Nina's peril

NEW YORK:
Copyright, 1886.
G. W. Dillingham, Publisher,
Successor to G. W. Carleton & Co.
LONDON: S. LOW, SON & CO.
MDCCCLXXXVII

The sleepy clerk on night duty at the drug store looked up with a start. He had not heard any one enter, but here stood a young girl by the counter, looking at him with large, sombre dark eyes, that shone wierdly out of a white, white face, framed in tresses of disordered golden hair—a face beautiful beyond all dreams of fancy but for its strange, marble pallor, and the anguished eyes out of which gleamed a desperate purpose, as she extended a snowy ungloved hand with a silver coin shining in the rosy palm, and repeated in a low, eager voice:

It was a wild wintry night in the great city, and there were none abroad except those whom necessity forced to be out. The air was full of keen, fine flakes of snow, that was frozen by the piercing wind even before it fell to the earth. The cold was intense.

The hour was late, and all the shops were closed except the drug stores that stood open by night as well as by day, always at the service of the sick and suffering. Even these, with their great red and green lights glowing abroad like friendly beacons to those who were drifting on the perilous seas of sickness and disease, were mostly deserted to-night, and in this one, where that unlooked-for customer entered, the weary clerk dozed at his post, and her sharp, eager young voice roused him from a disconnected dream.

He sprang to his feet and looked at her, but his sleepy eyes did not take in at first all the misery of that beautiful young face.

“What can I do for you, miss?” he inquired, with a tone of irrepressible admiration in his voice; and the girl reiterated her formula impatiently:

Then he looked at her more closely. He saw the misery in the great, heavy black eyes, with the purple shadows lying darkly beneath them, saw how awfully white and anguished was the lovely face with its perfect features, sharpened and refined by keen suffering. He hesitated before he complied with her request.

“We do not usually sell poisons without a doctor’s prescription. Have you one?” he inquired.

Chapter	Page
I.	A beautiful face	7
II.	Waiting and Hoping	12
III.	Sketching the Past	16
IV.	Coming Home	22
V.	“Nothing can undo the Folly of Five years Ago.”	28
VI.	“Can this really be Nina?”	39
VII.	Pride	49
VIII.	“I have Sworn an Oath and I shall have to keep it.”	53
IX.	Jealousy	59
X.	“I will never forgive her.”	66
XI.	The Shadows Fall	70
XII.	An Interview Declined	76
XIII.	Nina’s Sacrifice	80
XIV.	A Maddened Lover	89
XV.	The Tragedy	95
XVI.	The Flight of Nina	101
XVII.	Sibyl’s Accusation	108
XVIII.	Rescued	114
XIX.	With Friends	118
XX.	The Fieldings	122
XXI.	“Mad from Life’s History.”	128
XXII.	Remorse	132
XXIII.	Compagnons du Voyage	138
XXIV.	“She is Dead to All.”	142
XXV.	Poverty	148
XXVI.	I must have Money	152
XXVII.	Back to Selwyn Heights	158
XXVIII.	Entrapped	162
XXIX.	Nina learns the truth	166
XXX.	A Ghostly Laugh	174
XXXI.	The Arrest of Nina	185
XXXII.	Talbot’s Suspicions	193
XXXIII.	Talbot’s Dreams	201
XXXIV.	The Prison	205
XXXV.	Nina’s Despair	214
XXXVI.	The Trial	220
XXXVII.	The Letter	224
XXXVIII.	The Ghost again	234
XXXIX.	Nina forgives Talbot	245
XL.	In Egypt	253
XLI.	Ferris grows desperate	259
XLII.	The Naya Haye	263
XLIII.	Judge Lynch	274
XLIV.	Armstrong’s News	278
XLV.	Talbot learns all	282
XLVI.	Talbot accuses Ferris	286
XLVII.	Ralph St. Alban	294
XLVIII.	Flight into the desert	305
XLIX.	Torn by Wolves	311
L.	Journeying Homeward	320
LI.	On the Scaffold	330
LII.	Sibyl’s Punishment	340
LIII.	Nina’s Happiness	349
LIV.	The Invitation	356
LV.	“It’s we two for aye.”	360

She looked at him imploringly, and clasped her delicate hands together. “No, I have not, but for God’s sake do not refuse me,” she cried, almost wildly. “I must have the laudanum! I am suffering so much, and it will still this terrible pain.” She pressed her clenched hands against her pale cheek with a suppressed groan.

The dawning suspicions of the drug clerk were instantly diverted by her expressive movement.

“Oh, if it is the toothache, all right,” he said. [Pg 10]“Here it is, miss. A few drops on a bit of cotton will soon relieve you; be careful not to use too much.”

“Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “Oh, yes, I will be very careful; but it is not the toothache, it is the heartache I am going to cure.”

She murmured the last words in an undertone and hurried toward the door before she had done speaking. He saw her pause in the doorway an instant, saw her pull the stopple quickly from the little phial, then she put the deadly drug to her lips, drained the last drop, and threw the empty vessel far from her upon the pavement. All seemed to pass in an instant of time, and before the horrified clerk recovered from the trance of horror with which he beheld her terrible deed, she stepped quickly out into the street, and disappeared in the gloom and darkness of the inclement night.

He gained the door, sprang into the street at one [Pg 11]bound, and looked about him with straining eyes. The drug store stood on the corner of two streets that intersected each other; he looked hastily up one street and then the other, but vainly. Even in that moment of time the girl had disappeared from his sight like a spirit. Not a person was to be seen, and the hard, white snow freezing sleetily upon the pavements, and shining like diamonds under the light of the flaring gaslamps, held no impression of the light feet that had sped over them so swiftly, and borne her beyond his ken.

My readers, let us turn back a few pages in the tragic life-history of that unhappy creature, and read the story of those heavy sorrows that had driven the young and beautiful girl recklessly and wickedly forward upon the terrible shoals of self-destruction.

A cloudy gray sky, a chill gray sea, a stretch of sandy beach against a back-ground of rugged hills covered with trees, through whose leafless branches the March wind was eerily moaning. In all the grey monotony there was no touch of color or brightness, save the figure of a girl in a scarlet merino dress and turban, standing on the shell-strewn shore gazing seaward at a noble steamer bounding over the waves toward the landing that was hidden [Pg 13]from sight by a turn in the shore, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant.

The girl had come down from the great red brick mansion that crowned a tall bluff, perhaps half a mile away, and she had no companion save the great shaggy, black Newfoundland that crouched at her feet, gazing up at her with mute, adoring eyes of almost human intelligence, as she chanted low and softly to herself:

Then she looked down with a laugh that was half sad, into the big brown eyes of her canine friend.

“Ah, Lion, old fellow, what a silly pair we are, coming out in this wild weather watching for a ship that never comes in,” she said. “Every day for years we have come down to the wharf to wait for one who never comes. Will it always be thus, I wonder? Shall I go on waiting and hoping and loving till my hair turns gray, and will he never come?

Lion leaned his shaggy mane caressingly against her, and while she patted his black head with her white, jeweled hand, the steamer touched the wharf, landed a solitary passenger, and moved on majestically upon its way.

Nina Strangemore looked up after a minute, gave a smothered sigh, and turned back to her dog.

“Ah, Lion, my good dog, it is the same old story, ‘He cometh not,’” she said; and the magnificent animal gave a piteous whine, as if he comprehended the full measure of her wistful disappointment. He fell to licking her hands and gazing up at her with his dumb, affectionate eyes full of a mute sympathy that was almost painful to its recipient. She pushed him almost pettishly from her, and looked out again at the wide sea and the fast receding ship.

“How they come and go over the water like [Pg 15]white-winged birds,” she sighed, with a patient sorrow in her voice. “Ah, me, will they never bring Talbot home?”

A gentleman was coming along the level sands toward her—a tall, bronzed, handsome man, whose eyes lingered upon her with startled, irrepressible admiration. She met his gaze, and the rich color flew into her cheeks, and the light of a sudden, supreme happiness flashed into her great dark eyes. She made a few steps toward him, then quickly checked herself, and stood waiting with a bounding pulse and wildly beating heart.

The stranger came nearer, lifted his hat with courteous grace to the solitary girl, and passed on, followed by a low, inquiring growl from Lion, who did not quite know whether to regard him as friend or enemy.

But Nina Strangemore gazed like one petrified after the retreating form, and when it had passed from her sight, she knelt down upon the wet sands, put her arms around Lion’s black mane, and hid her white face there.

“Oh, Lion, Lion,” she sobbed, in an abandon of girlish sorrow. “He is home at last! Talbot, my husband, and he did not speak to me; he did not even remember me, his little Nina, his loving girl-wife! Oh, what shall we do, Lion, old fellow?”

While she kneels there desolately on the cold wet sands, we will briefly sketch her past for you, reader.

She was an heiress, this dark-eyed girl sobbing there as forlornly as if she had not a friend on earth. She had houses and land and gold, but all her vast possessions had not kept her life from being sad and lonely, for she was an orphan, and she had neither kith nor kin save a sour maiden aunt who lived with her in lonely state at the great house up yonder on the high bluff.

Five years ago she had been Nina Selwyn, a spoiled little girl of thirteen years, the idol of her father and her gentle step-mother, for Nina’s own mamma had died when her first-born was a toddling baby. Mr. Selwyn had mourned her devoutly for five years, and then he married a beautiful young widow with one son, Talbot Strangemore.

The second marriage resulted happily, perhaps the more happily because no children came to usurp the place of the loving, petted, and yet willful little Nina. Mrs. Selwyn was a good woman, and having no daughter of her own lavished all the love she could spare from her son upon her second husband’s only child. She was neither calculating nor mercenary yet as the years rolled on, vague, pleasant dreams came to her of a future in which the lives of Talbot Strangemore, her son, and of Nina Selwyn, her little step-daughter, were bound together with a flowery chain.

Mr. Selwyn shared these pleasant dreams. He had a profound admiration for his step-son, then a youth ten years the senior of little Nina.

Talbot Strangemore merited all the loving admiration [Pg 18]and pride that was bestowed upon him. He was noble, gifted, and remarkably handsome in a bold, manly style. He was in college, but all his vacations were spent at Selwyn Heights, his step-father’s stately residence, where he enjoyed himself intensely in the manly sports of hunting, fishing and rowing, delighting in such recreations after the confinement of his Alma Mater.

Little Nina, whose spirits were as gay and light as a wild bird’s, was his frequent companion at these times, and the young heiress regarded her step brother with a species of hero-worship that was carefully fostered by her parents, who, while they encouraged the affection of the pair, tried to preserve it from a fraternal cast. Nina was never permitted to call Talbot her big brother any more than he was allowed to term her his little sister. They were never suffered to forget that there was no tie of real kinship between them.

“For if they grow up loving each other as brother and sister they will never think of each other in any nearer, dearer light,” argued Mrs. Selwyn, and she took the greatest pains to manage affairs agreeably to the aim she had in view, although she gave no inkling [Pg 19]of her designs to the boy and girl for whom in innocent unconsciousness she was laying up a heritage of woe.

Both she and Mr. Selwyn thought it would be for the happiness of both, if they could one day be united in marriage. Talbot was so manly and gifted, but had very little money, while Nina had so much, and although she was a delicate, thin little creature now, she gave promise of future beauty of a rare and unusual type, for she had hair of the real golden shade and eyes as dark as pansies. She was thin and sunburned now, for they could never keep her in the house, but the tan would wear off when she was a young lady and she would be a real beauty, Mrs. Selwyn averred knowingly, and, managed rightly, Talbot could not help falling in love with the young heiress.

But when Talbot graduated at twenty-three with all the honors of his Alma Mater, Nina at thirteen was not making any very rapid strides toward being a charming young lady. She was such a willful, capricious, yet withal loving little thing, and her wishes were so absolute that her education had been dreadfully neglected. Mr. Selwyn loved her too [Pg 20]well to send her away from him to school, so he had employed governesses at home, who one after another resigned their situations in despair, declaring that Miss Selwyn would not attend to her books, and that she was a wretched little romp, who cared for nothing but boats, and dogs, and horses, and rough out-door sports.

Unfortunately, these charges were all quite true. Nina did hate books, and she did love to be out of doors all the time, gathering flowers in the splendid gardens and conservatories of Selwyn Heights, or boating fearlessly on the billowy sea, or riding at break-neck pace on her spirited white pony, with a grumbling groom galloping behind her. Thus life went on, until she was thirteen, and from time to time her doting parents would say, excusingly:

“The child is so thin and delicate that it is best to let her gain health and strength in her outdoor pursuits, that she first learned to love when she was Talbot’s little companion. There is time enough yet to restrain her and educate her before she is a young lady.”

Poor little Nina Selwyn, those were her happiest [Pg 21]days—those free, untroubled days that were soon to be only a memory—the sweetest memory in a life that in the coming time was to have many a thorn among its roses. For suddenly, from a sky that had hitherto been cloudless and serene, fell a swift, terrible bolt of fate.

Just before Talbot came home to prepare for the European tour that was to follow his college course, Mr. Selwyn died suddenly one evening while sitting peacefully in his chair watching a beautiful sunset scene. All his affairs were found in perfect order at the reading of the will. His large fortune was divided equally between his idolized daughter and his beloved wife, the latter being appointed Nina’s guardian.

But the loving wife did not live to discharge the sacred trust bequeathed her. She was a nervous, delicately-organized woman, and she never recovered the shock of her husband’s sudden death. In two weeks she followed him to the grave, leaving behind her the two whom she loved so well, and for whose future she had so hopefully plotted and planned—a future which she influenced as much as her limited [Pg 22]time on earth would permit her, for before she died, she had joined the hands of the beloved son and the simple, unformed girl of thirteen—had seen consummated the marriage that is the subject of our story.

That was all five years ago now, but as Talbot Strangemore walked slowly over the sand toward Selwyn Heights, memory recalled the past time freshly to his thoughts—memory mixed with pain and mad regret. He recalled his mother’s dying prayer that he would marry Nina Selwyn now in her innocent childhood, that she, his mother, might die in peace, knowing that her dearest wish was fulfilled, and that the happiness of the two she loved was secured.

“Yes, I know,” his mother answered, “and that is why I cannot bear to leave her alone in the world to be the future prey of designing people. It was her father’s wish and mine that she should be yours some day, but how can I tell what may happen if I die and leave her unprotected and uncared for, save by careless hirelings? Oh, Talbot, you have been a good son to me always. Do not fail me now!”

And so, because the young fellow was momentarily reckless and desperate, and because he was half distracted with grief over his dying mother, and could not say no to her earnest prayer, he yielded to her will.

“But Nina—what will she say?” he asked, thinking of the pale, large-eyed child who was so changed and subdued by her father’s death that she crept about the house a pallid, wistful little ghost, “Will she be willing?”

“Nina will do any thing I ask,” she replied, and the event proved that she was right, for after the child had been summoned to a private interview with her step-mother she came out with wet eyes and grieving [Pg 24]red lips and sought Talbot Strangemore in the library.

“Mamma has been telling me that you want to marry me,” she said, laying her small brown hand upon his arm, and looking at him with those sad, wet eyes like dusky pansies drowned in dew.

He laid his strong white hand softly over the little fingers that trembled on his arm.

“Oh, yes, for when mamma dies I shall have no one left to love me but you, and she says that if I do not marry you I may lose you too some day, so I will be your wife, and then you can take care of me always,” Nina replied, with childish directness, going over the specious arguments that Mrs. Selwyn had used to gain her compliance with her wish.

And so in this straightforward manner their strange troth was plighted and a few hours later they stood hand in hand by Mrs. Selwyn’s death-bed, and a wondering half disapproving man of God made the innocent child a bride. In another day she was motherless. Heiress of all the Selwyn wealth, and with all her life [Pg 25]before her, she was yet one to be pitied, for she had no one on earth but her husband, and he did not love her, and believed that he had made a great sacrifice when he had bound himself with all his future ambitions to that wan, uninteresting child.

“And what about my tour abroad, mother?” he said, when they were alone after the ceremony. “I do not believe I could bear to stay here when you—are gone away from me! But what shall I do with Nina? She is too young to be really my wife yet, shall I send her to school?”

“No,” she answered, “I will tell you what to do, Talbot, send for your maiden aunt in Baltimore to come and live with Nina, secure governesses for her and let her be educated thoroughly. By the time she is sixteen she will be old enough and cultivated enough for you to come home and claim your bride.”

The next day he and his child-bride stood to watch the last breath flutter over her gasping lips.

She drew Nina close to her side. “Talbot is your husband now, my darling,” she said, anxiously, “you will belong to him always, and he to you. Promise me now that you will give him all your love and all your life, that you will always try to secure his happiness.”

“I promise, mamma,” answered the weeping child, and the vow was registered in heaven.

She did not ask Talbot for the same promise she had exacted from the simple child, so innocent and ignorant of the world. She did not think it was necessary; she believed implicitly in her son’s faith and honor. And so having ordered their futures so far as lay in her finite power, she passed “to where beyond these voices there is rest.”

Talbot carried out her wishes and advice to the letter. He installed his maiden aunt and an accomplished teacher at Selwyn Heights, and when he had done that he went abroad, although Nina clung to him weeping, and besought him not to go.

“It is only for a little while,” he said, evasively, “And I shall write to you often, dear. You must be a good girl, Nina, and as soon as I get to New York I [Pg 27]will send you back a nice present to remember me by. Will you tell me what you would like to have, dear?”

He felt momentarily tender and sorry for the little girl who was grieving so much over his going, but in the next moment he was chagrined and half disgusted for she lifted her wet eyes from his breast and said, with transient brightness:

“Oh, if you please, I would like a great big, black Newfoundland puppy, Talbot.”

He promised and kept his word, but after that he forgot all about it, almost forgot his child-bride, too, or remembered her only as an incumbrance, for he stayed away five years instead of the three he had at first arranged for, and when at last he came back it was with bitter regret and reluctance.

“I have flung my life away, for what is life without happiness?” he was saying to himself, with impatient wrath when he passed Nina upon the sands that gray March afternoon, and he started with sudden admiration and delight at sight of her and forgot his bitter thoughts for a moment, for the girl was wonderfully lovely in her scarlet dress and cap with the loose gold curls of her hair falling around her like a [Pg 28]veil of sunshine. He thought too, that the magnificent Newfoundland added a picturesque touch to the lovely picture, but he had forgotten the episode of the “great big black Newfoundland puppy” that had so disgusted him at the time. In his thoughts he had forgotten to make allowance for the lapse of time too, just as Nina had forgotten that five years had improved her so much that it was a compliment to her beauty when her husband failed to know her.

“What a charming girl! A new edition of Una and the Lion,” he thought as he bowed and passed on his way.

Miss Drusilla Strangemore, Talbot’s aunt, was a tall angular lady in the fifties—a lady who detested men and whose opinion of the sex in general had not been improved by what [Pg 29]she called the “shilly-shallying” of her absent nephew.

“Dawdling over Europe these five years and more, leaving his poor little wife at home in this great, lonely house with nothing but me and the servants for company, not but what she thinks more of the black dog Talbot sent her than of the whole of us,” she would mutter to herself. “I say it’s a shame and a sin for him to neglect her so, and she bearing it all so patiently, and never breathing a word of complaint, although he has not even written her a letter for a year and more! I never liked men any how, and I like them less than ever now, seeing how shamefully my nephew has treated the poor little ignorant child, his mother fooled into marrying him just for the sake of the fortune her father left her!”

For this was the way that Mrs. Selwyn’s sister-in-law and the world at large regarded the strange marriage of Talbot and Nina. It was considered in the light of a purely mercenary scheme in which the innocent little heiress had been made the victim of a designing mother and son. But no one, not even the sour old maid, dared hint to the pure young maiden-wife [Pg 30]that she had been married for her money. Her trust in her absent husband was too flawless and perfect, her worship too entire and deep to admit of a doubt of him. Most purely and earnestly had she kept her vow that she would give all her life and all her love to him.

And now Miss Strangemore who was leisurely taking a cup of tea and some seed cakes in the cozy privacy of her own chamber was startled by the entrance of a servant who carried upon a salver a masculine looking square white card——she almost dropped the china cup out of her shaking fingers when she read upon it the name of Talbot Strangemore.

“At last!” she exclaimed, in blended sarcasm and surprise, and it was several minutes before she recovered herself sufficiently to tell the negro to apprise Mr. Strangemore that she would be with him directly.

