized in the heroine of the story the lovely patient she had tended so faithfully, last fall, at the logging camp in the woods.

"And I believe she told the truth to that wicked woman, that she was secretly married to Mr. Ellsworth," she affirmed. "For, Virginny, I'll tell you a secret that hain't never passed my lips before, not even to Peters, and I don't often keep secrets from my good old man. But this is it: I more nor suspected that that pore young chile was in a way to become a mother."

"Lord, have mercy!" ejaculated black mammy, and the tears rolled down her fat, black cheeks.

After that the two women could talk of little else but sweet Dainty and her sorrowful plight—an unacknowledged wife soon to be a mother.

They counted up the months on their fingers, and found that the important event was almost at hand—must happen within the next two weeks—and mammy exclaimed:

"I see it all plain as daylight now! Massa Love was 'fraid sumpin' would happen to 'vent de marriage, so he took his sweetheart off on de sly, an' dey got married; den he sent me home an' fix up dat room nex' to his own fer his bride, so 'at he kin tek keer ob her ebery night—dat's it. An' den dey bofe feel so easy in dey min's, little finkin' what turrible fings gwine happen on de birfday. Oh! ain't it de awfules' 'fliction you ebber hear on, Mis' Peters? Dat pore man wif de bullet in his haid, an' his senses gone, an' dat pore wife druv away in poverty, an' dem wretches rollin' in gold dat belongs to Massa Love an' his sweet bride! An' to fink dat I is cheated, too, out o' a hunnerd dollars! fer I done match dat torn piece ob torchon lace to Sheila Kelly's night gownd long ago, an' ef Massa Love was in his senses, I could claim dat big reward."

That night, the last of March, Mrs. Peters confided the whole story to her surprised and sympathizing husband.

"I never heard anything to ekal it!" he declared, indignantly; adding: "I wish sumpin' could be done to git that poor young wife her rights, and I'm willin' to spend time and money helpin' ef I only knew which end to begin at! Them wimmen at Ellsworth ought to be tarred and feathered and rid on a fence rail, I swow! But likely they'll make it hot for any one as tries to bring home their sins to 'em."

The next day he rode over to the station at sunset on his old gray mare Stonewall, for some groceries from the store, and the supper things being cleared away, mammy took her black pipe and sat down by the roadside to smoke, just outside the front gate.

By and by, through the cloud of smoke and the purple haze of twilight, she saw him returning with his bundles, and, sitting behind him on old Stonewall's back was a woman, whom he presently lifted down, exclaiming, cheerfully:

"Git up, mammy. Come out to the gate, Sairy Ann! I've brought you gran' company from the train, and you must spread a feast and rejoice! Come in, and welcome, Mrs. Ellsworth!"

"Oh, mammy! I've come back to you to die!" sobbed Dainty, falling wearily on the old woman's ample breast.



CHAPTER XXXVI.

"ONLY TO SEE YOU, MY DARLING."

Oh, what a welcome Dainty received from the true hearts in that humble home!

They treated her like a queen, but so warm was their devotion, and so eager their interest, they soon drew from her lips all that had happened to her in Richmond.

The women's tears fell copiously, and even Hiram Peters could not help drawing the backs of his horny hands now and then across his kind, moist eyes, while he groaned:

"I swow you had troubles fit to kill you!"

"At the last I could bear my shame and misery no longer. I made up my mind to come back to West Virginia, and try to find some evidence of my marriage, that my child should not be born under a cloud of shame," said Dainty, sorrowfully.

"Poor lamb!" groaned mammy; and the others sighed in concert, for when they had heard all she could tell about her marriage, Mr. Peters was fain to confess that her prospects looked very dark.

"You see, Mrs. Ellsworth, madame," he said, proudly giving her her true name, bringing a flash of pleasure to her eyes, "that old man, the county clerk that must have issued the license, died soon after, and likewise the preacher of that little church in the woods; so, unless you can find out what became of the license, it will be a hard job to prove the marriage."

"I fear so," sobbed Dainty; then she added: "Do you think, mammy, that Mrs. Ellsworth is still unrelenting?"

"Hard as a stone, honey!"

"But perhaps if she knew the truth, that a child is to come of that secret marriage, she might relent and pity it enough to acknowledge me as Love's wife," sighed Dainty, anxiously.