But when she was left alone she dawdled over her tea and cakes, out of pure perversity.

“Why should I hurry myself?” she thought, grimly. “He has not made any haste in coming, certainly; and then, of course, Nina is with him. She went down to the wharf to meet him as she has done [Pg 31]every day for years, poor little simpleton! I will give them a little while to bill and coo.”

So Talbot Strangemore waited impatiently in the library almost half an hour before Nina’s grim chateleine appeared before him, stiff and stately in her black silk dress and point lace collar, her cap-border bristling with indignation at “the graceless young scamp,” whom, she said to herself, had perhaps only come home “to get a big slice of his wife’s money, and be off again!”

She was rather surprised when she found him all alone. She said to herself that he had missed meeting Nina after all.

He was not much disheartened at her chill, nonchalant greeting. He knew that his aunt despised men, and that she had never made much exception in his favor.

“Have you seen Nina?” she asked him, brusquely, adding, maliciously: “Not that I suppose you are in any hurry to meet your wife.”

Hardly as she judged him, she was unprepared for his agitated answer. He flung recklessly out of his [Pg 32]chair, and began to stride madly up and down the floor, while he said in hoarse, strained accents:

“You are quite right there, Aunt Drusilla. I wish indeed that I had never met her!”

She gazed keenly at the dark, handsome face, and she saw that he was laboring under intense excitement that had been rising to fever heat while he waited for her entrance in the solitude of the dim and quiet library. Before she could answer, he flung himself down again into a chair in front of her, and, lifting his eyes to her face, said, almost pleadingly:

“Tell me, Aunt Drusilla, do you not think with me that this marriage of mine with Nina Selwyn was a cruel and inexcusable outrage?”

Miss Strangemore regarded him in surprise a moment, then she answered, with the perfect frankness which often made her a disagreeable companion to thin-skinned people:

“Yes, indeed, I do consider it an outrage, Talbot, but I did not think you would have the grace to acknowledge it. I never did like your mother, but I could not have believed that she would do such a wicked thing on her death-bed as to take advantage of [Pg 33]that helpless child and bind her to you, so that you might get all her money.”

A deep, angry red flashed through the rich, clear bronze of Talbot Strangemore’s face. He tore, furiously, though with a trembling hand, at the drooping ends of his long, silky moustache.

“Aunt Drusilla, for shame’s sake, forbear! How dare you traduce the memory of my angel mother?” he cried, hotly.

“You began it yourself, sir, remember. You said it was a cruel and inexcusable outrage, and I agreed with you with all my heart.”

“But, Aunt Drusilla, you misunderstood me,” he replied. “I did not mean to throw a reflection on the memory of my mother. She was a good woman, and she was not envious of Nina’s fortune. She was only solicitous over the child’s future, and anxious to leave her in the care of one whom she knew and trusted. She told me that it was Mr. Selwyn’s cherished wish that Nina should some day become my wife; so I weakly yielded to her wishes, but, oh, what [Pg 34]a terrible mistake we all made in the consummation of that ill-starred marriage!” he added, in deep agitation.

Miss Strangemore gave him a scathing glance over the tops of her gold-bowed eye glasses.

“I begin to understand you, Talbot Strangemore,” she said, frigidly. “You do not mean that a wicked and inexcusable outrage was committed on Mr. Selwyn’s daughter in making her your wife, but that you were the one wronged, in being made her husband.”

He flinched when she put the real meaning of his words before him in her cold, matter-of-fact way, and grew crimson again.

“Perhaps I should not have said that,” he answered. “I—I did not mean to put it in such an offensive way. I did not mean to say one word of what I have said; but somehow, sitting here all alone, my nerves were unstrung by my thoughts, and I spoke out what was in my heart. I was a fool for my pains, for nothing can undo the folly of five years ago, least of all mere empty words.”

“I gather from your talk that you regret your marriage. Indeed, I surmised as much long ago, [Pg 35]from your shameful neglect of your wife!” said Miss Drusilla, sharply.

“Yes,” she replied, “Have you not stayed away from her five long years?”

“I know that,” he replied. “But I did not intend it for neglect. It was originally planned that I should stay three years, you know, and—somehow—they lengthened into five. I will tell you the truth, Aunt Drusilla. There were reasons why I could not bear to come. But, after all, you cannot call it neglect, for Nina was only a child—too young to be my wife yet, only in name.”

“Too young—she is in her nineteenth year,” said the old maid, tartly. “And let me tell you, young man, your mother was a married woman and you were born before she was as old as Nina is now!”

“Nina in her nineteenth year!” he exclaimed, “she is a woman then, how strange it seems! Do you know, Aunt Drusilla, that I have gone on all [Pg 36]these years thinking of Nina just as the child I left behind me!”

“She is greatly altered. You would not know her again,” said Miss Strangemore, thinking of the many charms of beautiful Nina.

“So much the worse. I used to like the child quite well. Perhaps it may be different now!”

“You might wait until you see her before you make up your mind at least,” his aunt said, with a curling lip.

“I despise men in general, and I see no reason to make an exception in your favor,” snapped the maiden lady, scornfully.

“And yet I am not a bad fellow as men go,” said Talbot Strangemore, self-excusingly. “Aunt Drusilla, I am going to tell you the truth now before I meet Nina, and then we will never speak of it again. [Pg 37]Somehow I think I shall feel better if I confess to someone.”

“I can guess your secret. It is an entanglement with some woman or other,” she said.

“Not an entanglement,” he said, with dignity. “I am not that kind of a man, Aunt Drusilla, but it is that my whole heart is so irrevocably given to another woman that the bare thought of taking Nina to my arms thrills me with dread and repulsion. I have fought many a battle with my heart, tried bravely to cast out the passion within me that is an insult to the girl who is my wife, but I have ignobly failed in every effort, and now having torn myself away from my idol, I have brought only a broken heart to lay in Nina’s shrine.”

He went on then to tell her his whole sad story, and neither of them dreamed of the white-faced girl in the next room, who had stolen in quietly just to catch the sound of her idol’s voice, and who had thus heard in horror and amazement the tale of his love for another and his repugnance to herself.

She went away presently very quietly to her own room with a face from which all the beauty and brightness [Pg 38]had suddenly been stricken as a flower is blighted by the frost of a night, leaving her pale and wild-eyed and forlorn.

She locked herself into the room and stood up white and agonized, looking her fate in the face.

“How dared she take him from me, that beautiful woman?” she muttered, bitterly, twisting her white hands in and out in anguish. “He belongs to me always, and I to him! Mamma told me so on her dying bed, and she would not have told me a falsehood. I shall go and see that woman and I shall tell her that she is a criminal before high heaven, for she has robbed me of my husband, and ruined all my life. What do they do with such women I wonder? Is there any punishment for a woman that steals the heart of another woman’s husband? If there is, I will find it out and punish her for her sin!”

Nina was half mad for the time over the terrible experience that had come to her. She had sorrowed long over her husband’s absence and silence, but the worst fear that had come to her was that he was dead. That he was cold, indifferent, false, had never once occurred to her. The magnitude of her discovery stunned her. She could not think clearly. She was only conscious of one feeling, and that was a bitter, burning jealousy and hatred of the woman that held Talbot Strangemore’s heart.

“He is sorry that I am his wife—he is angry with his dead mother because she made him marry me. Oh, how can I bear this terrible humiliation!” she moaned, pressing her white hands against her throbbing temples, while her heart felt as if it would break with its burden of despair.

Presently Kitty—her own, faithful Kitty, who had [Pg 40]been her maid ever since she, Nina, had been a little girl—came and knocked at her door.

“You may go away, Kitty, I do not want you now,” Nina said, in as natural a tone as she could assume.

“Open the door, Miss Nina, please, I have such joyful news for you,” cried Kitty, on the other side.

“Miss Strangemore wants you to come down at once. Your husband is come at last,” the maid bawled through the key-hole, sorely disappointed that she had missed seeing the joylight flash into the fair face of the young mistress she loved so well.

“Well, I never! I thought she’d be wild with joy, and she’s as cool as a cucumber!” muttered disconcerted Kitty, as she retired with the message.

Miss Strangemore was too much astonished for words. When she had heard from one of the servants [Pg 41]that Nina had come in, she had sent at once to her room, expecting in all good faith that the girl would come flying down the stairs to fling herself into the arms of her husband. The cool, almost curt reply amazed her, but Talbot Strangemore only laughed. The respite was indeed a relief.

“My wife apparently is no more anxious to meet me than I was to see her,” he said, lightly. “She gives me a chance to meet her under the least embarrassing circumstances; I commend her tact. Can you send a servant to the wharf, Aunt Drusilla, for my trunk, as I shall have to dress for dinner?”

“Of course. What else?” he exclaimed, in surprise, and arching his dark brows a little frowningly; but she did not explain. She could not tell him what she had been thinking about him in the privacy of her own room.

She had his trunks brought, and he went to the rooms that were always in readiness for him by Nina’s express orders, and where the furnishings and arrangements were perfect, while a vase of fresh flowers [Pg 42]always stood upon the mantel, breathing forth a fragrant welcome to the possible return of the master. He noted their sweetness and beauty, and when he had carefully made his toilet for the late dinner, he selected a rosebud and some delicious heliotrope for a boutonniere, but it did not once occur to him that Nina’s delicate fingers had culled these sweets from the wealth of the conservatory, and placed them there in anticipation of his coming, although his thoughts were busy with her as he fastened them upon his coat.

“She was very ceremonious, certainly, deferring our meeting until dinner,” he thought, with unconscious pique. “I hope she has not been brought up with exaggerated notions of her importance as an heiress. How ridiculous that would make me appear before my friends, who already consider me a martyr!”

He went down stairs, where he found his aunt waiting primly in the large, seldom used parlor, which had been lighted and warmed in honor of his coming. A sensation of pleasure came over him as he entered the handsomely furnished room, and realized that he was master of all this elegance and luxury. He [Pg 43]glanced around for the girl, the gift of whose small white hand had conferred it all upon him, but she was not visible.

“Nina is not down yet, but it is not many minutes to dinner, so she cannot delay her coming much longer,” said Miss Drusilla, interpreting his glance.

He took his stand on the hearth-rug and waited with his back to the glowing fire that the inclement March evening rendered necessary.

“It is very strange that you missed meeting her this evening,” pursued the old maid, reflectively. “Every day for years she and Lion have gone down to the wharf to see if the boat brought you home, and she was as punctual as usual this time.”

“I missed her, at all events,” said stupid Talbot Strangemore. “There was no one at the landing, and I met no one on the way to Selwyn Heights except a beautiful young lady with a black dog.”

“Why, you simpleton”—she was beginning, tartly, when she was interrupted by the opening of a door. A tall, white figure glided into the room.

“Mrs. Strangemore!” announced Miss Drusilla, maliciously, and she immediately retired from the room, leaving husband and wife alone and face to face.

“I must be dreaming,” Talbot Strangemore said to himself, for here in the center of the room gazing fixedly at him, was the lovely girl he had encountered on the sands that evening, only that the warm red merino had been exchanged for a soft, clinging white robe with misty laces and multitudinous knots and loops of silvery white satin ribbon, while Kitty who had been intent on making her mistress look as bride-like as possible, had actually rifled the orange trees in the conservatory of their costly blooms and adorned her so that the folds of her dress and the loose veil of her golden hair exhaled the delicious fragrance of real orange blossoms as she moved slowly across the room to greet the handsome man who gazed at her in perplexity a moment, and then advanced to meet her, catching both her white hands in his as he said, with a tender intonation:

“Can this really be Nina, my little child-bride grown so beautiful and womanly?”

“Yes, it is Nina,” she replied, but when he bent down to kiss her curved red lips, she crested her golden head in haughty refusal.

“What, not even one kiss from my bride after all these years apart?” Talbot said, banteringly, and she answered, with girlish dignity:

“You know although we are married, we are almost strangers to each other,” and Talbot laughed a little as he answered:

“Yes, strangers, for we did not even recognize each other when we met upon the sands this afternoon.”

He was surprised when she looked steadily at him with those great dark eyes full of blended fire and softness and answered:

“You knew me, and yet you did not speak. Why was that, Nina?” She had gone over to the corner of the hearth and was standing there with her white arm resting on the low, black marble mantel. He followed her and looked anxiously into her beautiful, pale face for a reply.

“I really do not know. Perhaps I was disappointed at your failure to recognize Lion and me, or perhaps, I thought that our greetings might well keep a little longer.”

“My failure to know you again was a compliment of the highest type,” said Talbot Strangemore. “I had never dreamed that the little girl I left behind me would blossom out into such a rare and radiant maiden. Do not look at me so incredulously, my darling. Indeed, you are beautiful, and in those white robes and real orange flowers you look queen-like, bride-like. Does it not seem to you, Nina, like a new bridal hour?”

Carried away by the influence of her marvelous beauty and her strange reserve, he would have continued in the same strain, but the girl did not heed him. She was gazing with horrified eyes at the bride-like robe in which her maid had dressed her. She tore the orange blossoms from her breast and hair and threw them disdainfully upon the floor.

“Kitty has done this, and I did not notice! How [Pg 47]dared she make me so ridiculous?” she cried, bursting into a torrent of humiliated tears while she hid her shamed face in her hands.

Talbot Strangemore suddenly remembered the little girl who had wept so dolorously upon his breast five years ago, and he would have taken her to his arms again but she repulsed him. He retreated to his original position upon the hearth-rug, and stood watching her with puzzled eyes, until, her brief tempest of passion over, she dashed the tears from her cheeks and looked at him half wistfully under the long black fringes of her lashes.

“You must blame Kitty, really,” she said, “I—I did not know that I was actually attired as a bride coming to the arms of a husband. You see I was unnerved, agitated, by your sudden coming, and I did not notice what my poor, silly Kitty was putting on me. I am ashamed to think that she has made me remind you of that long past event that you——that I——would both so gladly forget. If you will excuse me I will go and change this inappropriate dress,” and she pulled angrily at the silvery loops of white satin ribbon.

“It is not inappropriate, and I will not excuse you,” said Talbot, in a very winning voice. He had already gathered the scattered orange blossoms from the floor, and now he came up to her and said gently:

She could have killed herself for yielding, but when he laid his hand lightly but firmly on her shoulder she could not say him nay. An electric thrill ran over her and she remained perfectly still and silent while he fastened the wax-white flowers again upon her corsage and in the soft curls of her hair, retaining a single one himself which he placed with the rose-bud and heliotrope upon his coat. While he was yet bending over her, dinner was announced, and drawing her white hand through his arm, he led her to the dining room.

Miss Drusilla, who was waiting for them, studied the two faces anxiously. Talbot’s had certainly acquired a more animated expression, but Nina was very unlike herself, pale, distrait, almost proud.

“What is the matter with the child? Is she already disappointed with her wretch of a husband?” the old maid wondered within herself.

Miss Drusilla’s wonder grew and grew when, after dinner, they all returned to the parlor, Nina treated her husband more distantly than she would have done an ordinary stranger. Her courtesy was all of the most stately fashion. She played at his request on the grand piano, but it was with automaton-like precision, and the brilliant pieces she selected had nothing sweet or tender in them. Miss Drusilla thought of the pathetic song “If” that was oftenest on the girl’s lips, and she marvelled within herself.

“Perhaps it is only maidenly shyness, after all. His sudden coming has frightened the child,” she reflected. “He should have written.”

“It is more than a year ago since we have received a line from you. We had begun to believe that you must have died abroad.”

“And you both believe me a villain of the deepest dye,” he said, flashing a swift look from her face to Nina’s. “But, indeed, I am not so bad as that. I wrote to you and Nina—not very often, for I received no replies—but at least several times within the last year. My last letter—dated from Baltimore two days ago—bade you expect me to-day.”

“We did not receive it,” announced Miss Drusilla, with no abatement of her frigid air.

“I see that you are skeptical on the subject,” he said, with some chagrin. “But I really wrote, although my letters have perhaps miscarried. But you, Aunt Drusilla, and you, Nina, might have written to say that you had not heard from me.”

He looked across at the pale, beautiful face of his wife. She answered, almost inaudibly:

“But I did not receive your letters”—he said, quickly. “You see, I have been yachting for a year and more—the guest of my friend, Cameron, from Baltimore. He came abroad with some friends, and I came back with them. I thought that my roving life explained the non-reception of letters from home, but you should have received mine; I cannot understand why you did not.”

“I gave Cameron my letters to forward. What did he do with them? Has there been treachery any where?”

He said to himself that this was the reason of Nina’s cold reserve and dignity. She resented with a woman’s pride his long absence and his strange silence. She would forgive him now that she knew the reason.

But when he looked at her he saw no change in the cold proud face with its flower-like lips and great slumbrous dark eyes whose thick drooping fringe hid the fire and passion within her. He decided that there was something else yet. Nina was not glad to have [Pg 52]him home again. She did not love him now as the girl Nina had loved her boyish playfellow long ago.

“There are many changes in five years. What if she, too, has learned to love another?” he thought, feeling suddenly hot and cold, and distinctly angry all together.

He walked hastily over to the window, drew back the heavy curtains of velvet and lace, and looked out. A full moon was lighting the bare March landscape into dreary splendor. The glass roof of the long conservatory was silvered by its beams. The terraced walks beneath the window shone whitely and coldly. Farther on, the great white-capped waves of the mysterious sea rolled on with a hollow murmur to the ocean. He looked back at Nina with a sudden impulse.

“Are you afraid of the chilly night, or will you put a wrap on, and walk on the terrace with me?” he asked.

She raised her dark eyes to his face with an air of surprise, and shivered perceptibly.

“It is too cold. Pray excuse me,” she replied, [Pg 53]while Miss Drusilla hopped up with an audible sniff, and said with dignity:

Talbot Strangemore could not repress a smile at the absurd action of his exceedingly high-tempered aunt. He said, hastily:

But Miss Strangemore’s stiff black silk had already rustled across the threshold. He looked at Nina, half pityingly.

“I am afraid that my aunt has not been a very charming companion for you all these years,” he said.

“She has been all kindness,” Nina answered hastily. “Then, too, I had my governess. She was a very gentle, lovable lady.”

“You should have retained her when your education was finished, as a companion,” said Talbot Strangemore.

“Do you think so?” she asked, “but you see that was impossible. She was engaged to be married all those years, and she left me to become a companion to a husband who worshiped her, and who had grown impatient of waiting.”

The light of the lamps shining full on his splendidly handsome face, showed that the delicate shaft had struck home. He winced slightly, said, “Ah-h?” in an embarrassed tone, and then a silence ensued, which he broke at length by an abrupt change of the subject:

“There is something that I ought to tell you, Nina, as the mistress of Selwyn Heights. My friends with whom I have been yachting—Cameron and the rest—have threatened to make an unceremonious descent upon us to-morrow. Of course I would rather they did not—so soon—but they have been so kind to me, I could really say nothing when they said they were so anxious to meet my young wife, and as they [Pg 55]were yachting in these waters, they would run into Selwyn Heights to-morrow. Can you, will you, receive them, Nina? Or will it be inconvenient for you to entertain them?”

He wondered why she grew as pale as her trailing white robe, why she held her white hands so tightly together in her lap, why she was silent so long before she answered in a dull, strange voice:

“The thought does not please you,” he said, quickly, and with a ring of offended pride in his tone. “Very well, Nina, you shall not be disturbed. This is your house, your home, and I will see that my friends do not intrude upon you.”

She rose quickly from her seat and looked him through with her proud, pure gaze.

“You quite misunderstood me, Mr. Strangemore,” she said, with quiet dignity. “You are master here as I am mistress. Your friends have a right to come to Selwyn Heights, I am ready to welcome them here. I had no intention of declining the honor of their visit. I will go now and consult with Aunt Drusilla, as to the arrangements for their entertainment.”

She swept to the door with queenly grace. He followed her almost against his own will, for her looks and tones although quiet and well-bred, had been a tacit repulse to him.

She paused on the threshold, a slim, white figure, full of enchanting girlish curves and supple grace, looking back at him.

“But I shall see you again to-night,” he said, taking her hand in his and looking tenderly at the beautiful face.

She drew it quickly away and a hot blush stained her white brow and cheeks. Her young bosom heaved beneath its lace and flowers.

“No, not until to-morrow,” she answered, with something like a passionate protest in her young voice. “You know we are like strangers yet.”

“Good-night, then, my beautiful Nina,” he said, gently, but she shrank from the offered caress, and ran swiftly away from him.

“By Jove, how beautiful she is,” he cried. “Mother was right, she has developed into a beauty of the rarest type. She is not like Sibyl or the rest; charming as they are there is something rarer yet about this girl my mother chose for my wife. What if I should suddenly fall in love with the fate I have raved against for long years! But, heavens, how angry Sibyl would be if she knew that I was actually thinking tenderly of my lovely and reserved young wife? What a pity that fate ever threw that little enchantress in my way again!”

He went out on the terrace alone and smoked a cigar in a fierce, irritated fashion, gazing up now and then at the tall, dark front of the house, and wondering idly which was his wife’s window, while all alone at the darkened casement of her room, Nina watched him with heavy, woeful eyes.

She had gone up to her dressing-room and hastily huddled out of Kitty’s keen sight a grey traveling-dress and cloak, that she had laid out to don that night.

“I shall not need them yet,” she said. “How strange that instead of my going away to seek my [Pg 58]rival to-night, she is coming here under my own roof to-morrow. He will actually bring her here, that fair woman he loves, and they will flaunt their love under my wretched eyes and madden me with misery, until I give him the freedom he craves, either through the horrible mire of a divorce court, or—or, by the straight road of death! I have sworn an oath, and I shall have to keep it. Oh, mamma, did you realize what you were doing when you bade me give your son all my love and all my life, and to try always to secure his happiness? I do not believe you even dreamed that you were pledging me to a terrible sacrifice!”

Very different are Miss Drusilla’s thoughts and feelings, for she is scolding vigorously in the house-keeper’s room over the influx of unexpected guests to-morrow.

“It don’t make one bit of difference to me, Miss Strangemore,” that worthy person placidly assures her. “I prides myself on never being taken at a disadvantage! All will be in readiness for your friends, ma’am.”

“Don’t call them my friends!” snaps the irate [Pg 59]spitfire. “They’re no friends of mine, let me tell you; and I think they might have stayed away for decency’s sake, until Talbot Strangemore got acquainted with his wife. It’s outrageous, I say, crowding into Selwyn Heights at such a delicate time!”

Perhaps Talbot Strangemore thinks the same thoughts, pacing up and down the terrace before the tall, dark house, idly admiring its splendid proportions, and all unconscious of the brooding shadow of a coming tragedy.

“Talbot, where can I see you alone a moment? I am so anxious to speak to you privately. I hurried with my dressing purposely, so that I might have you to myself before the others come down!”

A snowy hand, sparkling with diamonds, fluttered down on Talbot Strangemore’s arm and a pair of [Pg 60]seductive blue eyes looked up into his proud dark ones. An uneasy frown drew his brows together, and he mentally ejaculated:

To-morrow evening had come, and with it had punctually appeared Mr. Strangemore’s self-invited guests. There were all in all three ladies and four gentlemen. Talbot and his aunt had received and welcomed them, and now all had gone to their rooms to dress for dinner. One indeed had finished her toilette and come down before the others to the elegant parlor where, as she had hoped and expected she found Talbot Strangemore alone.

She was a petite, flaxen-haired fairy with a milk-white skin, rosy cheeks, and large limpid blue eyes that usually wore a look of infantine guilelessness and confidence that impressed one with the idea that she was sixteen instead of six and twenty, her real age. She was as exquisitely pretty as a doll, and her dress of soft blue silk and creamy-hued lace, with ornaments of torquoise and pearls, enhanced her dainty charms.

But, lovely, winning, as she was, the frown [Pg 61]between Talbot Strangemore’s eyes was a deep one as he looked down at her and answered:

“Excuse me, Sibyl, but there is no time for us to talk privately now. I shall have to remain in here to entertain my guests who will be coming down at any moment.”

“I don’t believe you want to talk to me, there,” she said, “I thought you’d be just dying to see me again, but I see how it is—the girl-wife has rivalled me in your fickle heart already. Oh, Talbot, Talbot, I did not believe you could be so cruel to me!”

“Do not make a scene, for Heaven’s sake, Sibyl,” he said, impatiently, “I don’t go in for hysterics, you know. Come into the conservatory and look at the flowers. If you must talk to me now, I suppose you can have an opportunity there.”

A gleam of triumph brightened her eyes as he drew her into the conservatory, that had a door opening from the parlor. She slipped her hand through [Pg 62]his arm in a pretty, confiding fashion, and began to talk to him eagerly.

The parlor began to fill up quickly with the guests who strolled in one after another. Miss Drusilla and her niece entered, Nina in her pretty bride-like white again, with five rows of great, moon-white pearls shining around the slender column of her graceful throat. Some womanly longing to look as lovely as she could in the eyes of her rival had made her quite quiescent under Kitty’s loving hands this evening. The result was a lovely, snow-white maiden, whose own wine-dark eyes, golden hair, and girlish bloom, set off the whiteness of her robe admirably. She greeted the guests with graceful ease, although each one noted her single, quick, disappointed glance around the room.

“Strangemore has acted like a fool, dangling after that little coquette, while this beautiful creature was waiting for him at home!”

“We are all here now except Mr. Strangemore and Sibyl,” said Miss Mason. “Does any one know if Mrs. St. Alban is down yet?”

No one seemed to know, and Nina crossed the [Pg 63]room to the conservatory, obeying an idle fancy for a rosebud. She stepped under the broad arch that led into it, and disappeared from view for a moment—only a moment, for then she came hurrying back with a handful of pink geraniums, snatched at random. Her face was as white as her dress, her dark eyes blazed with indignation. She looked at pretty Miss Mason, and said, in a trembling, incoherent voice:

And the beautiful young face, all untutored in the art of hiding the emotions of the heart, betrayed its bitter, burning jealousy to all.

“He is giving her some flowers—we must have some, too!” both the ladies cried, and they rushed to the door of the conservatory.

Far down the flowery vista of sweetness, they saw Talbot Strangemore standing motionless, while Sibyl St. Alban leaned her fair head on his breast, weeping bitterly.

They turned back quickly as Nina had done, but they could not meet the dark eyes of the girl. They tried to talk of other things.

But that terrible Miss Drusilla watching them closely, said to herself grimly and with not very choice phraseology, that she “smelt a rat in the pantry,” and she immediately arose and plunged into the odorous green shadows of the conservatory.

She did not start and turn back as the others did. She walked straight on toward the beautiful siren who was laying her head on Talbot’s breast and sobbing, with bitter reproach and anger:

Miss Drusilla walked straight up to them, and Talbot lifted his head with a frightened start.

“Talbot,” said the grim spinster, “I hope your pretty young friend hasn’t heard any bad news that some of her friends are dead. She is certainly taking on as if she had! I expect some of her lady friends could comfort her better than you could!”

Sibyl St. Alban, the charming young widow, lifted her head from its resting place and flashed a steady glance into Miss Drusilla’s scornful eyes. From that moment the two women knew themselves as enemies.

“I expect Aunt Drusilla is right, Sibyl. Let us [Pg 65]return to our friends,” Mr. Strangemore said in a short tone of displeasure, and he led her into the parlor, hoping devoutly that no one would observe the pink rims around her eyes which had shed such angry tears.

Too much annoyed himself to notice the distrait looks of the others, Talbot led his fair enchantress across the room to where his unloved wife was sitting, Cameron hovering attentively by her side.

“Mrs. St. Alban, my wife,” he said, simply, but every ear in the room except Nina’s was struck by the tender pride that breathed in those two words “my wife.”

Nina arose and they bowed to each other. Sibyl St. Alban drew her breath hard when she took her first look at her rival.

There was a proud, fearless scorn and deep reproach in the dark eyes that met her own in one swift, quickly withdrawn glance.

Then dinner was announced, and every one breathed freer, as for a few moments, as Virgie Mason whispered to her partner at table, there had seemed to be suppressed thunder and lightning in the air.

“Mrs. Strangemore, I think yours is the most romantic marriage I ever heard of. You were the merest child, weren’t you?” said Virgie Mason, curiously.

The gentlemen were lingering over their cigars, and the ladies had gone back to the parlor. Virgie, a pretty and very voluble young lady, started the after-dinner conversation with the above remark.

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” Miss Drusilla snapped to herself. “Now, what under heaven does that chatterbox want to discuss Nina’s marriage for? And before that hateful St. Alban’s woman, too!”

She hoped that Nina would, as she mentally phased it, “shut her up;” but the girl only answered, in a dreamy sort of way:

Sibyl St. Alban flashed her a look of hate under her drooping lids. Only eighteen, while she was twenty-six.

“Were you very much impressed with the importance of your position—married, although but a child in years?” continued inquisitive Virgie, while her bosom friend, Miss Starr, tried to telegraph her a warning glance, but failed utterly, because Virgie’s grey eyes were fixed admiringly on Nina’s agitated face, as she answered, slowly:

“I was very much impressed by the dying words of Talbot’s mother addressed to me. I have never forgotten one single word.”

“They were solemn words, perhaps,” the girl said, with irrepressible curiosity.

“Yes,” her hostess answered. “Would you like to hear them? These were the words she said:”

“‘Talbot is your husband now, my darling. You will belong to him always, and he to you. Promise me now that you will give him all your love and all your life, that you will always try to secure his happiness.’”

The blue-eyed beauty flashed her a furtive look of defiance, but her heart sank with fear. It seemed to her that Nina had already penetrated her secret, and that she was appealing to the dead against her.

“You promised her, I know,” said Virgie, with that confidence with which one young, noble heart reads another.

“Yes, I promised her,” Nina answered, and suddenly at the thought of all the wasted love and trust she had lavished on Talbot Strangemore a pulse in her heart seemed to snap asunder—her bitter pride seemed to fail her—she broke down before them all, and hiding her face in her hands, sobbed passionately.

“Oh, I was too thoughtless, making you talk about those long past things; I am so sorry! Do forgive me dear Mrs. Strangemore,” cried Virgie, full of compunction.

“Let her alone, please, she is not used to being so badgered,” she cried, testily. “Nina, my dear, let me [Pg 69]take you to your room until you feel better—or let me call Talbot.”

“Not for worlds,” shivered the girl, dashing the tear-drops from her eyes, and turning them full of superb wrath upon Sibyl St. Alban. “Why should you call him to my side to comfort me?” she flashed. “He is not mine, no, not even though God and his mother gave him to me! He belongs to that woman there, who this evening put her arms around him and rested her head on his breast. Do not look at me so strangely, all of you, I know all that you thought was hidden from me! Aunt Drusilla, I heard all that Talbot confided to you, yesterday. I know that Talbot Strangemore is my husband in name only, for this woman here who cast him aside when he was a boy to marry a richer man, has thrown her fetters around him again. She is cruel, heartless, shameless, for she kept him from me all the time while I was waiting for him and loving him so truly. She is false and wicked and I hate her for what she has done—”

“I will not hush!” the girl raved, madly, “she is a wicked woman, and I pray God to punish her for her [Pg 70]sin. I will never forgive her for what she has done by the power of her cruel beauty. I—”

She looked up, saw Talbot Strangemore gazing at her in wonder and dismay from the open door-way and with an inarticulate moan of shame, she fell forward senseless and apparently lifeless, at Miss Drusilla’s feet.

“Oh, Talbot, Talbot,” she cried, lifting her humid blue eyes to his face, appealingly, “Your wife has insulted me cruelly! She has been saying the most dreadful things to me. She hates me, she says, and she has called me all sorts of bad names, and——”

But he checked the torrent of complaint by putting her firmly aside, while his dark eyes flashed her a look so stern that she quailed beneath it.

“Sibyl, I have no time to hear your complaints now,” he said, impatiently. “My wife needs me. I must attend to her.”

She threw herself, weeping, upon a silken sofa, and Talbot hastened on to the spot where Nina lay white and motionless, with the veil of her golden hair about her. He was frightened when he saw how white and rigid was the lovely young face.

“It is only a faint,” said Miss Drusilla, “But I wish you would carry her to her room, Talbot.”

“If you will lead the way,” he replied; and the ladies exchanged glances. What a strange husband not even to know where his wife’s room was.

He took the slender young form up tenderly in his strong arms, and followed Miss Drusilla from the room. Mrs. St. Alban sent a long look, full of hatred, after the retreating forms.

“I will be revenged for this,” she muttered, clenching her tiny fist angrily under the silken folds of her dress. “I will not be thrown aside for that impertinent, black-eyed minx! So she saw me with him in the conservatory, did she? Well, I meant that she should. That theatrical scene was intended for [Pg 72]her benefit. She is madly jealous; she knows already that he loves me, that he has loved me for years. I intended that she should know it, but she has found it out by Talbot’s bungling, not by my telling. That is best. All is working well for my purpose; all but Talbot himself. How dare he throw me over after all our hopes and plans? But he shall not do it. I will not give him up. I will yet win him for my husband. I love him, and I will not give him up to that disdainful heiress, not if he were hers by even a stronger tie than he is!”

Dashing the angry tears from her cheeks, she rose and trailed her rich silken robes slowly over the floor to where the two young girls were whispering together.

“Did you ever hear such an ill-bred, unprovoked attack?—and in her own house, too?”—she exclaimed, “I never was so insulted in my life! I shall go back to Baltimore in the morning. If Duke Cameron won’t take me in the yacht, I’ll go on the earliest steamer!”

“I want to go, too,” said Virgie Mason, “somehow I feel mean, although I didn’t dream that I should [Pg 73]cause such a scene by my idle curiosity. But, oh, Sib, I love Mrs. Strangemore, and I feel sorry for her. Only fancy her feelings! she saw you—we all saw you—among the flowers, with your arms around Talbot Strangemore and your head on his breast,” and she flashed a look that was almost contempt upon the flaxen haired blonde.

Mrs. St. Alban had the grace to color under the reproachful glance of those pure young eyes, then she crested her head defiantly.

“How could I help it if Talbot Strangemore caught me in his arms and kissed me and cried out that he was wretched in his marriage to that girl?” she said. “He has been in love with me six years, as you all know. I threw him over once for Mr. St. Alban, and since my husband’s death you know he has come back again as loving as ever. I am sorry for the girl, but how can I help Talbot’s loving me so?”

“But indeed, Sibyl, I rather think you encouraged him to flirt with you—didn’t you now?” said frank Virgie.

“Oh, Virgie Mason, you ought to be ashamed of yourself! How can you even hint such a thing? I [Pg 74]encourage a married man’s folly and misplaced affection! you know me better than that although you talk to me so! I wish I had never allowed myself to be persuaded to come to this dreadful place!” wept Mrs. St. Alban, hiding her face in her tiny lace handkerchief.

“I thought that you were the first one that proposed coming,” said Helen Starr, rather drily, but the wounded widow was saved the necessity for a reply by the entrance of the gentlemen.

Candid Virgie immediately blurted out the whole story of the scene that had passed. They all looked very grave when they heard it. Talbot’s infatuation for the beautiful widow had long been patent to all, and they had heretofore made a jest of it: Now that they had come to Selwyn Heights and seen the beautiful young neglected wife and heard her indignant plaint the affair suddenly assumed a different aspect.

“We should not have come here at all. It was an unwarrantable intrusion,” said Duke Cameron, who was the prince of good fellows, immensely rich, and as generous as a king to his friends. “I think we must all go away in the morning.”

“That is just what I was saying before you came in,” cried the widow, eagerly, “I have been cruelly insulted by poor Talbot’s wife, and if you all will not go with me, I shall go alone! I do think however, that that girl ought to apologize to me for what she said. I am not to blame for her husband loving me! We were engaged when he was a student at college, and how could I help it if he went on loving me after I threw him over for one whom I liked better than——”

Her torrent of words was interrupted by the sudden entrance of Talbot himself. He came up to them pale, but composed.

“I can guess what you are talking of,” he said, seeing how silent they all suddenly became. “I am very sorry for all that has happened this evening. I hope no one will blame my wife. She is but a child in her innocence and ignorance of the world. I take the blame upon myself. I have neglected her, forgotten her, and acted a dastardly part for which the devotion of my whole future can scarce atone.”

He looked so shamed and contrite that every one was sorry for him but Sibyl, at whom he did not look [Pg 76]while he was speaking, for he well knew that his words would make her bitterly angry.

“I love your sweet Nina dearly, and I do not blame her one bit! Please tell us if she is any better, Mr. Strangemore?”

“I left her with her maid and my aunt. They think she will soon be better,” he replied, gratefully.

He did not tell her that Miss Drusilla had sent him out of the room with the bitter words:

“Now go back to your charming widow! It will only make Nina worse to come to and find you here. I dare say she hates you now as much as she has loved you these five years. And no wonder, for any one who could prefer that little simpering doll to this beautiful girl, deserves for every sensible woman to hate him!”

“But I have a right to stay by my wife’s side, Aunt Drusilla, and I cannot bear to leave her like this,” he remonstrated, glancing apprehensively at the lovely, death-like face that Kitty was convulsively weeping over.

But the excited old lady actually opened the door, took him by the shoulder, and shoved him out into the hall.

“You may just go, for men-folks are always in the way at times like this,” she said. “I’ll send you word by Kitty when she gets better.”

“Ask her to let me see her as soon as she revives,” he said, “I have something very particular to tell her,” and then he went down to the parlor, carrying with him a troubled consciousness of that lovely, death-white face, but with no presentiment of the years that would elapse before he looked again upon its girlish beauty.

“We shall go away in the morning,” Duke Cameron said to him. “Indeed I believe we owe you all an apology for coming at this time. It was very thoughtless and ill-advised. I hope you will excuse us. We should have remembered that you would want [Pg 78]some time to make your wife’s acquaintance before your friends came to see her.”

In their secret hearts every one knew that Sibyl St. Alban had been the motive power in their coming, that she had instigated and urged it. No one had considered the girl-wife until now. Indeed every one’s sympathies had been with Sibyl and Talbot, the two who were openly devoted to each other, and who were cruelly debarred from a union by the existence of an unloved wife whom Talbot himself represented as homely and unlovable.

Sibyl had gone so far as to circulate hints among her friends of an intended divorce that would make Talbot free to marry where he pleased, but this had not been openly discussed, although no one blamed Talbot much for wishing to shake off the fetters that had been thrust upon him. Now since they had come to Selwyn Heights, since they had heard the plaint of pain from the stricken wife, they became suddenly roused to the enormity of what they had been contemplating so carelessly, and there was something almost like contempt in Duke Cameron’s voice as he said:

“I wish from my soul we had not come here. You ought to have told us to stay away, Talbot.”

He was glad that they retired early to their rooms that night, glad that they were going away in the morning. He said to himself that it would have been well, indeed, if they had stayed away as they said.

Kitty came at last to say that her mistress had revived from her long swoon, and was better.

“No, sir,” and Kitty shook her head in unconscious imitation of Nina’s imperative little nod. “She will not see you to-night.”

“Go and ask her to give me only ten minutes, Kitty. Tell her I pray her, I implore her, to grant me even that short space of time.”

“She utterly declines to see you for even one minute. Be merciful, Talbot, and do not insist upon an interview that cannot be anything but painful to both. Indeed, I should think you must feel ashamed to face the poor girl. It seems she heard everything yesterday; [Pg 80]and, then, she saw you in the conservatory with that woman to-night.”

“I do not know, but I should think that she would separate herself from you. Any woman of spirit would!” said the man-hating spinster, decidedly.

“I will write her a letter, and I will send it to her to-night,” he said, throwing himself down before his desk in feverish haste. “I will tell her what a fool I have been, and how I repent my folly! I cannot wait until to-morrow.”

Miss Drusilla had already retired, but Kitty lingered by the fire, where Nina, wrapped in a pink [Pg 81]cashmere dressing-gown, lay back in a great white-draped easy-chair, and stared into the leaping flame within the steel bars of the grate.

“But it seems so lonesome-like for you, and you aren’t well, I’m sure,” urged the girl.

Thus summarily dismissed, Kitty had no resource but to go, yet the girl’s heart ached to leave her there solitary and forlorn, with her golden head bowed sadly on her jewelled hand.

“A strange home-coming for the master of a house,” she thought. “Oh, I wonder what it is that has come between Mr. Strangemore and my sweet young mistress, and made them both so unhappy.”

Nina sat very still, gazing sadly into the fire, her sweet lips quivering, her young heart throbbing with pain and shame. She would have given all the wealth her father had left her to have recalled her mad and jealous outbreak that night.