But her listeners all persuaded her that such a thing was impossible. The woman would never acknowledge anything that would cause her to lose her grip on the wealth she was holding by a shameless fraud.

"Honey, don't yo' go nigh them deceitful wretches! Don't yo' even let them know that yo' are alive, or there'll be a new plot set on foot direckly 'ginst yo' sweet life and the one that's comin' too! Hab yo' forgot how the old 'oman shet yo' up in dat dark dungeon till yo' pisened yo'self, and how dem gals tried to burn yo' up in de ole cabin, and would hab 'ceeded, too, but for John Franklin breakin' in de winder and fetchin' yo' out—an' his face an' han's an' hair all scorched drefful!" expostulated mammy.

Among them all they persuaded her that it was better not to try to prove her rights than to lose her life.

"You stay here quietly long o' us, honey, and don't let no one know who you air, and arter your chile comes, you may leave it with me ef you wants, and I'll tek keer of it till the good Lord makes a better way for it. And all of us we'll pray and pray that good luck may come to you," exclaimed Mrs. Peters, piously, while her husband chimed in, fervently:

"You kin 'pend on us to be your firm fren's fer life, ma'am, and you air jist as welcome ter anythin' we got as any one of our nine boys!"

Oh, how their humble kindness went to her wounded heart, encouraging her to cry out, passionately:

"There is one thing I crave more than I ought on earth, and perhaps some one might manage it for me; it is to see my husband's face again!"

A dark cloud seemed suddenly to fall over them all, and she cried in dismay:

"Why do you all look so strange and frightened? Oh, my God! do not tell me he is dead!"

"No, deares', yo' husban' ain't dead!" sighed mammy, and burst into sudden loud sobs, as she added: "Dey done tooken him away dis larst week to New York, honey. Doctor Platt, dat good ole man, yo' know, and Franklin, his body-servant, as sabed yo' from de fire, yo' know. And yo' kain't nebber look on his face no mo', fer Doctor Platt say he was gettin' dang'ous an' might hurt somebuddy, so he 'suaded Missis Ellsworth to fasten him up in a 'sylum way off yonder, an' him'll nebber come home no mo'!"



CHAPTER XXXVII.

A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.

Fortune had indeed seemed to favor Mrs. Ellsworth.

Nearly nine months had passed since her step-son's attempted murder; and though his bodily health seemed good, no change for the better had taken place in his mental condition.

Another very pleasing fact was that Dainty Chase had never turned up again to annoy her with assertions of a secret marriage, to which she could produce no proof but her simple word. She wondered in her secret mind what had become of the girl, for her nieces were too prudent to confess to her the crime by which they supposed their beautiful cousin to have perished.

They suspected that while glad to have the girl out of the way, she might feel squeamish over downright murder.

So they decided that it was just as well not to tell her that they had tracked the hapless girl to the negro cabin, and having seen her fall senseless on the floor, had fired the ramshackle old place in front of both doors and fled.

As the cabin had burned completely to the ground, they supposed that their victim had perished in the flames; but their guilty consciences had never permitted them to venture near the debris to see if her charred bones remained a mute witness of their awful deed.

As the winter wore away and no more was heard of Dainty or her mother, they confidently looked on the girl as dead; but if their consciences reproached them for their sin, they allowed no sign of it to appear on their careless faces as they plunged into every gayety offered by their new position. The winter had been an epoch in their hitherto poverty-stricken lives, and they made the most of it, Mrs. Ellsworth giving them a lavish allowance, and permitting them to travel with friends wherever they chose.

Thus they had had a trip to California in December, and on returning in February had been given glimpses of the gay season in New York and Washington before returning in March to silent, gloomy Ellsworth, where the mistress had remained inflexibly on guard over her step-son, lest the doctors, peradventure, should do something to restore his mind.

"That meddlesome old Doctor Platt keeps on hoping for something to happen. The other physicians have given it up, and say that Love will be an idiot for life. He is sure that if the bullet could be removed, he would be restored; but I will not permit them to cut into the poor boy's head, and perhaps destroy his life as well as his reason," she often complained, until the old doctor gave up all hopes of gaining her consent to the operation that he wished performed.

But he still came to visit Love in a friendly way, although the young man continued in the same state of seeming hopeless idiocy, never improving with the lapse of time, until, in desperation, the old man, with Franklin's assistance, concocted a daring scheme.