“What must he think of me? Why did he wish to see me? To upbraid me, perhaps, for my discourtesy to his charming and beloved guest. Ah, heaven, I do not think I can ever, ever, meet him again! I have too bitterly humiliated myself by my folly of to-night,” she moaned, aloud.

The door opened and shut softly, unheeded by the girl absorbed in her own sad and gloomy reflections. A petite form clothed in soft, rich blue, glided across the floor, and stood beside Nina’s chair.

With what a cooing, melodious murmur the words fell upon Nina’s ears. She looked up with a start.

“Mrs. St. Alban,” she exclaimed, haughtily, “Why this unwelcome intrusion?”

The great blue eyes lifted to Nina’s flashing dark ones, filled with quick tears.

“Oh, do not speak to me so harshly, so coldly,” implored Sibyl. “You cannot guess what I suffer, Mrs. Strangemore, or you would forgive me for seeking your presence thus by stealth, to exculpate myself in your eyes from all the cruel aspersions you cast upon me to-night. Oh, you beautiful, fortunate [Pg 83]child, you have wronged me bitterly. You cannot in justice refuse to hear my defense!”

They stood looking at each other, the unloved wife and the triumphant rival, in silence a moment after Sibyl’s artful appeal, then Nina answered, slowly:

“What defense can you make? I saw you myself with your head upon my husband’s breast.”

“But it was his fault not mine,” said Sibyl, quickly, “Oh, Nina, my child, you must listen to me while I confess all! You took Talbot from me five years ago! We were engaged to be married and your mother thrust that unwelcome marriage upon him and ruined both our lives. Out of pique I married another, but I never loved him, for my heart was broken by Talbot’s loss. When Mr. St. Alban died and left me a rich widow two years ago I went to Europe. I—I met Talbot in London. He was about to go home to you, dear Nina.”

A sob, and the tiny lace handkerchief fluttered up to her wet eyes with a waft of perfume. Nina stood before her cold, pale, statue-like, listening in silence.

“Indeed, indeed, it was not my fault that he [Pg 84]lingered and lingered, putting off his return from day to day,” sighed Sibyl. “I will not deny that I loved him still, but I would not have kept him from his wife, oh, no, no, no! But, poor fellow, he was mad for love of me, and I could not drive him away. Oh, you cold-hearted child, do not look at me so scornfully. We loved each other so dearly, and we had been so cruelly parted, was it any wonder that we liked to be together, or that Talbot raved against the child his mother had forced him to marry for the sake of sordid money?”

She saw the beautiful face before her grow crimson with shame and anger, and laughed within herself.

“Ah, that was a trump card,” she thought, cruelly, and she continued in her soft, sad, regretful tones:

“Ah, we were perfectly wild with joy in these first days of my freedom. We dreamed happy, impossible dreams of freedom for Talbot, too—freedom that should give him back to me as in the days before he forged those fetters he hated so madly!”

The flush of shame on the lovely face before her [Pg 85]grew deeper. A low moan of pain escaped Nina’s lips.

“Oh, how cruel you are! Why do you tell me these dreadful things?—me, his wife?” she exclaimed, reproachfully.

“To defend myself,” Sibyl answered, pitilessly. “You said crueler things to me down stairs to-night, and yet I had done nothing wrong. I loved Talbot, that was all my sin. I loved him, and when I was saying a last farewell to all my hopes I laid my head upon his breast and wept, that was all!”

“Yes, my hopes,” Sibyl answered, watching the lovely shame stricken face before her with keen eyes. “Before Talbot came home to you he told me that he meant to procure a divorce from you that he might marry me!”

“Oh, God!” Nina cried, and reeled backward into her chair like one death-smitten.

“Do not take it so hard, Nina,” said the smooth, musical voice. “I have more to tell you yet.”

“I must for in this lies my whole defense,” Sibyl answered, sadly. “You think very hard of Talbot now, but you will retract your opinion when you hear that when he came home and saw you he repented his promise to me!”

“Yes,” Sibyl answered, sobbingly. “He told me that we must say an eternal farewell to our love and our hopes. He had found out that you loved him devotedly, and he was so sure that you would contest a divorce that he was afraid to ask your consent. He said that you were his wife and that we must sacrifice ourselves on the altar of your happiness. We kissed and parted for an eternal farewell! Oh, Nina, Nina,” she fell on her knees with a sudden theatrical semi-tragic air, “You cannot have the heart to be angry with us any longer when you know that we are so unhappy, and that we are parted forever for your sake. Forgive me, dear, for the unconscious wrong I did you in winning Talbot’s heart, and promise me that you will not hate me any longer for the poor reason that [Pg 87]he belonged to me before an adverse fate gave him to you!”

The passionate torrent of words ceased, and Nina lifted her hand and pointed to the door.

“Go, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I cannot bear your presence any longer.”

“Nina, you must have a heart of stone,” she cried, upbraidingly. “After the way I have humbled myself to you, you have not one single word of sympathy for the grief that you alone have caused me! You are not one bit sorry for poor Talbot and me!”

“I am sorry for you both—sorrier still for myself,” said Nina, drearily. “But what are you waiting for, Mrs. St. Alban? Do you want me to promise you that Talbot shall have a divorce?”

“Ah, you will not do it. He said so,” Sibyl answered, hopelessly. “He said you were so desperately fond of him you would not give him up. Don’t think I blame you, Nina. I know how you feel by my own experience.”

“Hush, I have heard enough,” Nina answered, bitterly. “Go back to your room, Mrs. St. Alban. [Pg 88]Talbot shall have his freedom. You shall have him for your husband soon. I promise you that I shall not be in your way long. I will keep my promise to the dead. I will try to secure his happiness!”

“You generous darling! I thought you would be willing to do what was right,” Sibyl began effusively; but Nina immediately turned her back upon her, so, having gained what she came for, she concluded to leave without further ceremony.

She glided toward the door, and as she came near it, she saw a large, square, white envelope lying upon the floor, as if it had been pushed beneath the door by a cautious hand. An instant suspicion darted into her crafty mind. In a moment she had slyly secured it, and pushed it inside the corsage of her dress. Nina heard the door close upon her, and drew a sigh of relief, unconscious that she carried with her a letter from Talbot Strangemore, that, had she only received it, would have changed the current of her life so far that this story of her sorrows need never have been written.

Later in the night a little dark-robed figure glided [Pg 89]out from the grand portals of Selwyn Heights, and took its way along the sea-shore. It was Nina Strangemore, alone and empty-handed, for on the strange journey she was desperately resolved upon, they who venture forth carry nothing with them.

Sibyl St. Alban gained her room, turned the key hurriedly in the door lock, and looked at the letter she had brought from Nina’s room. It was addressed in a firm strong hand that she knew well, and she shivered with rage as she tore it open.

“Why is he writing to her? I will know,” she said, and she ran her gleaming eyes hurriedly over the letter, murmuring bitter words to herself as she took in the full import of the words the repentant, shame-stricken husband had written for the eyes of the fair young wife that now would never rest upon those pages.

“Nina, my beloved, my darling wife,” he wrote, in deep haste and agitation, “On my knees I beg you to forgive me for the folly and madness of which I have been guilty. Oh, if you could know how remorseful, how shame-stricken, how repentant I feel, you could not help but pardon me. I am not worthy of you, my beautiful wife, but I love you with a deep and passionate love that sprung into full growth in the first moment I saw you last night with the orange-blossoms on your hair and breast. In that very moment my mad penchant for a fair coquette died an instant death, slain by the glances of your innocent eyes. I know now that she was not worthy the foolish passion I wasted on her for years, and I beg your pardon for permitting her presence beneath your roof. Oh, my sweet and deeply injured wife, I can explain all if you will grant me an interview to-night, to-morrow, or at any time you may select. I shall not sleep to-night. I shall wait in my room, hoping that you will send me word that I may come to you and plead my cause. Oh, my bride, my wife, do not be hard upon me, do not judge me as I deserve! Only remember my love and my repentance that I place [Pg 91]humbly at your feet, hoping prayerfully that you will accept them, and that you will give me a chance to win your forgiveness, and then your love, my beautiful fate. Remember, I am waiting for a single word from your lips, Nina, and be merciful to me, although my past egregious folly merits no mercy at your pure hands!”

Sibyl crushed the letter in her little white hands, and paced madly up and down the floor, her silken robes trailing over the carpet with a low swish, swish, that sounded like the hissing of a serpent in the silence of the room. Her blue eyes scintillated fury beneath her frowning brows.

“How dare he, how dare he!” she muttered. “A fair coquette! unworthy of the passion he has wasted on me for years, am I? We shall see, we shall see about that my fickle lover! It is most fortunate that I went in there to-night. If she had received this letter it would have made all clear between them, for I could see, poor fool, that she was dying for him! But she will go away, after what I told her about the divorce, her pride will not permit her to accept any overtures toward a reconciliation. She will set him [Pg 92]free that he may be mine. She has promised me, and I am sure she will keep her word. But what will she do? Will she separate from him, or will she commit suicide? The latter, I hope, for I do not believe I could win his love again unless he knew that she was dead. Death! oh, what a horrible thing that is! The very thought of it frightens me alone in my room, and so late into the night!”

And she shuddered and hid her face for a moment in her hands with a vague presentiment of horror stealing wierdly over her.

After a little she lifted her face and looked half-fearfully around her at the dark shadows in the corners of the elegant chamber.

“What is it that I am so afraid of?” she asked herself, aloud, “I never felt so strangely before. I have a horrible dread upon me. Perhaps I am going to be ill. I think I will go to Helen Starr’s room and ask her to let me stay with her to-night. This large room with its dark corners makes me feel frightened and lonely.”

She caught up a light shawl, threw it about her shoulders, and softly opening the door peered out into [Pg 93]the hall. She drew back with a smothered exclamation.

She had caught sight of a slender, dark-cloaked figure moving with swift and noiseless footsteps along the dimly lighted hall toward the stairway.

Forgetting all her nervousness and terror of a little while ago, Sibyl peered through a crevice of the slightly open door at the vanishing form.

“It is Nina,” she muttered, with a cruel, exultant laugh. “She is going away, and I think I may safely predict that this is the last we shall ever see of the heiress of Selwyn Heights.”

In her glad excitement over Nina’s flitting she forgot her momentary fears, and her intention of going to Helen Starr’s room to pass the night. She hastily disrobed, and lay down to rest on her soft bed, under the flowing canopy of silk and lace.

“I can rest in peace now that I know that I am rid of my dangerous rival,” she said, with a low laugh of triumph, as she nestled her flaxen head among the lace-trimmed pillows. “Perhaps even now she has plunged into the cold, dark sea out yonder, and Talbot may be already a widower.”

Too heartless to give even one regret to the fate of the hapless girl she had wronged so cruelly, she closed her eyes and was soon fast asleep, dreaming of the day when she should be Talbot Strangemore’s bride, and mistress of Selwyn Heights.

The night hours wore on to midnight. The light of the shaded lamp fell on Sibyl’s fair, placid face, its round cheeks daintily flushed by warmth, its red lips slightly parted with the soft, even breath of her happy slumber. From one of those shadowy corners that had so affrighted her with their gloom and darkness, a stealthy form crept forth to gaze upon the sleeping beauty.

Oh, how the dark, blazing eyes of this sinister intruder gloated upon her loveliness! How the strong, passionate features worked with emotion beneath the shade of the dark hat drawn down over his brows! How his muscular hand trembled as it closed nervously over the hilt of a slender dagger, half hidden in his breast.

“So she was afraid, was she?” came in a low, fierce sneer from his lips. “The spirit of murder made itself felt in the room, I think, and yet she wondered [Pg 95]what it was she feared. Why did she not remember me and my wrongs that I had sworn to avenge? Ah, how lovely she is, the base little coquette! Too lovely to live, because a devil’s heart with a face like that has too much power for evil in this world! Die, my beautiful false lover, my blue-eyed siren, and go home to Hades, where you justly belong!”

The gleaming, upraised steel descended on the bare, white breast, and Sibyl’s eyes flared wide open, while her dying shriek rang through the house, “Murder! Murder! Murder!”

That awful, blood-curdling cry of agony and despair rang through and through the silent house, hushed in the repose of slumber. The echoes caught it up and prolonged it in awful, sound waves:

There was no ear in that great house upon which it did not fall. Talbot Strangemore, keeping his wakeful vigil in patient expectation of a summons from Nina, heard it first, and rushed madly from the room out into the faintly-lighted hall. His first thought was of his wife; but when he ran to her apartments, so sacred until now from his intrusion, he found the outer door locked against him, and, horrified and bewildered, he turned away.

In a few moments the corridors were full of excited people running hither and thither, looking into each other’s blanched faces, and asking what was the matter, and was it really a shriek of “Murder” that had roused them from slumber.

Miss Drusilla was there in nightcap and slippers, with a large red shawl hastily thrown over her flapping night-robe. Helen and Virgie were there in dressing-gowns hastily huddled over their white wrappers; all the men were there in various stages of dishabille, the servants were all there too, and but two of the whole household were missing—those two were Mrs. Strangemore and Mrs. St. Alban.

Some ran hastily to one door—some to another—Nina’s [Pg 97]was locked; Sibyl had forgotten hers in her joy at witnessing her rival’s flight. They entered readily.

It was Helen Starr who entered first. Her shriek of horror and dismay rang in the hearing of all long afterward. It announced the tragedy that in a minute more every one crowded in to gaze upon.

No one ever forgot that tragic sight in the dimly-lighted room, where some one quickly brightened the lamp for a clearer view. Sibyl St. Alban lay wounded and apparently dying, across the bed, her life-blood staining her white robes and the white counterpane in a ghastly torrent, while a bloody dagger lay carelessly upon the floor.

They crowded around her, and the dim, fast glazing eyes searched their faces with mute yearning until Talbot Strangemore came. Her drawn lips faintly murmured his name:

He took her hand compassionately in his and looked at her with dazed, horrified eyes. Some faint fear [Pg 98]came over him that she had thrown away her life because she had lost him.

“My poor Sibyl,” he repeated, and the lips she had opened to speak to him closed without a sound, the white lids dropped heavily over the blue imploring eyes in a momentary unconsciousness. Better for him had it been an eternal sleep.

“Let someone bring a doctor,” he said, hastily, and one of the half-dazed men-servants went out to do his bidding.

Miss Drusilla, beginning to recover from the trance of horror which had struck her at first, began to bustle around. She cleared the room first of all the gaping, terrified domestics who were huddled in a group at the foot of the bed, whispering fearfully together.

One man in his retreat picked up the blood-stained dagger and presented it to Miss Drusilla. The housemaid found a letter lying on the floor. She could not read, so she handed it to Helen Starr who stood nearest her.

“Oh, Miss, here’s a letter I found on the floor. [Pg 99]Mayhap the bloody murderer who killed that lady dropped it there,” she shuddered.

Helen took it with an answering shiver of fear. She held it out and read the name upon the back, then she held it out to her host.

“Perhaps I had better give it to you, as it is addressed to your wife,” she said.

Talbot Strangemore took it from her hand and looked at it. It was the letter he had slipped under Nina’s door a few hours ago.

“Yes, it belongs to my wife. I wrote it, but how came it here?” he said, full of wonder.

“Perhaps she has been in here and dropped it,” said some one, and those words although so innocently spoken, suggested a terrible possibility to every one. Every face blanched suddenly, and a silence fell that was more fearful than words.

And in their sudden interest over the letter no one noticed that Sibyl’s eyes had opened languidly again, and that she heard and saw all that was passing around her.

Her first thought was one of terror that she had thrown Talbot’s letter carelessly from her in her [Pg 100]wrath and that now it was discovered in her possession. But a moment later some one spoke the thoughtless words, “Perhaps she has been in here and dropped it,” and the sentence conveyed such a sinister idea to her mind that she drew a quick breath and shut her eyes again before Talbot looked around at her and said, decidedly:

“No, I do not believe that Nina has been in this room at all. When Mrs. St. Alban revives from her swoon she will no doubt be able to explain how it came to be in here.”

He crushed it fiercely in his hand, and gazed anxiously at the still white face on the pillow, until the pale gold lashes fluttered open and Sibyl looked up at him with a faint, dying expression.

“No, I am not better—I—I—am dying,” faintly articulated the victim. “Let some one—bring—pencil and—and paper. Let them take—my—my dying deposition!”

It was Duke Cameron who obeyed her. He looked with sad, pained eyes at the dying face.

“Poor Sibyl,” he said, sorrowfully, as to a hurt child, “I am ready now—what is it you wish me to write?”

She looked at Talbot Strangemore not at him as she answered, slowly and painfully:

“I have been—foully murdered! It was your wife that did it, Talbot Strangemore! It—it was Nina! She was—jealous, mad—she hated me, and in—in her rage she stole upon me in my sleep and—and plunged a knife in my breast! I saw her—she wore a hood and cloak, ready—to fly—to fly from the scene of her crime! I am—am dying, and—she—Nina Strangemore who hated me—is the woman who has cruelly—murdered—me!”

Several days after that tragic night at Selwyn Heights a sensational item appeared in the Baltimore papers and was thence copied widely into other journals.

“A thrilling tragedy. A jealous wife murders her beautiful rival and makes a successful flight from justice. A fine old family disgraced by the crime of its last remaining descendant.”

“Many members of the bon ton in this city will remember the beautiful Mrs. St. Alban, who about two years ago was the star of a season here, and who at the death of her husband went abroad with a party of friends in the splendid yacht of our citizen, Marmaduke Cameron. This lady recently returned from Europe and during a visit at Selwyn Heights, the seaside home of her friend, Mr. Talbot Strangemore, she was cruelly murdered by the young wife of the latter gentleman. Rumor accredited Mr. Strangemore with a penchant for the charming widow which so enraged the beautiful young wife that she publicly declared her hatred and jealousy of Mrs. St. Alban, and that night she stealthily entered the young widow’s room and assaulted her with a sharp dagger which she left lying upon the floor when she fled from the scene. Mrs. St. Alban is now lying at the point of death at Selwyn Heights, and there is not the faintest hope of [Pg 103]her recovery. Her dying deposition accuses Mrs. Strangemore with the crime, and her testimony is strangely supported by the fact that a letter, addressed to Mrs. Strangemore and written by her husband, was found in Mrs. St. Alban’s room, where the jealous wife had most probably dropped it in making her hasty escape. The whole affair is extremely distressing. All the parties belong to the best society, and the crime of the jealous wife has covered with ignominy the name of a fine old family of which she is the last living descendant. It is said that some members of her household will not believe in her guilt, but all the evidence is against her, and her mysterious, unexplained absence of itself is a tacit admission of her sin. Vigorous search is now being made for her, but as yet without success.”

All Baltimore rang with that sensation. Many recalled the beautiful fairy, coquettish Mrs. St. Alban, the bride of the rich manufacturer Ralph St. Alban. He was twice as old as she was, having been her father’s friend at college, and no one supposed that the poor professor’s daughter was in love with her elderly spouse, or that she grieved much when he suddenly [Pg 104]died after three years of wedded bliss and left her a wealthy and attractive young widow. She had been a flirt of the most pronounced order, dreaded alike by plain wives and pretty young girls, and now when this story of the tragedy appeared, many said that they were not surprised at the fate that had befallen her. She had always had too strong a penchant for the sweethearts and husbands of other women, and now Nemesis had overtaken her at last. There was a great deal of silent but intense sympathy with the young wife who had been goaded to desperation and crime by her cruel wrongs. More than one woman who had been insolently rivaled by triumphant Sibyl thought furtively within herself that the little coquette had only got what she deserved.

While Rumor repeats with its thousand barbed tongues the story of the tragedy at Selwyn Heights, let us follow the flight of hapless Nina, reader mine, when she stole forth that night, wretched and despairing, from the shelter of her beautiful home.

Nina had fled from Selwyn Heights with the idea of self-destruction uppermost in her mind. She had brooded morbidly over her promise to Mrs. Selwyn, [Pg 105]until it assumed the proportions of a solemn oath in her eyes. She believed that she was solemnly bound to ignore and sacrifice herself, if in no other way the happiness of Talbot Strangemore could be secured.

“I would sooner die by my own act than be divorced from him that he may marry another woman. I could not live under such shame and ignominy as that!” she cried, passionately, for she had come of a proud race, and she inherited all of their pride and nobility. And then she clasped her beautiful hands together and added, with bitter pathos:

“The sorrow would be as great as the shame, for, oh, I love him still, in spite of all that has passed; I love him still, and I believe that I shall always love him! I have worshipped him so truly for five long years, have studied, read, practiced, all to improve myself for his sake, that it would be impossible now to live and look on him as the husband of another woman. It would be easier to die!”

And so she had gone away, leaving behind her a pathetic little note, whose incoherent sentences only made another terrible link against her in the evidence that convicted her of a fearful sin.

“My husband,” she wrote, and a great burning tear splashed on the word, and almost blotted it out; “I am going away out of your life forever! I know all now, and I take the only way I can think of to free you from the fetters that chafe you so cruelly. May God forgive me for what I am going to do to-night, for I am so maddened by my wrongs that I am not accountable. But you will be free, you will be happy, and I ask no more of fate. Do not blame me when they tell you of the awful deed I have done. Only remember that I was driven mad by my wrongs, and that my oath to your dying mother compelled me to the deed.”

To that strangely ambiguous note she signed her name in full, “Nina Selwyn Strangemore,” and then she laid it conspicuously upon the toilet table, and left the room, locking the door outside, and taking the key away that her flight might not be discovered until morning.

“I shall be dead then—dead in the deep sea, or perhaps the cold waves will cast me back upon the sands, and he will behold my dead face and rejoice that he is free to marry his beloved Sibyl,” she said [Pg 107]and she went on steadily to the place where day after day she and Lion had waited for the ship that would bring Talbot home. She had a fancy that on that spot where she had stood so often she would seek her death.

How dark was the night, how dark the sea! No one saw the slender black-clad figure stealing along the shore going to her death.

Behind her on the tall heights stood her stately home, the goodly inheritance her father had left his child. She looked back just once at its gloomy towers with a farewell on her lips.

“It will belong to Talbot now—Talbot and his blue-eyed love,” she murmured, and with a prayer to heaven for peace and pardon she sprang desperately into the cold, black water.

Something like a blind horror filled Talbot Strangemore’s heart as Mrs. St. Alban’s blighting accusation of his wife fell upon his ears. He staggered back from her side with a cry that was almost like the wail of a lost soul, and passed his hand before his eyes in a bewildered way, then turning to her again, he exclaimed in hoarse tones of anguish:

“Sibyl, you know not what you say! You have made a terrible mistake! My wife is innocent of the guilt with which you charge her!”

And Miss Drusilla, who had heard all with a horror equal to his own, echoed, fiercely:

“She is innocent! Woman, how dare you charge our little Nina with such a fearful sin? The angels in Heaven are not more guiltless of that sin than she!”

And Sibyl St. Alban, inwardly full of malicious triumph, lifted her heavy eyes and answered in a [Pg 109]voice that sounded faint and far away like a dying tone:

“If she is innocent why is she not here? Why, oh, why, has she—fled from the scene of her crime?”

“She is ill,” Miss Drusilla answered, instantly, “she is perhaps unable to come, but I will go find her, I will tell her what horrible things you have said. Not but what you have treated her bad enough, Mrs. St. Alban, for her to have felt like taking vengeance upon you, but she would not have done this. I could sooner believe that some one of the many enemies you must have made in your heartless life has followed you here and tried to put an end to your flirtings and stealing other women’s husbands!”

She did not know how keenly her shot told, for Sibyl had shut her eyes and seemed to have relapsed into a deep swoon again, and just then the hastily summoned physician entered the room, and the indignant spinster went out to find Nina, followed closely by her nephew.

They found Nina’s door still locked. Miss Drusilla pounded, called, raved in vain.

“I am afraid she has fallen into another swoon,” [Pg 110]she said, looking anxiously into Talbot’s white, almost rigid face, as he hovered by her side. “I ought not to have left her alone, but she was so anxious to get me away, and I felt sure she would let Kitty stay with her all night!”

“Indeed, then, Miss Drusilla, I almost went down upon my knees to her but she would not have me. She sent me away in spite of all I could beg her to let me stay,” said Kitty’s voice right over her shoulder. “Oh, me, my poor young mistress, what has happened to you all alone in there? Perhaps you have been murdered, too!” she cried, bursting into a storm of tears.

“Talbot, you will have to do something—cannot you break the door down? She must not stay in there by herself!” exclaimed his aunt, displaying a tenderness of heart he had not dreamed of under her sour exterior.

Maddened by excitement he threw himself against the door. He did not know that he was so strong, but the lock yielded to the mighty pressure and burst from the door. It flew wide open, and they all tumbled pell-mell into the spacious apartment, the snowy, [Pg 111]lace-draped bower of maiden innocence where Nina nightly pillowed her golden head.

The fire had burned into ashes, the lamp flickered dimly on the toilet table. Kitty ran to the bed that stood like a great drift of new fallen snow in a corner of the room, and drew back the voluminous lace draperies.

Talbot waited at the door, too chivalrous to follow them into the sanctuary Nina had forbidden him, but Miss Drusilla was just behind Kitty, and a cry of dismay escaped her: “Oh, oh, oh!”

For the great mound of whiteness, the silken coverlet, the embroidered pillows, were smooth and empty, no golden head rested there, no slender maidenly form. Nina was gone! Kitty dived into the dressing-room, the boudoir, the bath room—all in vain.

“Oh, Miss Nina, my darling, where are you?” cried the poor girl, beginning to sob with fear and excitement, and she ran to the dressing-table in her flurry and began to shake the perfume boxes aimlessly as if her missing mistress might, perchance, be hidden there.

“It is mine,” cried Talbot Strangemore, taking it from her hand with a swift, terrible throb of the heart.

By this time several people had followed them into the room. They watched him curiously as he tore open the note. They never forgot the cry of anguish and despair that thrilled over his lips as he read it.

“What is it?” cried Miss Drusilla. “What is it?” cried every one crowding around him, but he crushed it in his hand and turned upon them like some fierce, wounded creature at bay.

“No one shall ever see, no one shall ever know,” he answered, with a ring of strange defiance in his voice, and lifting his arm, he thrust the crumpled note into the flame of the lamp, and held it aloft until it shriveled into ashes. The flames burned his hand, but not so deeply as the words had burned themselves into his heart.

And then, strong man as he was, the horrors of this awful night overcame him. For a moment he staggered dizzily, then fell like a log to the floor and [Pg 113]lay there for long minutes wrapped in merciful unconsciousness of his misery.

“He’s dead—Mr. Strangemore’s dead, and, oh, where is my young mistress?” cried Kitty, wildly weeping and bewailing, her honest heart nearly broken with sorrow.

“He’s not dead, but it might be better if he were,” she said. “I wish indeed he had died long ago, before he and his mother brought all this trouble on poor Nina Selwyn! Poor child, I expect she’s run away, but I know she never hurt that beautiful fiend in there! Dear girl, she would not have harmed a worm! She has run away from her own misery, that’s all. She’s innocent, poor pretty Nina, as innocent as a lamb!”

“I’d stake my life on that!” sobbed Kitty, and Miss Drusilla suddenly felt a soft hand touch her arm, and Virgie Mason said, with streaming eyes, “I believe she’s innocent, too—as innocent as an angel!”

“Fate is above us all,” has been aptly written by the poet. Our hapless young heroine found it true in her own case.

It was not destined that the spark of her life should go out in the black waters into which she had hurled herself in a very desperation of despair.

In her excitement she had not observed that Marmaduke Cameron’s yacht, the Sea Bird, lay at anchor near the spot where she had sprung into the water. But it was there, and through the gloom and darkness a pair of horrified eyes had witnessed from the deck her desperate plunge into the sea.

Rendered unconscious by the shock of her rapid descent into the deep, cold waves, Nina’s body rose to the surface again. In the meantime a little boat had been hastily lowered from the yacht and a man had gone to her assistance. When she was about sinking [Pg 115]again into the water friendly hands reached out to save her, she was drawn into the little boat and thence conveyed to the yacht.

We will leave her there a little while and look forward a few hours in the progress of our story.

To do so we must give our readers a peep into the interior of a charming little birds’-nest of a cottage in the city of Baltimore.

It is early hours for calling, for the gray dawn-light of the new day is just beginning to glimmer in the east, but our hostess is not a fashionable lady. She is just a darling little busy bee who rises with the sun and whatsoever her hand findeth to do does it with all her might.

So, peeping into her pretty, simple chamber, we find her already up and dressed and drawing back the curtains to admit the cold, gray light of the new day, while she murmurs to herself with a pleased smile on her gentle womanly face:

“I shall have a whole long day to myself while Arthur is away, and I shall not do one bit of cooking, I shall just lunch on bread and cheese, and I can do [Pg 116]ever-so-much sewing for baby if she will only be good and lie in her cradle!”

And even as she utters the words she is startled by the sound of wheels, grating

She gives a little, startled exclamation, pushes up the sash, throws open the blind, and looks out.

It is a small, simple brougham with a pretty bay horse that greets her sight, but her gentle face grows radiant with pleasure, and forgetting her self-gratulations a moment ago, she cries out joyously:

“It is Arthur, home before I expected him. Oh, how glad I am!” and she flies down the steps two at a time to open the door.

Her big gray eyes grow round and bright with dismay and wonder as she sees her tall, strong husband alighting from his brougham with a drooping black-robed figure in his arms.

“Oh, Doctor, you have brought a patient home,” she exclaims, holding the door wide for him to enter with his burden.

She answers “Yes,” and leads the way to her own room, where every thing is in dainty order, the baby sleeping sweetly in its cradle, and a bright fire burning in the polished bars of the grate.

Doctor Fielding advanced without the least hesitation and laid the motionless form he carried down upon the smooth white bed. Then he stooped and pressed a tender kiss on his wife’s lips as he said, fondly:

“Oh, yes, thank you, but we have missed you sadly. We did not expect you home so soon.”

“I had good reason for coming,” he replied, gravely, and he bent down and gently removed the close dark hood that completely hid the face of his mysterious patient. As he did so a mass of damp golden hair fell in disheveled tresses over the pillow, and a pallid, lovely face was revealed, with delicately chiseled features, straight dark brows, and fringed black lashes lying heavily against a marble cheek.

“It is Nina Strangemore! Oh, Arthur, what does it mean? Do not tell me she is dead!”

Doctor Fielding turned his kind, grave eyes upon the frightened face of his pretty wife and shook his head.

“No, she is not dead, Minnie, but I shall have to reserve all explanations until we have resuscitated her,” he said. “She is in a deep swoon now, and before we try to revive her I want you to bring some of your warm, dry garments and put them upon her. You see she is quite damp now. She has been in the water.”

“I will go and light a fire in the kitchen while you change your patient,” said her husband. “I daresay Mrs. Strangemore will need a cup of warm coffee when she revives.”

“And I have been so lazy I have not made a drop this morning,” Mrs. Fielding cried, penitently.

“Of course not—it is much too early for breakfast yet, but I will see about the coffee, dear, while you attend to your friend.”

He slipped on a short gray dressing-gown and went out. Mrs. Fielding went about the task he had set her with tearful alacrity, pausing now and then to drop a kiss on the pale cheeks of the unconscious girl.

“Oh, my dear little pupil, my sweet Nina, what has happened to you?” she cried, sorrowfully, as she buttoned up her own pretty blue dressing-gown upon the slim, girlish figure.

Something in the sorrowful, tender words must have gone straight through the sealed consciousness of Nina for she stirred faintly and opened her eyes. Their dark wondering gaze fell on Mrs. Fielding’s tender tearful face.

“Nina, my darling little girl,” she repeated, fondly, and chafing the cold little hands in both her own, “Oh, my little pupil, how glad I am to see you again. I have wished so often that you would come [Pg 120]and see me in my humble, happy little home, and now my hope is fulfilled!”

The dazed expression vanished out of the girl’s eyes, and full consciousness came into them—full consciousness of her sorrow. She could not answer the loving words of her old teacher. She looked back at her mutely with big, heavy dark eyes circled by wide, purple shadows, and full of hopeless misery.

Then for the first time it dawned on Mrs. Fielding that her old pupil had come to her in sorrow and misery, not in joyful greeting. Those dark eyes so full of despair told their own story. All the agony of a breaking heart was in them.

The kind hearted lady uttered a cry of blended sympathy and sorrow, and threw her arms around the passive figure, laying the golden head against her shoulder.

“Do not speak one word to me, darling, if you do not choose,” she said, “I see that you are in trouble and sorrow, and I am, oh, so sorry for you!”

Doctor Fielding coming in presently, found them thus, but he did not like the hard, cold misery of Nina’s face, lighted by the large suffering black eyes. [Pg 121]Her speechless calm, her stony endurance seemed more terrible than tears.

He went to the crib to kiss his sleeping child, and the babe stirred and awoke. He took it carefully in his arms and carried it to Nina.

“This is our little daughter—just two months old—Mrs. Strangemore,” he said, “I hope you will kiss the little stranger, for Minnie has named her Nina for the sake of the love she had for you.”

Nina gazed with strange, wild eyes at the sweet, pink face a moment, then she stooped and pressed her lips to her little namesake’s cheeks. Two great burning tears splashed on the child’s face as she did so, and when she lifted her head it was to break into a tempest of bitter weeping which dismayed Minnie, but at which her husband gazed in silent satisfaction.

“Let her weep. It is better for her,” he said, under his breath, and he carried the baby out of the room, and left Minnie alone with the mourner.

She followed him presently with a sad, perplexed face, and took the fretful babe from his arms.

“She has sobbed herself to sleep without saying a [Pg 122]word. Oh, Arthur, what has happened to the poor child?”

“Indeed, Minnie, I do not know,” he answered, “But I think she must have had some terrible trouble greater than she could bear, for last night I rescued her from a suicide’s grave in the deep sea.”

A cry of terror came from the lips of the happy young wife as she pressed her infant in her arms.

“A suicide’s grave! Oh, how terrible!” she cried, with blanched face and trembling hands.

“I will tell you all I know about it,” said her husband. “I went on Mr. Cameron’s yacht as I promised, to look after the health of my willful patient Mr. Mason who accompanied his sister. Pretty soon I found out several things. One was that your old [Pg 123]pupil’s husband, Talbot Strangemore, had returned to his home at Selwyn Heights the day before.”

“Talbot Strangemore, home at last! Oh, how pleased, how happy Nina must have been at his return,” exclaimed Mrs. Fielding.

“I learned also that Mr. Cameron’s party was bound for Selwyn Heights to visit the Strangemores.”

“So soon? But I should have thought that Nina would have liked to have her husband all to herself just at first, after his long absence!” exclaimed the little woman.

“Something of the same feeling was in my own mind,” replied her husband. “Mr. Cameron invited me to accompany them to the Heights, but although I knew that I would be sure of a welcome from your old pupil, I declined his courtesy. It seemed to me like an unwarrantable intrusion upon the husband and wife in the first hours of their reunion.”

“Yes, for although they have been married five years, this is really their honey-moon. Talbot Strangemore [Pg 124]is a bride-groom, Nina a bride,” assented his wife.

“So I decided to remain on the yacht as my patient seemed recovering very fast from his sudden attack of indisposition,” continued the doctor. “They all went away to Selwyn Heights without me, I spent a day and night very pleasantly with my books and the captain of the yacht. The next night I grew rather restless, thinking of you and baby alone and lonely at home, and I heartily wished that Mr. Mason would dismiss me from attendance upon him that I might return to you.”

Minnie nestled nearer to his side to kiss his bearded cheek fondly in return for his tender words.

“I talked to the captain until quite late last night, then I went on deck to smoke before retiring. I suppose it was quite midnight then. I walked up and down and gazed at the lights gleaming from the windows of Selwyn Heights, far away on its high bluff, and I thought of the sweet young mistress of the place whom my little wife loved so dearly, and I hoped in my heart that she was as happy with her husband as you and I are, my darling.”

“I do not know what it was that made me suddenly turn my eyes from the bluff to the shore,” he continued, “But it is certain that some influence in the air, some unaccountable premonition, moved me to do so. Then all in a flash as it seemed to my startled senses, Minnie, I beheld a slight, dark figure spring from the shore and fall into the water with a loud, terrible splash. Then it disappeared an instant in the depths of the waves.”

“Oh, poor Nina!” she cried, with the tears raining down her cheeks, and Doctor Fielding after a thoughtful pause again resumed his story: “I gave a cry of alarm that brought Captain Travers rushing to my side. We immediately lowered a little boat from the side of the yacht and went to the rescue of the would-be suicide. As she came back to the surface from her terrible plunge I seized her skirts and drew her into the boat. She was already unconscious but not dead. We took her on board the yacht, and what [Pg 126]was my horror and amaze when I discovered in that desperate creature the lovely and wealthy Mrs. Strangemore, your former pupil and friend.”

“I did not tell the captain that she was Mrs. Strangemore,” continued the doctor. “Some inward consciousness warned me not to do so. But I told him that she was a friend of my wife, and that I would be glad if I could bring her home to you. He was very kind. I did all that I could to resuscitate her, and having restored her to partial animation, I put her in the little boat which he kindly placed at my disposal and myself rowed her to Baltimore to give her the tender care of her old friend. I felt sure that something very dreadful must have driven her from Selwyn Heights, and I did not think it would be wise to take her back there until we knew more.”

“You did right, but, oh, Arthur, it is a three hours row from Selwyn Heights to Baltimore. How weary you must be!” she cried.

“It was hard work,” he said. “My hands are unused to the oar since my college days. But I did not mind it for the sake of the girl you loved so well, Minnie!”

Nina’s slumber was a long and deep one. She had scarcely slept an hour since her husband’s home-coming, and now since her reckless attempt at suicide exhausted nature could bear no more. Wearily, heavily, almost like one in a state of coma, she lay and slumbered, the pale, pale face, with the dark lashes lying heavily against her cheeks, looking death-like in its wanness, while the breath was scarcely perceptible as it fluttered over her lips. The doctor and his wife stole in and out now and then to look at her, but they were careful not to disturb her, and the little one was carried to a distant room that its cries might not awake her.

“She will awaken rested and refreshed, and although very weak from her long, unbroken fast, she [Pg 128]will be in a better frame of mind, and I have no doubt that she will repent of the desperate deed she attempted last night,” he said.

Meanwhile the chilly dawn had broken and one of the most inclement days of blustering March had set in. It rained, hailed, snowed, by turns, and the cold was intense.

The short, wintry day passed away. Mrs. Fielding, intent on the household tasks which she accomplished without the aid of a servant, was obliged to leave her patient alone many times, but on each occasion when she tip-toed back Nina still lay wrapped in that deep, lethargic sleep.

“I almost wish she would awaken—her sleep seems almost as deep as death,” murmured the little woman over and over to herself.

But when Nina wakened at last she was all alone [Pg 129]in the pretty cheerful chamber, with its nameless air of comfort and refinement.

The lamp burned dimly under its clear, white shade, the fire leaped and glowed in the grate. Nina lay still for some moments gazing around her with large, dark, wondering eyes.

“Where am I?” she asked herself, vaguely, and the answer to her question came in a sudden rush of memory. She gave a shiver of horror and sprang upright in the bed.

“I remember now that I saw Doctor Fielding and his wife, my dear old teacher, in this room some time ago,” she thought. “But how came I here? Who took me out of the water, and how dared they do it, for I cannot, I will not endure my life. I have lost my husband whom I loved so dearly, and I cannot bear my life without him!”

She went to the window, drew back the crimson curtain, and looked down into the street. She saw that she was in a large city. There was a wide brick pavement under the window, and the flaring light of the gas lamps at the corners showed her wild drifts of whirling sleet and snow. It was a wild and terrible [Pg 130]night. The keen, sharp wind tore fiercely around the corners, banging loose window shutters, and shrieking loudly as it held high carnival abroad. The streets were coated with sleet that shone with diamond brightness in the light. Nina gazed at it all with dull mechanical eyes. Her thoughts were of other things.

Doctor Fielding had been mistaken in his thought that she would repent her mad attempt at self destruction. He had not known the terrible motive power that urged her onward.

“I have been foiled once,” she murmured, “And so I have it all to do over again. I promised to give him all my love and all my life, and that meant I think that I must sacrifice my life for him if need be. And there is no other way, none! I never heard of a Selwyn being divorced. They could not have borne it. There is too much pride in the race. No, there is only one way for Talbot Strangemore to find his happiness, and that is by walking across my grave!”