He had read with contempt and abhorrence the mind of the woman, and knew that she wished to keep her step-son in his present state, and that no proposition looking to his cure would be entertained by the selfish creature who wished to keep her grip on the young man's property. She would rather see him dead than restored to his rich dower of brains and wealth.

So when, late in March, she was first informed by Franklin, and afterward by Doctor Platt himself, of a change for the worse in the patient, she was more pleased than sorry.

Love's condition was changing, they said, from simple idiocy to active insanity that would necessitate his removal from Ellsworth to a place of close confinement.

"He may develop at any moment a homicidal mania, and prove terribly dangerous to his attendants. Indeed, Franklin has grown nervous already over some of his more violent moods, and threatens to resign his place," said Doctor Platt.

This was indeed most welcome news for Mrs. Ellsworth. Nothing except Love's death could have pleased her better.

Though she had been fond of him once, his opposition to her will, and his contempt of her two favorite nieces, had turned her lukewarm fondness to active hate.

So it was hard for her to assume a look of concern when it was all she could do to keep from openly rejoicing. She dropped her face in her hands to keep the keen old doctor from openly reading its expression.

"It is a very delicate and peculiar case," continued Doctor Platt. "You can not place him in an idiot asylum, because he is not now an idiot—yet his lunacy is not developed enough to commit him for lunacy. At the same time, he may become violent at any time and—do murder! It is not right to keep him at Ellsworth with such terrible risks attached to his staying. I have a plan, if you choose to consider it. If not, you may consult other physicians."

"Let me hear your plan first," she answered, affably, in her secret joy.

"Let me take him to a private sanitarium in New York, well known to me as the best place in the United States for a person in his condition. It is a high-priced place, but you can afford it for the sake of the relief of mind you would experience in removing this threatening danger from Ellsworth, and in knowing that his hopelessly incurable insanity had the kindest treatment."

Those two words caught her instant attention.

"You honestly believe him hopelessly insane?" she cried.

"Yes," he replied; saying, inwardly: "God forgive me for lying, but it is in a righteous cause!"

In fact, he was quaking with fear lest she should suspect the motive lying at the bottom of his anxiety to take his patient to New York.

If she had been a well-read woman, he would have been afraid to risk such a plot; but he knew that she scarcely ever scanned the columns of a newspaper.

Otherwise she would have been cognizant of the new scientific discovery, one of the greatest of the nineteenth century triumphs, and most important to the medical cult—the discovery of the wonderful X-ray of light by the famous German savant, Professor Roentgen.

She would have known that by the operation of this X-ray the formerly dense human body could be made transparent enough to be seen through, revealing not only the skeleton with all its delicate mechanism, but the presence of every foreign element, so that already bullets had been located and removed from the bodies of patients who had suffered tortures from them for years. These wonderful facts filled the columns of newspapers and the pages of magazines. The whole world was wild with enthusiasm. It was the greatest and most beneficial discovery of the nineteenth century, they said, and Professor Roentgen's thoughtful brow was laureled with a fame that made him greater than a king.

Mrs. Ellsworth had never read a line about the X-ray. If you had asked her she would not have understood what you meant.

But every fiber of the intelligent old doctor's body vibrated with joy of the new discovery, and the hope that through its means his patient might be restored to health.

The dream that he dreamed night and day was to carry Lovelace Ellsworth to New York and have the bullet in his head located by means of the wonderful X-ray.

"Once located it might in all probability be removed, and your master restored to himself," he said confidentially to the clever Franklin, who rejoiced exceedingly at this little ray of hope in the darkness of his master's fate.

But realizing the deep interest Mrs. Ellsworth had in preventing Love's restoration to reason, they knew it was useless to tell her of the new discovery with any hope of her consent to having any experiment tried on her step-son.

Nothing remained to them but strategy, and they resorted to its use with flattering success.

Mrs. Ellsworth had had so many triumphs, that she regarded this one as only her due—a reward of her clever plotting, as it were.

The removal of Love to a sanitarium would be a great relief to her mind; and she jumped at the proposition with alacrity, even twitting the old doctor with her superior judgment.

"I told you all along that you were foolish ever to expect his recovery, and you see I was right."

"The women are always right," he replied, gallantly, in his joy at having gained his point.

So armed with a liberal check from her hand, the old doctor and Franklin journeyed to New York with the patient, in the hope of restoring his wrecked mind and of righting a great wrong.