Near the fire spread open over some chairs to dry, was the dark hood and cloak she had worn last night. Nina deliberately put them on again, opened the door [Pg 131]and looked out into the narrow little entry. She saw and heard no one. Mrs. Fielding was in the kitchen keeping an appetizing supper warm for her guest when she should wake. Doctor Fielding had stepped out to see a patient in the neighborhood. The girl ran with light feet along the entry to the street door. The good doctor had carelessly left it unlocked. She opened it softly. In a minute more she was out in the night and the storm alone.

Blown hither and thither by the blinding storm, Nina pursued her way along the almost deserted streets. She came at last to a corner where the flaring lights, blue, red and green, of a drug-store, streamed athwart the stormy night. Without a moment’s hesitation, she ran into the store.

“A phial of laudanum, please,” she said to the sleepy clerk who stared in amazement at his beautiful unexpected customer, and she handed him a silver coin she had taken from a little pocket in her cloak.

“We do not sell poisons without a physician’s prescription,” he had said to her at first, then yielded and gave her the phial because in some adroit way she had [Pg 132]conveyed to him the impression that she wished it to relieve a tooth-ache.

She caught it eagerly from his hand, and madly drained the last drop, then dashed wildly from the place. The horrified clerk ran after her, but the beautiful desperate girl had already disappeared from his sight like a shadow among the shadows of the inclement night.

The world of fashiondom that had been so shocked and astonished at the news from Selwyn Heights of the attempted murder of Mrs. St. Alban had another sensation a few days later when an item quite as startling as the first appeared in the newspapers.

“Death in the streets. A mysterious suicide. Night before last the drug-clerk at the store of Physic & Co. on B. street was very much startled at a late hour by the entrance of a beautiful young girl who [Pg 133]asked for some laudanum for the tooth-ache. As she appeared to be suffering acute pain he complied with her request, but was horrified when he beheld her pause on the threshold, pull the stopper from the phial, and drain the last drop of the deadly narcotic poison. He immediately ran after her, but she rushed into the street and in a moment had entirely disappeared from sight. Mr. Meldrum, the clerk, gave the alarm to a passing policeman, but he failed to trace the mysterious suicide, and up to this date her body has not been recovered, although it is believed that she must surely have succeeded in her fell design of self-destruction. A clue to her identity is afforded in the fact that she dropped her handkerchief upon the floor of the shop where the clerk found it lying after she was gone. The perfumed bit of lace and embroidery was marked in the corner with the name Nina Strangemore. It is believed without a doubt that she was the desperate young wife who fled from Selwyn Heights after the attempted murder of her rival, Mrs. St. Alban. Her description tallies exactly with that of the missing Mrs. Strangemore, who was said to be brilliantly lovely, a dark-eyed blonde with rich golden [Pg 134]hair, and a skin like lillies and roses. Her mournful suicide from remorse and despair furnishes the finale to her sad and romantic story of love, jealousy and revenge.”

What a passion of remorse, of horror, and despair, swept over Talbot Strangemore’s heart as he unfolded his morning paper still damp from the press, and read that dreadful paragraph. He threw the paper to his aunt without a word, and rising unsteadily from his chair at breakfast, went away to his room to lock himself in with that guilty conscience that rose up and called him to his face “Murderer!”

“She is dead, my fair young wife whom I neglected so long, and wronged so cruelly, and it was I that drove her to her death! I am her murderer. It was my folly and sin that broke her heart and sent her away from me in despair. I am morally guilty of her death, and I wish that the heavens would fall upon me and crush me out of my loathed existence!” he groaned, in a paroxysm of despair.

He was full of the bitterest self-shame and self-reproach. He knew that he had betrayed his mother’s trust. She had given him Nina so gladly, so confidingly, [Pg 135]and he had forgotten the child who was his wife—forgotten and neglected her, and given the heart that belonged to her to another woman. And how fair, how lovely, how lovable she had been, this neglected bride of his? Keen arrows of remorse and self-reproach quivered through his heart as he realized all that he had done, all that he had brought about by his inexcusable folly and madness.

Under the same roof with himself, wounded, dying, perhaps, lay the woman who had so fatally beguiled him with her blue eyes and honeyed smiles. His mad and foolish infatuation for her was over. It had burned itself to ashes as by a flash of lightning in the instant when he had looked into his wife’s dark eyes and felt, with a throb of passionate joy, that that beautiful creature belonged to him by the nearest, dearest tie upon earth, his

Sibyl St. Alban lay at the point of death. He was sincerely sorry for her, but he could not believe that harm had reached her at the hands of Nina. He thought of the beautiful, dimpled white hands with [Pg 136]their slender, taper fingers and rosy palms, and he could not believe that Sibyl’s blood was upon them. They were not strong enough nor cruel enough to have driven that dagger home in the white breast of her rival.

“I cannot, I will not think that she is guilty,” he had said, over and over to himself. “I must believe that she is innocent in spite of all the damning evidence in support of Sibyl’s accusation. Yes, although Nina declared to her face that she hated her, that she would never forgive her for what she had done, and prayed God to punish her for her sin, I will believe that her young soul is pure and unstained. I will try to find out how my letter to Nina came to be in Mrs. St. Alban’s room. I am sure my wife did not drop it there. Perhaps she sent it back to me in her righteous scorn and it fell into Sibyl’s hands, who knows? I could sooner believe that than the other! I have wronged my fair young wife enough already, and I will be loyal to her now. I will not even take her own terrible letter with its dreadful admissions as evidence against her. I could sooner think that in her frenzy of despair and humiliation she knew not what [Pg 137]she was writing. Oh, my darling, if I only knew where to find you, how glad I would be, for something tells me that you will yet belong to me really and truly, and that we will yet be very happy together.”

All these things he had said over to himself many times since Nina’s flitting that awful night, and with the sanguine spirit of a young man, he had hoped for Nina’s return to him, had hoped that all might yet be well, and that he might make her so happy that she would forget the sad and unhappy past.

But that terrible paragraph he had just read in the paper struck down at one fell blow the rose-colored fabric of his hopes and dreams. She was dead, the beautiful, dark-eyed maiden who had been his wife in name only for five long years that he had spent in restless wanderings in foreign lands, chafing like a fool and a madman against the bondage that held him. In the dark and terrible hour that came to him now he cursed himself bitterly for his folly and his sin that had cost him so dear. He had been in sight of an earthly heaven, and had lost it by his willful blindness.

While he raved alone in his madness some one came to tell him that Sibyl St. Alban had that moment died.

And so Talbot Strangemore’s home-coming, long-deferred, had ended in a tragedy. The two women who had loved him were both dead. Both had died wretched and tragical deaths, and he felt dimly in his soul that he was to blame for it all.

Only a few days ago he had deemed himself wretched because he was bound to one woman while loving another one. What a mockery those foolish pangs seemed to him now in the light of the real grief and deep remorse that came to him when he realized that Sibyl St. Alban and Nina, his wife, had both gone out of the world in their youth and beauty for his sake.

He had a conscience although it had spoken but seldom in the years while he had been away, neglecting his simple child-bride, and hating the bonds that [Pg 139]held them together. It wakened to active life now and almost maddened him with its stinging reproaches and accusations.

It appeared to him now as if his Aunt Drusilla, Kitty, his dead wife’s maid, and the servants generally, at Selwyn Heights, hated the very sight of him. The story of Nina’s wrongs and sorrows had become known to all, and every one seemed to resent his part in it. Cold looks and averted faces met him everywhere. No one felt any kindness or pity for the fickle husband whose folly had driven the fair young mistress of Selwyn Heights to her dreadful death.

“I cannot bear my life here. I shall go mad with shame and sorrow and remorse, if I go on like this,” he said to Miss Strangemore soon. “Can you bear it to stay here and let me go abroad again?”

She answered, “yes,” and he took her at her word. The day after Mrs. St. Alban’s funeral he quitted Selwyn Heights, saying to himself that he would never return there, never claim the place as his, although, since Nina’s death there was no owner for it but him. Miss Drusilla’s broad hints that his mother had married him to Nina from mercenary motives [Pg 140]still rankled bitterly in his heart. He would show her that she was mistaken. He would never touch one penny of all the vast Selwyn wealth. His own narrow income should suffice for his wanderings.

He went to Baltimore and had an interview with the drug clerk who had sold Nina the fatal poison. When he left him he had not a doubt that it was his wife who had thus recklessly precipitated herself into eternity. He carried with him in his exile the dainty handkerchief that bore her name. It lay always upon his breast. But it brought him no peace. Rather it was like the shirt of mail that Nessus wore for an everlasting torture.

“I will go abroad with you, Strangemore, if you will have my company,” said Oswald Ferris.

He had been one of Duke Cameron’s yachting friends, and later one of the guests at Selwyn Heights, a tall, dark, taciturn man whom every one voted a good fellow, but no one quite understood. Duke Cameron had admired him for his handsome looks and his superior intellect, but the ladies had declared that [Pg 141]they were afraid of him, although they never could explain the reason why.

“It is just because”—Virgie Mason would say, vaguely, and with this highly satisfactory reason the subject would fall through.

“I warn you that I shall be a dull companion,” he said, hoarsely, “I am steeped to the lips in misery.”

“We shall be companions in despair then,” Oswald Ferris answered, drawing his heavy brows darkly together, “I too am going abroad to seek Nepenthe from maddening memory.”

“Yes, even I! Have you never guessed my painful secret, Strangemore? I, too, loved Sibyl St. Alban. She, the cruel little coquette, made a victim of me, then threw me aside like a broken toy, when she met you. We are fellow-companions in misery. I know she was fickle, light, and unworthy, yet since she died [Pg 142]I seem to be going mad, I shall lose my senses unless I find

So the two men with their shadowed lives sailed away from the American shores together.

“My little Nina, my sweet pupil, a murderess! No, no, never! I cannot believe it. That woman spoke falsely,” Mrs. Fielding cried, turning her white, horror-struck face upon her husband.

She held in her hand the paper with the paragraph relating to the murder at Selwyn Heights. Her face was white with terror, and her voice shook as she uttered her vehement disclaimer to the doctor.

“The case looks very dark against her,” he said, gravely, as he took the paper from her hand, and again ran his eyes hurriedly over it.

It was the morning after Nina had run away from the care of her kind friends, and the daily paper had brought the news of the tragical occurrence at Selwyn Heights. They had wondered much what had happened to Nina to drive her from her home in despair, and now they held the key to the mystery. Love and jealousy had been at the bottom of it as they are at the bottom of most of the tragedies of life.

“I will never believe that my sweet Nina is guilty of the murder,” Mrs. Fielding cried, loyally. “The deed was committed after she went away that night. I will go and show her this paper. I know she will be able to vindicate herself.”

She rose hurriedly from the breakfast table and was leaving the room, but her husband intercepted her.

“No, dear,” he said, “you must not do so. The consequence of such a procedure in my patient’s weak state would be most disastrous. If your faith in your friend’s innocence is so strong prove your loyalty by destroying that paper and never breathing to her one word of what you know.”

Mrs. Fielding gazed at him in mute dismay for a [Pg 144]moment, and then she threw the paper into the fire, saying simply:

“I believe in Nina’s innocence just as firmly as I do in God and the angels, and I will do just as you say. I will never let her know that I have heard the things that bad and wicked people are saying about her.”

“That will be best,” he said, and in their pity and tenderness over the stricken young wife they kept their knowledge to themselves, and Nina remained blindly ignorant of the terrible accusation and the awful peril that remained suspended like a sword over her head.

The next day the Fielding’s morning paper, chronicled the attempted suicide of Nina at the drug-store. They read it with dismay.

“She is now dead to her husband and to all the world should she choose to remain so,” the good physician said, gravely, to his wife.

For Doctor Fielding had again become the instrument selected by Providence to snatch the wretched and desperate young creature from a reckless, self-sought death.

When Nina had stolen from his door in the storm and darkness of the preceding night he had been on the opposite side of the street about returning from his professional call, and having his eyes fixed on the tiny, little cottage he called home he beheld a sight that momentarily thrilled him with alarm and dread.

The front door had opened suddenly, and the bright light from the entry lamp had streamed out into the night. The broad glare revealed the slender graceful form of Nina poised on the threshold a moment, and in the next instant the whole scene was blotted out by darkness as she slammed the door behind her and hurried out into the street.

“Great heaven, she has escaped, and she will make another attempt at self-destruction,” Doctor Fielding ejaculated, hoarsely, and he dashed across the street in desperate pursuit.

But in this he was mistaken. For one thing Nina had the start of him, and in the second place he could scarcely preserve his footing on the pavement which was like a sheet of ice with the sleet and snow that [Pg 146]had been steadily coming down all day and freezing as it fell.

Making his best efforts to effect a swift transit over terra firma he found that he was not gaining in the least and that he could scarcely keep the flitting figure in sight as it hurried on beneath the glare of the gaslights.

When she was more than a block ahead of him he saw her disappear into the drug-store whose ruddy colored lights streamed out athwart the gloomy darkness of the night.

He instantly divined her terrible purpose, and with horror-thrilled pulses redoubled his efforts to overtake her. Though his feet threatened to fly from beneath him every moment, he fairly flew over the pavement. He was almost abreast with the drug-store when Nina reappeared in the lurid light of the door-way, drained the phial of laudanum to the last drop, and flashed out and on though the darkness.

He gave a single downward glance at the phial lying label upward, with the staring skull and cross-bones and the black letters laudanum, then he rushed after her in desperate pursuit.

She, poor child, fainting with the horror of what she had done, and believing that death would overtake her in a few moments, had slipped into a secluded alley-way, and crouched down in a heap, waiting despairingly for the end, with a murmured prayer on her trembling lips:

There was no time to be lost, and he uttered no word, raised no alarm. He had a small case of medicine and instruments in his pocket. He set to work then and there to relieve his patient of the deadly drug she had swallowed. The intense cold was a help rather than a hindrance to his efforts, and in a short time he was successful. She was dumb and passive in his hands, feeling that fate was too strong for her.

No one passed, no one ever dreamed that in that narrow alley-way, on that wild March night, Death had been cheated of his prey, and presently Doctor Fielding drew Nina’s hand through his arm and led her quietly home again almost before his wife had missed her.

After those exciting days and nights Nina fell into a low, nervous fever. In the meantime Sibyl St. Alban had died and Talbot Strangemore had gone back to Europe. The tender-hearted Fieldings were in despair. They did not know what to do.

“Ought we to let her husband know that she is alive?” they had asked each other many times, and one terrible answer had always stared them in the face:

“She is accused of the murder of Mrs. St. Alban. If the officers of the law knew where to find her she would be thrown into prison and tried for her life!”

That terrible thought held them back from what seemed to be their duty to Talbot Strangemore. Nina was safe with them now, and dead to all the world beside. Full of fears and doubts and sorrow they [Pg 149]decided to keep her presence with them a secret still until she grew well and strong again. Then Doctor Fielding said she should do as she pleased about the matter and decide her own future. If she chose to remain dead to her old life no one could greatly blame her.

But there were days and nights when Mrs. Fielding, frightened and nervous, was almost tempted to send for Miss Drusilla and confide her strange secret to the ears of the old lady, Nina lay so low and ill, so perilously near the borders of the death for which she longed, that she grew frightened. She was afraid that the girl would die indeed, and her heart ached and her tears fell often while she gazed at the fragile form and wan, white face, with the dark eyes looking so wild and wide and dreary, as if she were so utterly wretched and undone.

In those long days and nights of sorrow and sickness, Nina always had one reproach for Doctor Fielding. When he came and stood beside her looking down at her with his kind, grave eyes, she would away say to him with a pathetic sadness deeper than [Pg 150]the wildest reproaches could have seemed, “You should have let me die!”

“Should we not send for Miss Strangemore? She loves Nina, and she will keep her secret,” the wife said one day when the girl seemed sinking fast, and they had almost despaired of her recovery.

But she saw a shiver run over the wasted form, and the hollow dark eyes flared wide open upon her face.

“No, no, no!” Nina muttered, in feverish displeasure, and after that they spoke no more of it, but did their best for the poor sufferer and prayerfully left the issues with God.

March waned, April came in with its soft showers and tenderer breezes, and, contrary to all their expectations, Nina grew better. They knew now that her dreary, darkened life would be spared to her, for although she convalesced with painful slowness they saw that the improvement was decided.

“She will live, but only God knows what she will do with her broken, ruined life, for, oh, how empty the world will be to her without the love of her husband,” sighed Mrs. Fielding, who was so happy in her home, [Pg 151]her husband and child, that she had a profound pity and sympathy for less fortunate women than herself.

“I wish that we could take her to the sea-shore to recuperate her exhausted energies,” Doctor Fielding said in May, for the wasted face and the hollow dark eyes of the girl troubled his peace. He longed for her to get well faster.

“And cannot we do so?” his wife asked, wistfully, for she, too, longed to see the drooping, pining invalid grow well and strong again.

“I had as well cry for the moon,” he answered. “I am so poor, dear little wife, and my income from my practice is so small that it barely supports us, even with your strict economy and the toil of your little hands over the weary routine of household tasks. Even the long illness of that dear girl has been a heavy tax upon us, and it will take close financiering to meet our expenses this year; so our greatest wish cannot be gratified,” he added, little dreaming what terrible fruit his kindly spoken and kindly meant words would bear in the near future.

Doctor Fielding had forgotten that the door of the room where he sat with his wife was ajar, and that it opened into the pretty little chamber where Nina was lying back listlessly with half-shut eyes in the comfortable reclining chair he had procured for her. When he had gone in a little while ago to speak to her she had been asleep, but now she was broad awake, and every word of the conversation had reached her ears.

“The Fieldings are poor people, and I have been here two months, weakly brooding over my troubles without giving a thought to the fact that I am a burden and expense to them almost heavier than they can bear,” she said to herself with lively compunction, although she might well have been excused for her [Pg 153]thoughtlessness. Having been reared in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury, she had perhaps never given a thought to the fact that there is so much want, misery and sorrow in the world, all caused by the lack of money.

But her sensitive conscience, spurred into activity by the words she had overheard, was on the alert now.

“I must go away from here and relieve these kind true friends of the burden of my support, and I must try to reimburse them for the expense I have been to them,” she decided.

“Not back to Selwyn Heights,” and she shivered, “Not back to my faithless, unloving husband, and my triumphant rival. They believe me dead as I would have been but for Doctor Fielding. They may think so still. I shall never intrude upon them. Doubtless they will be married soon, and she will reign in my old home, queen of the heart I could not win although I was his wedded wife.”

With a smothered moan she rose and walked [Pg 154]unsteadily across the room to where her dark cloak hung upon a peg in the corner. She slipped her hand into the pocket and drew out a little port-monnaie of pearl and silver.

“I always had plenty of money in my purse,” she thought, “Perhaps I have enough to give the Fieldings some now.”

There was only a five dollar bill and some loose change in it. She remembered then that she had left home on so desperate a mission that she had taken nothing with her. It was by the merest accident, and not by design that the little purse had been in her pocket.

“Only five dollars, and I wanted to help them so much,” she sobbed, bursting into babyish tears. It was the first time in her young life that she had ever felt the need of money.

And while she stood there forlornly weeping she remembered that only one day before Talbot Strangemore had come home she had put away five hundred [Pg 155]dollars in the secret bottom of her jewel casket for safe-keeping.

“If I only had that five hundred dollars out of all the wealth I have left behind me, how rich I would feel,” she murmured, “I would give every penny to these noble people. We could go to the sea-shore then, and it would do Mrs. Fielding and the baby as much good as it would me.”

She began to revolve all sorts of schemes in her mind for obtaining possession of the money hidden in her jewel casket at Selwyn Heights.

“I believe that I could easily enter the house by night, obtain the money, and slip away again unobserved,” she thought.

The fancy took possession of her mind. Perhaps there was blended with it an undefined longing to know what Talbot and the rest of them were doing now that they believed her dead and lost to them forever. She persuaded herself that nothing could be easier than to go to Selwyn Heights, get her money, and come away again, all without being discovered.

“And I am compelled to have it,” she reasoned, “I intend to cast my lot with the Fieldings henceforth, [Pg 156]and I must have money to live upon until I get strong enough to work for my daily bread.”

A faint smile crossed her lips at the thought of one of the Selwyns, whose pride and wealth had descended to them through many generations, working like a pauper for daily bread.

“But even that would not be so bad as what that dreadful woman talked about so coolly,” Nina thought, with a lump in her throat, that hurt her cruelly, “I could bear anything rather than the world should say that Nina Selwyn was put away by her husband because he did not love her. It is a shame to a woman to be divorced. I could not have borne the disgrace of it. Talbot was cruelly hard and unkind to suggest it to that woman!”

She was proud and sensitive. She had chosen death rather than the public disgrace of the divorce she believed that Talbot intended to have. She could not think of anything more terrible than that. If any one had told her that a degradation even deeper awaited her, that before long she would be convicted of a murder, that the shadow of the gallows tree hung over her head, and that ere many months she would [Pg 157]feel the horrible rope of the hangman about her fair white throat, she would never have lived to endure it, she would have fallen down dead with the very horror of the thought.

But she did not dream of all that impended over her. She did not know that her husband had gone abroad, that Sibyl St. Alban was dead, and that she herself lay under the ban of murder. The Fieldings had kept everything from her in the kindness of their hearts, waiting until she grew strong enough to bear it.

So in utter ignorance of all that awaited her, of the tragedy that loomed over her darkly, Nina went straight to her fate.

The next morning she was gone and Mrs. Fielding found a brief note upon the pillow the tired head had been wont to press.

“Do not be alarmed about me, dear friends,” the poor sick girl had written. “I am not going to make another effort at self destruction. I am simply gone away upon an imperative matter of business, and I shall return to you in a few hours never to leave you [Pg 158]again if you will let me stay with you. I have forever renounced home and name and husband, and I desire that no one shall ever know that Nina Strangemore still lives upon the cruel earth—no one at least except you two who have been so good to me!”

The great house on Selwyn Heights where that dreadful tragedy had so lately been enacted loomed up dark and stern and stately in the soft spring moonlight. The salty breath of the sea came up over the high bluff and mingled with the perfume of flowers in the spacious terraced grounds. In the great mansion everything was still and silent as the spell of the midnight hour fell over all.

Miss Drusilla Strangemore, the grim guardian of Selwyn Heights in the absence of its master, slumbered peacefully in her room, the domestics had all retired hours ago. Surely no one could detect her now, thought the fair young mistress of that stately home, as she stole along through the dark, deserted halls, and entered her own especial chamber, stealthily, like a thief in the night.

Blank darkness met her as she groped her way to the toilet table and lighted one of the wax candles that always stood in the silver sconces beside the long mirror. A pale, clear flame streamed athwart the darkness, and showed her the dear familiar room looking so dainty and home like, yet withal having such an air of loneliness and desertion that Nina burst into quick tears of sympathy and sorrow for the girl who had lived there so long with her happy love-dream only to have it rudely dispelled at last.

“It seems as if it were some other girl and not me, little Nina Selwyn, who bore all that cross of sorrow. I can scarcely realize that it was really I, for since my long illness I seem to have grown years older and [Pg 160]graver,” she thought, as she wiped away her tears and looked around her for her little jewel case.

There it stood in its old familiar place, and the little key was in her purse. She hurriedly unlocked it, threw back the lid, and her treasures of gold and precious stones lay revealed—diamonds and rubies and pearls, emeralds, amethysts, cameos—all flashing back the light in shimmering radiance. They were the accumulated treasures of the dead and gone Selwyns, and she, the last descendant of that proud old race, caught up a great broad neck-let of rubies that lay nearest her hand and let it shine a moment in the light.

“They look like blood,” she cried, and dropped them back with a strange thrill almost of fear.

“What if I should take some of these jewels of mine? They would make the Fieldings rich. They would keep me from want all my life,” she murmured.

“No, I must not take them, even though they are really mine. They might be missed some day, and an [Pg 161]innocent person be suspected of the larceny—my own faithful Kitty, perhaps! I will leave them all. They will belong to my faithless husband now. Perhaps he will be heartless enough, some day, to adorn my rival with them—the dainty beauty who ruined my life,” she said, bitterly.

She laid all the glittering things upon the table, and lifted out the false bottom of the box, whose secret was known only to herself. There, on the soft satin cushion of the real bottom, lay the bank-notes she had laid there nearly three months ago. She crammed them hastily into her purse, and then rearranged the box and the jewels, locking it, and taking away the key as before.

“Only five hundred dollars out of the millions my father left me! Talbot may have all the rest!” she said, sadly, as she prepared to go.

But suddenly she gave a wild start of terror, and the candle she was about to extinguish fell from her shaking hands to the floor, and left her in total darkness, while she gasped in despair, for a pair of warm, loving arms had been thrown around her, and the voice of her own dear Kitty was saying in eager joy and triumph:

“Oh, Miss Nina, dear, darling child, so it is really yourself, and not your ghost that walked by night as they said? Oh, my dear young mistress, my poor wronged baby, why did you run away from us that awful night?”

In the thick darkness that wrapped them around, Nina made a convulsive effort to tear herself away, but she was like a baby, indeed, in the clasp of Kitty’s strong arms, and the fiercer her struggles the tighter the maid held her.

“Oh, my dear young lady, what do you want to go away for?” she cried, reproachfully. Haven’t you given us trouble enough already, running away like you did, and us thinking you were dead by that dreadful laudanum? And why did you do it, anyhow? Didn’t you know it would break all our hearts to lose you, and you the last one of your race! Be quiet, my [Pg 163]lamb, my darling, for I shall not let you go again, oh, no, no, never!”

“Let me go, Kitty! How dare you keep me against my will?” Nina cried, sharply, making frantic efforts to escape from her captor. “Let me go, and keep my secret for me, please! I went away because I was unhappy here, and I drank the laudanum, too, but Doctor Fielding was so cruel he would not let me die! But I must go away again to-night, and I shall never come back to my old home! No one must ever know that I am alive, Kitty!”

Significant silence followed on the part of Kitty. She held the frail, weak girl tightly in the clasp of one arm, and with the other managed to strike a light again. By its soft clear beams she gazed into Nina’s face with dismay.

“Oh, my dear young lady, what have you been doing to yourself?” she exclaimed, “You are all thin and pale, and your eyes like saucers!”

“I have been ill, Kitty, I have been very near death,” said Nina, nestling her golden head wearily against the faithful creature’s breast and ceasing her fitful, futile efforts at escape.

“Near death! I should think so indeed,” cried the maid, “You look like a real ghost!”

Nina only sighed and clung closer to the maid. Oh, how good it seemed to be back with her dear, kind Kitty again, after all she had endured. The girl had been her childhood’s nurse, and her girlhood’s maid, always dearly loved by Nina, who looked upon her as the only present link between her and that happy past, before her idolizing parents died and left her alone. Her love for the girl was more like that of friend for friend than of mistress for servant. She said to herself that since Kitty had caught her there would be no harm in lingering a little while. Kitty would tell her something of all that had happened since she went away, and then she would persuade the good creature to let her go away again, perhaps, even, Kitty would go with her. The future would not be quite so dark and desolate if she had this true soul to lean upon.

“I will stay with you a little while, Kitty, dear, and then you must let me go. But tell me something about them all—about Aunt Drusilla, and—yourself—and—and”—she [Pg 165]broke down, crimson with shame and pain, angry with herself because in her secret heart she was longing for tidings of Talbot Strangemore.

“I love him still! cruel, neglectful, and unkind as he has been to me, I cannot tear his image from my heart!” she moaned within herself.

“About Mr. Strangemore,” she said, “Oh, my dear, he went back to Europe after he saw that piece in the paper about your taking the laudanum. He thought you were dead—we all thought so—and he said he could not bear to stay at Selwyn Heights after that.”

“But—but”—Nina began, and broke off the sentence—indeed it was interrupted by a startling occurrence.

The door had suddenly opened wide and a slight figure all in white, stood upon the threshold gazing in at them. When it saw the light upon the table, and the startled women, it suddenly turned around and fled swiftly and silently down the gloomy hall.

“Great heaven, that dreadful woman, she is here [Pg 166]yet,” Nina exclaimed, but her words were drowned by a succession of piercing shrieks from Kitty that brought every inmate of the great house rushing to the scene.

Miss Drusilla, the maid-servants, the boy-of-all-work, all in various disheveled stages of attire that but for the warmth of the night might have been productive of colds and catarrhs, appeared precipitately in the room, and when they saw the young mistress of Selwyn Heights they thought they understood the meaning of Kitty’s outcry.

“It is the ghost, the ghost! Kitty said she would sleep in the room and catch it,” cried the maids, and one or two, more fearful than the rest, ran out into the hall again, unable to endure the proximity of a visitant from the other world.

But Miss Drusilla Strangemore being made of sterner stuff than those weak-minded ones, walked [Pg 167]straight up to her niece and laid her hand on her shoulder.

“So it is really you, Nina,” she said, with a touch of tenderness in her stern, old voice, “Oh, my dear, how glad I am that you have come home at last. We have grieved for you so much, for we believed you dead.”

And she put her arms around the trembling girl and shed some furtive tears of joy on the top of the golden head.

“I would have been dead if I had had my way, Aunt Drusilla,” the girl answered, bitterly, but she returned the caresses of the old lady, and felt as she had done with Kitty that it was pleasant to be with her again, for although Miss Drusilla had a hard, stern nature, she had always been kind to the orphan girl confided to her care.

“And you, Kitty,” said Miss Drusilla, looking over the top of Nina’s head, and feeling compelled to scold somebody to check her rushing tears, “aren’t you ashamed of yourself, shrieking out, and raising a regular hullabaloo at the sight of your young mistress? [Pg 168]Didn’t you have sense enough to know that she was not a ghost?”

“Why yes, ma’am, of course. It wasn’t Miss Nina that frightened me—no, not if it had been her ghost instead of her dear blessed self. It was the other one that made me scream,” Kitty answered.

“The other one?” Miss Strangemore interrogated, with an air of mystification.

These disjointed exclamations from the servants followed pell mell upon Kitty’s words. The women huddled together with frightened faces, gazing half terrified at Nina, as if her ghostliness and the other’s combined, were too much for weak human endurance.

“Very well, ma’am, you may doubt my word if you like, but ask Miss Nina here what made me scream.”

“We were in here alone, Kitty and I,” she said, simply. “She had just been telling me that——that Mr. Strangemore had gone abroad again, when the door into the hall there suddenly opened wide. We both looked up, and we saw that woman——I mean Sibyl St. Alban——standing in the door, clad in a soft, loose white dress, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders. When she saw us looking at her she turned around and fled from us.”

A renewed chorus of groans and whispers greeted Nina’s words. Even Miss Drusilla looked pale and troubled. She gazed blankly into Nina’s face.

“I am perfectly certain of it,” was the confident reply, and then the girl burst out, reproachfully, “Oh, Aunt Drusilla, I did not think you could have tolerated that woman here so long! Why is she here still? It cannot be that Talbot has already married her and made her the mistress of my home?”

“Nina, where have you been all this time?” her aunt asked, with seeming irrelevance.

“So near, and not know all that has happened at Selwyn Heights since you went away? Are you jesting with me, child?”

“No, I am telling you the truth, dear Aunt Drusilla. I have been very ill for months. I know nothing, I have heard nothing, I have not read a newspaper since I went away. What has happened? Tell me, Aunt Drusilla,” said the girl, with innocent unconsciousness.

After one moment’s blank, shocked silence, a cry of amaze burst from Nina’s lips:

“Are you mad, Kitty? Did I not see Mrs. St. Alban there in the door looking at me ten minutes ago?”

“You saw her ghost, dear Miss Nina,” said the girl, solemnly, “Mrs. St. Alban is dead and buried long ago, but they do say that bad people can’t rest in their graves, and so I guess that is why her spirit walks at night.”

A great tremor ran over Nina at the maid’s dreadful words. Her sweet face grew ashen, she leaned against Kitty for support.

“Dead,” she murmured, in a tone of awe and wonder. “How long has it been, Aunt Drusilla?”

“About three days after you went away,” the old lady replied, and the wonder in Nina’s eyes grew deeper.

“But she was young and well and strong,” she said, “What was it that killed her so suddenly?”

Miss Drusilla’s heart gave a great throb of dread. She answered almost against her own will:

She never forgot Nina’s ghastly white, horrified [Pg 172]face, and she hurried on to the end of her story for fear the girl would faint.

“Someone went into her room the very night you went away and stabbed her in the breast with a sharp dagger.”

“Oh, my God, how horrible!” shivered the girl, “Oh, she was hard, she was cruel and relentless, but she was so beautiful, so weak, who could have had the heart to kill her? Who did it, Aunt Drusilla? Who murdered Mrs. St. Alban?”

Miss Drusilla turned away from the appealing look in those dark eyes. She could not speak.

“Who was it, Kitty?” said the girl, startled by Miss Strangemore’s emotion, “It was not, oh, no, no, never—it was not my husband?”

“Oh, I am so glad,” she cried. “You all acted so strangely I knew not what to think. But who was it, then, that killed Mrs. St. Alban? Aunt Drusilla, why don’t you speak to me?”

Thus adjured Miss Drusilla’s pale lips parted stiffly, and she answered, desperately.

“Was there ever such a strange answer given to anyone,” Nina asked herself in wonder, and she looked back at her maid.

“And you, Kitty,” she said, “Are you dumb, too, because you know not what to say to me? Can’t you tell me who killed Mrs. St. Alban?”

“Miss Nina, darling, I don’t know who killed her!” the maid responded, doggedly.

The answer was simple enough but Nina’s strained, alert senses detected something beyond it.

“You are keeping something back from me, all of you,” she said, looking round upon their white, scared faces.

“Lucy,” she added, turning around to the chambermaid, who was regarding her through a swift rain of quick tears, “why are you crying, child?”

“About you, Mrs. Strangemore,” sobbed the girl, “because—because—that bad, wicked woman said before she died that it was—was you that had killed her!”

Those words blurted out by Lucy in her grief, [Pg 174]seemed to have killed Nina too, for a moment. She stood still an instant like one transfixed, her form and face rigid and statue-like, her white features looking marble-like, and her eyes wild and wide with horror. Presently one single word, uttered in tones of deepest dismay and wonder, fell from her blanched lips:

“Yes, you, Miss Nina,” Lucy reiterated. “She made them put it down upon a paper that you had stole into her room and killed her and then run away!”

“My God!” the poor girl uttered, in a voice of horror, and then her voice failed her. She reeled dizzily a moment, then dropped heavily, like one dead, to the floor.

Miss Drusilla was so angry with Lucy for blurting out the truth to Nina that she drove her out of the room.

Lucy sobbed and protested that she had not wished to hurt her darling Miss Nina, but Miss Strangemore sent her out with the others, and followed them a minute after with a grave, portentous face.

“Mind,” she said, shaking her long, slim finger at the staring frightened group, “not a word of what has happened outside this house! Listen to me, all of you women, and Jack there, too. I do not want any of you to open your lips to any one on the subject of Mrs. Strangemore’s return. No one outside this house must know that your young mistress is alive and that she has come back to Selwyn Heights. Her presence here must be kept perfectly secret. I know that this silence will be hard upon you, for women have long tongues, but it is necessary to the safety of your mistress that you keep her secret.”

“I’d have my right arm cut off before I’d tell,” exclaimed Jack the boy of all work, loyally, for he worshiped the beautiful young mistress who was always kind and pleasant to him.

“And I, and I”—came the quick response from all, and though Miss Strangemore had small faith in humanity in general she believed in the promises of [Pg 176]these simple, humble servants. She knew that each one worshiped their gentle, indulgent, young mistress.

“Very well,” she said, “I am glad to see that you are all disposed to obey orders, and if you all keep your word I will see that you each receive a nice present for doing your duty. Now go back to your beds and don’t stand gaping in the halls, gossiping, and looking for Mrs. St. Alban’s ghost. She does not walk at all. It was only Nina’s and Kitty’s fancy. Dead people don’t come back to earth, for if they get to heaven they don’t want to return, and if the devil gets ’em he won’t let ’em, and I am pretty sure he got Sibyl St. Alban!”

And leaving her startled hearers, shivering and gaping in a huddled-together group, the stern female returned to the room where she had left Kitty applying restoratives to her mistress.

But none of her remedies had taken effect as yet. Nina still lay upon the floor, her beautiful, rigid face upturned to the light with no more signs of life upon it than if she had been a corpse. Kitty was silently weeping over her.

“Oh, Miss Drusilla, I can’t bring her to. She is dead, surely,” she sobbed. “She was weak and faint. She told me that she had been ill a long time, and so she could not bear the shock of Lucy’s words. They have killed her, my poor young mistress.”

“No, Kitty, I do not believe that she is dead. She is in a deep swoon, that is all. But we must do the best we can for her ourselves. We cannot call a doctor. You understand me, Kitty?” said Miss Drusilla, and in the dim light they looked at each other across the lifeless body with awed eyes.

“That the horrible malice, the dying falsehoods of Sibyl St. Alban have ruined Nina’s life. Oh, what a wicked woman she must have been to die with a lie upon her lips to gratify her jealous malice! If it were known that Nina were alive, that she had come home to Selwyn Heights, she would be arrested for murder!”

Was it only their fancy, or did a low laugh of horrible, unearthly, exultant malice echo through and through the room, seeming to come from the other [Pg 178]side of the door? Kitty was a devout Catholic. She crossed herself when she heard it.

“The saints preserve us!” she cried. “Did you hear the ghost laughing, Miss Drusilla?”

“Kitty, you’re a fool! ’Twas nothing but the wind in the gables,” the lady cried, sharply, but she went quickly to the door and threw it wide open.

“There’s nothing there,” she said, triumphantly, and Kitty did not know that she was shuddering in spite of her pretended bravado, and that that eerie, mocking laugh still rang in her ears. “Mind,” she continued, sharply, “don’t you tell the servants you fancied you heard something. They’ll be leaving the house in a body if you tell them any more ghost tales.”

“I’ll not breathe a word to them, ma’am,” answered trembling, frightened Kitty.

“And now let us do what we can for this poor, unhappy girl,” continued Miss Drusilla, calmly. “Let us take this tight dress off and put on her night-gown and lay her in bed. I think she is going to revive presently.”

“The saints grant it,” prayed Kitty, and Miss Drusilla replied, rather bitterly:

“Perhaps the saints would be in better business if they took her home to glory. Even if she lives what will she do with her blighted future? She will have to fly from justice, a poor, hunted creature! All the world believes her guilty of Mrs. St. Alban’s death!”

And while she busied herself with tender assiduity to bring back the suspended life of the girl, she told herself that she was doing wrong, that Nina was better off dead than to awake to the doom that menaced her.

“I would sooner see her laid in her grave than dragged before a judge and jury to be tried for the murder of the bad and cruel woman who stole her husband and blighted all the happiness of her young life!” she said to herself, “And yet I would give worlds to see her cleared from the base accusation Sibyl St. Alban made against her in her dying hours. But there is no hope of that. The mystery will never be cleared away.”

When she looked at the rigid white face upon the [Pg 180]bed and thought of the suffering that had come to this last fair descendant of the proud old Selwyns through her nephew’s sin she felt that she cordially hated Talbot Strangemore.

“If his mother could look down upon Nina now what must she think of her selfish work?” she thought, for she could not divest herself of the impression that her sister-in-law had acted from purely selfish considerations in bringing about Nina’s marriage with her son.

“Oh,” cried Kitty, and looking down at Nina, Miss Strangemore saw that her dark eyes had flared wide open and her lips parted with a gasp of returning consciousness.

She had come back to life, to consciousness, to sorrow. The two women there who loved this beautiful young creature better than they loved anything else on earth did not know whether to laugh or weep at her recovery.

But Kitty took the nerveless white hand in her own and kissed it warmly through falling tears, while the spinster scarcely less moved, but hiding her emotion [Pg 181]better, continued to bathe Nina’s face and hands with delicate, pungent perfumes.

“Oh, Aunt Drusilla, I thought I was dying just now, and I was so glad, so glad, but now I am come back to life, and I could weep with the very sorrow of it,” shivered the wretched girl, “I—I—think something frightened me very much just now, but I cannot quite remember. My brain seems dazed. Some one said something just now, something very horrible! What was it, Kitty? tell me.”

“It was nothing, Miss Nina, dear, only your fancy,” soothed the maid. She could not summon courage to tell her the truth, she looked so frail and helpless, so like a broken flower, lying back among the pillows with her wan, white face and masses of disheveled golden hair that contrasted so strangely with her large, brilliant dark eyes, darker and larger than ever now as they stared perplexedly at the maid.

“But I am sure there was something,” she said, faintly, “I—I—shall remember it myself presently,” and suddenly like a flash of light memory came back.

“Something very like it, then. Now I remember it. Mrs. St. Alban made them write down that I, Nina, who never harmed the tiniest fly, even—that I had killed her.”

“Did any one believe it?” Nina asked, and somehow Miss Drusilla quickly gathered the yearning thought in her young mind.

“Talbot did not believe it. He felt quite sure that you were innocent,” she replied, and she saw a look of relief pass quickly over the lovely face.

“I went away to die, that Talbot might be free to marry the woman he loved so much,” answered the girl. “Oh, Aunt Drusilla, do not look so shocked! there was no other way for me. Talbot’s mother made me promise solemnly on her death-bed that I [Pg 183]would always try to secure his happiness, that I would give him all my love and all my life. So when I found that his happiness could only be secured by a union with Mrs. St. Alban, what could I do but give him my life as I had promised Mamma?”

“Oh, you poor devoted child, Mrs. Selwyn did not mean that!” she cried. “She did not want you to kill yourself for the sake of that great, hulking, selfish fellow. She only meant for you to be true and faithful to him all your life, and to make him happy with your love.”

That view of the matter had never occurred to Nina. She lay looking at her aunt with a mild surprise in her eyes.

“Yes, I threw myself into the water the night I ran away, but Doctor Fielding saw me and saved my life. He took me to Baltimore, and I ran away again and drank some laudanum, but he had followed me, and he frustrated my purpose again. So then I was [Pg 184]very ill, and as soon as I grew better I came back here.”

“Repenting of your silliness in running away, and wishing to make it all up with Talbot?” Miss Drusilla inquired.

“No, indeed. It was no such pacific motive that brought me back. I came to get some money that I had hidden away in my jewel casket. Then I intended to steal away again unseen, but I was so unfortunate as to be caught by Kitty who would not let me go.”

“Do you mean to say that you intended to live your life out away from us, and never let us know you were living?”

“Nina, you are certainly a most unmitigated little simpleton! I really have no patience with you,” she remarked. “It was ridiculous for you to think of blotting yourself out like that for Talbot Strangemore. He is not worth it, indeed no man is worth the sacrifice of a woman’s life. I have always despised men, and my nephew’s conduct has only made me dislike them worse. What was he, what kindness had he ever done you, that you should have given up your life for him? I wish he had died before he ever came back to make all this trouble. I am sure I hate him, even if he was my brother’s son!”

“So do we all,” Kitty muttered under her breath, but not so low but that Nina caught it.

“Oh, Aunt Drusilla, oh, Kitty, please do not talk about my husband like that! I used to love him so much,” she pleaded.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Nina tried to say, but a great sob rose in her throat and choked her.

“You need not try to tell me a fib, child. I know just how weak and silly women’s hearts are. Go on loving your husband as much as you like. Perhaps he will turn out more worthy of your love some day. I wish I knew where to write to him now. He ought to come home to you,” Miss Drusilla said, thoughtfully.

“No, not for worlds!” Nina gasped, in horror, “Do not send for him, please. I will not stay to meet him!”

“Nonsense, child, you need him now. His place is by your side to shield you and protect you,” said the old lady, impressively.

“What do you mean?” she asked, and Miss Drusilla [Pg 187]felt that no task she had ever undertaken in her life was as hard as that which lay before her now.

“I cannot tell her the whole truth. I will temporize with her,” she finally decided, and so, looking as calmly as she could into the pale, sweet face, she said:

“I mean that Talbot ought to be here to silence any malicious tongues that may wag over that dying falsehood of Sibyl St. Alban.”

There was a minute’s silence. The pale face on the pillow grew, if possible, still paler.

“Does any one credit that cruel story?” she asked, faintly, and suddenly Kitty flung herself down on her knees by the bed.

“Oh, Miss Nina, darling, you can prove that you did not do it, can’t you, dear?” she cried. “What time was it when you went away that night, because the murder was not committed until midnight, and if you can prove that you went away before that time no one can believe aught against you.”

“Indeed, Kitty, I do not know what time it was when I went away. I was so wretched, so humiliated by my own madness that I took no thought of time!”

“But after you sent me away, Miss Nina, you [Pg 188]went away at once—that was the way, wasn’t it, darling?” Kitty asked, anxiously.

“Let me think a moment, Kitty.” She put her hand to her brow in a bewildered way, then answered. “No, I did not go away then, for after you were gone Mrs. St. Alban came into my room to talk to me about my husband.”

“The viper! What could she have to say about Talbot?” flashed Miss Strangemore.

“She wanted to tell me how unhappy they both were and how I had ruined all their lives by marrying Talbot. She wanted me to consent to a divorce that he wanted to have so that he might marry her,” Nina answered, bitterly.

“The she-devil!” Miss Drusilla cried, violently. “How did she dare talk to you so? She was brazen-faced indeed! I hope you ordered her out of the room, Nina.”

“I asked her to go, I think, but not until I told her that she should have Talbot for her own soon,” the girl answered, wearily.

“You meant to consent to a divorce?” the maiden [Pg 189]lady cried, aghast, and all the pride of the Selwyn’s flashed from Nina’s eyes as she answered:

“Perhaps so, I don’t know. I remember that I asked God to forgive me when I sprang into the cold water.”

“You went away directly after that woman left you?” the lady asked her, anxiously, and her heart sank when Nina answered, sadly:

“No, not just at once. I was so hurt, so shocked at the thought that Talbot actually contemplated divorcing me, that I sat like one stunned for some time, going over and over in my mind the humiliating thought. I rose at last mechanically, put some dark garments on, and went away down to the shore and flung myself into the sea.”

“But after all it could not have been midnight when you went, Nina,” said Miss Strangemore, and [Pg 190]the tremor of deep anxiety in her voice struck the girl oddly.

“Indeed I do not know, I cannot remember,” she said. “But it does not matter very much, I suppose.”

They turned it off as lightly as possible, but their strange questions, their confused answers, awakened her suspicions. The truth began to dawn upon her mind.

She sat up in bed looking almost unearthly, with her great, startled dark eyes and her deathly white face.

“You are frightened over something, both of you. Is it about me?” she asked.

And then Kitty went and sat down behind her on the bed and put her arms about the slender form. Nina turned her face to her.

“Can anyone punish me because that dreadful woman said falsely that I killed her?”

“But if”—and all in a minute a ghastly change came over the lovely, stricken young face, “oh, Aunt Drusilla, what if I cannot prove it?”

It was all over. They never quite remembered in what words they had told her the truth, but they never forgot the wail of agony that came from her lips as she put her white hand to her throat and said, with an awful shudder:

“They will try me for murder and then they will put a rope around my neck and hang me!”

Then there had followed another season of blank unconsciousness. This time Miss Drusilla had not lifted a finger to help her back to life. She had sternly forbidden Kitty, too.

“We both love her,” she said, “Let us have mercy upon her. Let us pray God to take her suffering spirit back to himself.”

It did not seem to them that they were doing [Pg 192]wrong, they were wrought up to so high a pitch of frenzy by the dread of the future. They stood by her senseless body without lifting a finger and they silently implored Heaven that she might never awaken from her swoon.

But their wild wishes were not to be granted. The vitality in the girl’s young frame was not exhausted yet. She struggled back to life unaided, and then they realized all that lay before them, the peril, the danger that they must try to avert.

“We must hide her,” they said to each other. “We will take her back to Doctor Fielding. He is strong and wise. He will tell us what to do.”

And for the first time since Talbot went away his aunt regretted that he had left her no address to which to write.

“I shall be a remorseful, broken-hearted wanderer all over the wide world, and it is not likely that I shall ever return here,” he had said, and in her wrath against him she had let him go, not forseeing this moment when she should vainly long to warn him of his wife’s peril.... The first gray beams of dawn were beginning to glimmer in the sky when three [Pg 193]heavily veiled women stole out from the portals of the great house and went swiftly and silently down the long avenue.

But fast as they went the law had traveled faster. Two men came in at the tall gate—men in official clothing, with hats drawn over their brows as if ashamed of their mission. One advanced and laid a heavy hand upon one of the vailed figures leaving the house. She gave a startled cry and drew back, but he held her fast.

“Mrs. Strangemore, you are under arrest for the murder of Mrs. St. Alban,” he said, in an official tone.

All unconscious of the portentous events happening at home, Talbot Strangemore pursued his wanderings from city to city, from clime to clime, in restless search after that fabled Lethean stream in [Pg 194]whose waves one may bury all the woeful memories found too heavy to carry through the pilgrimage of life. Oswald Ferris bore him indefatigable company in his strange pursuit.

He was a very peculiar man, this Oswald Ferris with his tall, proud form, and dark, corsair like beauty. He was a brilliant conversationalist, and shone in society, although after all, men liked him best. Women like Virgie Mason shrunk from him without a reason why, but Sibyl St. Alban had been hand-and-glove with him for a brief season. She had taught him

The little coquette had scarcely understood the nature of the man she had fooled with such charming grace in the early days of her widowhood, when, having been debarred from the pastime for some months, she entered upon it with new zest and pleasure. Ferris had been a splendid subject, too, for he seemed so ignorant of womanly coquetry and was so jealous, passionate, and intense, that he was a constant amusement [Pg 195]to Sibyl. She greatly enjoyed “playing this big fish” as Cameron and the others phrased it, enjoyed it, systematically, until Strangemore joined them, then as her slighted lover said, she threw him over.

She was tired of him, and here was another subject, that was all Sibyl thought about it. She did not think about the adoring heart, the fiery temper, the passionate, undisciplined nature of the man she had wronged, nor of the fiery desire and longing for vengeance that rose from the ashes of his dead love. He had served her purpose, and she was done with him. She bent herself to the delightful task of winning Talbot Strangemore from his child-bride at home, and forgot all about Oswald Ferris, save when she was reminded of his existence by the reproachful glances he flashed at her, and by words he sometimes uttered whose barbed point had seemed to be aimed at her heart, and which stung her by their truth, but did not move her to repentance, because she was entirely cruel and heartless.

So now this man whose heart and soul she had wrecked so heartlessly, was an exile for her sake, hating all women because this Circe born without a [Pg 196]soul, had made a plaything of his heart and flung it back to him when weary, broken, ruined and worthless from the pastime of an hour.

He was not a pleasant companion for Talbot Strangemore now. All his old brilliant gifts of talk and manner had deserted him. He had grown moody, dull, distrait and restless beyond measure. Once he had loved books, but he never opened one now. He spent hours and hours in long solitary walks. Strangemore rallied him a little drearily on his deep depression.

“Do not give yourself up so wholly to your sorrow,” he said. “It is wrong to speak ill of the dead, but after all, Mrs. St. Alban was not worthy of the feeling we both wasted on her. That truth has come home to me although too late for my happiness.”

They looked deep into each other’s eyes, those two men whose lives had been ruined to please the vanity of a beautiful, heartless butterfly.

“That is the bitterest part of it,” said Oswald Ferris, low and bitterly. “I have lost myself for her sake, and after all she was not worth it. Oh, how I fooled myself with the thought of making that dainty [Pg 197]creature my bride. She promised it. She took my ring, my gifts, she let me hold her in my arms, she suffered me to kiss her face, and to toy with her soft gold hair, and after all she was false. She was only feeding her vanity with my admiration, and by and by when a new victim came, she dropped me as coolly as if I had been a soulless clod, instead of a man mad for love and thirsting for vengeance. Was it any wonder I was wrought to frenzy when she lavished her love and her smiles on you, when she even dared try to divorce you from your fair, sweet bride? Oh, my God”—he paused, abruptly, with a startled look, as if in his passion he had uttered too much.

“Why did you not tell me how she had wronged you then, while she was making a fool of me?—doubly a fool, for I had known her wiles before,” said Talbot, with biting self-contempt.

“Did you think I wore my heart on my sleeve for daws to peck at?” demanded Ferris. “No, I was too proud. I bore all in silence, save that now and then I reproached her with bitter looks and barbed words, which she received with tacit defiance. I wondered then why she had no conscience. I often wonder now [Pg 198]why she had no fear. Did she think she could drive a great, strong powerful animal mad with impunity?”

“She knew that the animal in this case had a soul,” said Strangemore, with a rather dreary smile. “Women expect men to bear such wrongs as yours, mon ami, with meekness and equanimity. You would not have harmed that gilded butterfly, would you? Nay,” he added, springing to his feet while a terrible suspicion smote his brain, “You did not hurt her, did you? You whose wrongs were so deep that your brain was half distraught with rage and resentment, you did not strike the dagger into her white breast, did you?”

The suspicion and the words were born together, and with such suddenness that Ferris was for a moment staggered by them.

He recoiled before the excited speaker with a marble-white face and a startled hunted look that was almost like guilt itself in his blazing eyes. Strangemore believed that he had detected the murderer of Sibyl St. Alban.

“My God, Ferris, then it was you that committed that dastardly deed!” he cried.

Ferris had recovered himself now. He turned upon his accuser with passionate defiance.

“How dare you, oh, how dare you accuse me of the heinous crime committed by your own wife?” he exclaimed, hoarsely, “Have you forgotten that she, too, was maddened by her wrongs?—wrongs that you had inflicted upon her in your mad worship of her rival! Have you forgotten that Sibyl St. Alban’s dying deposition laid her death at the door of Nina Strangemore? Have you forgotten the letter dropped by your wife in the room of the murdered woman? Have you forgotten her flight that was a tacit admission of her guilt?”

He hurled the angry words one after another thick and fast at his accuser and each charge fell upon Strangemore’s heart like a hail-stone. He recoiled with an exceeding bitter cry:

“Oh, God, to think that my folly and madness brought all this upon my poor young wife! Would to God, I had died before my return home!”

Ferris regarded him cynically, with a dark and lowering expression between his brows.

“If your wife had only killed herself instead of [Pg 200]sending her rival out of the world, too, how pleasant it would have been for you,” he observed. “You could have married Sibyl and been happy after all.”

“Hush,” Strangemore said, hoarsely. “Do not throw my folly and sin into my face. I cannot bear it. No, I could never have married Sibyl even if Nina’s desperate suicide had left me free to do so. I loved my young wife from the first moment we met after my return. At the first sight of her pure young face the wicked infatuation that Sibyl had fostered died within me, and a pure and holy love for my neglected bride took its place. If Sibyl had not formed that mad scheme for coming to Selwyn Heights and ruining my wedded happiness all would have gone well with me. I should not have been caught in the trap she set for me, Nina would not have been driven desperate, nothing would have happened as it did!”

“But, so help me God, Ferris, in spite of all the awful evidence against her, I cannot believe that Nina, [Pg 201]my wife, was guilty of that terrible crime. Some dreadful mystery hangs around that murder—a mystery that Sibyl St. Alban hid behind her false declaration that Nina had killed her. It was some other hand that drove that dagger home in her breast.”

And looking steadily at the downcast face of Ferris, he said within himself: “Thou art the man!”

But he did not again charge him with the crime. Some instinct told him to be wary. He said to himself that he would watch Ferris closely, but in silence, for some token that should convict him of his sin.

Talbot brooded more than ever over the memory of his dead bride after those words with Oswald Ferris. That night he dreamed of her.

Not that he had not dreamed of her before in his dreary, remorseful exile, for there were few nights [Pg 202]when her image did not brood above his pillow. But his visions of his poor wronged Nina had been most unsatisfactory ones. She appeared to him always cold, proud, repellant, as she had been after she overheard the foolish confidence he had reposed in his aunt. To-night there was a change.

Sometimes Talbot fancied that it had been a real vision not merely a dream that came to him that night, it was so strangely real.

He had not retired, he had merely dropped into a doze over his book, when the form of Nina rose clearly before his mind’s eye, and the beautiful, despairing young face with its hollow, pleading dark eyes, made an ineffaceable impression on his memory. Her golden hair floated like a vail over her shoulders, and her delicate white hands were raised and clasped as she murmured in tones of agonizing entreaty:

Talbot Strangemore started forward to inclose that suppliant figure with his arms, but they only clasped the empty air. The vision had dissolved, faded, even while the low, entreating tones seemed to tremble on the air.

“Nina!” he cried, but no voice answered him back. He saw that he was alone, that his lamp had burned low, and his book fallen to the floor. He looked at his watch and saw that it was midnight, the hour when restless spirits revisit the earth.

“Was it her restless ghost come to summon me to the other world?” he asked himself with throbbing pulses, and a certain sense of pleasure came to him with the thought.

“By that token I know that she has forgiven me,” he thought. “She knows now all my sorrow, all my repentance, all my love, and she forgives me and summons me to join her in that dark, mysterious Beyond, whither she so rashly precipitated herself.”

There was joy to him in the fancy that his wronged young wife desired his presence in that other world where she was gone. He knew it would be sin to take his own life, yet for a moment the temptation came over him almost too strongly to be resisted. The beautiful vision seemed to beckon him away, the voice seemed to draw him by invisible chains.

“She needs me,” he said to himself, and he was only held back from throwing himself into the blue [Pg 204]waves of the sea that flowed beneath the windows of the old chateau where he was staying, by a sudden warning thought:

“I must live to track Oswald Ferris down to conviction for his crime, and clear my darling’s name from the shadow of a sin before I go hence to join her.”

So he whispered to Nina as if she were present in spirit and could hear him, that she must wait a little while until his mission on earth was accomplished before he was ready to join her in the spirit world. Then he would come to her, oh, so gladly.

After that day he watched Oswald Ferris furtively but closely. He was determined that he would ferret out the secret the man had hid so cleverly, leaving a lovely, innocent, unhappy girl to bear the brunt of his sin.

“The coward, the villain,” he said to himself many times, and he was half tempted to take the wretch by the throat and throttle him until he confessed the truth.

But calmer thoughts prevailed. He knew that it was necessary to hide the suspicions he had once imprudently [Pg 205]uttered, or Ferris would fly with his guilty secret to the uttermost ends of the earth.

“I must bide my time. I must watch and wait even though my little Nina is calling me to join her in the other world,” he thought, and no prescience came to him that Nina still dwelt upon this lower earth, and that by one of the strange and wondrous operations of the mind a miracle had been accomplished—that Nina, kneeling on the hard floor of her cruel prison cell, her pride, her resentment, her coldness all beaten down by her unutterable woe, had sent her soul’s cry for him ringing across leagues of sea and land that divided them, ringing on, and on, and on, until it reached his heart.

Innocently and ignorantly Nina had walked into a terrible trap on the night when she re-entered her home at Selwyn Heights. Before the day dawned information of her return was lodged with the [Pg 206]authorities. Her arrest followed quickly, just as she was about to make her escape.

Her youth, her beauty, her wealth were all powerless to save her now. The yawning doors of a prison received her within their gloomy embrace, she who had been cradled among the roses and lillies of life now became the inmate of a prison cell.

It was hard, it was bitter, it was cruel, but she had no redress. Shivering, trembling, dazed with fear and terror, she was led away like a lamb to the sacrifice. Her friends were half-mad with grief and dread.

Upon the dastardly wretch who had betrayed her presence at Selwyn Heights, Miss Drusilla Strangemore called down the deepest vengeance of heaven.

But the identity of the traitor was wrapped in impenetrable mystery. She called around her the whole small staff of servants at Selwyn Heights, and after delivering a scathing exordium that she hoped would scorch the conscience of the guilty party, she called upon each one individually to confess the truth.

If the occasion had not been so solemn the scene would have been ludicrous, so fierce and animated were Miss Strangemore’s gestures, and so vehement [Pg 207]her injunctions that the truth and nothing but the truth be told.

But one after another, solemnly, indignantly, even with tears in their eyes, the little group protested innocence of the alleged fault, and swore anew unswerving love and fidelity to their young and hapless mistress.

“But you know it was one of you, certainly,” she said, at last. “And I shall keep such a close watch upon you all that I’ll be bound to catch the guilty one at last. So whichever one of you it was that played the part of Judas, I want you to go away from Selwyn Heights and never darken these doors again!”

But no one offered to go, and no one went. Each and all were indignant at her suspicions.

“Miss Strangemore ought to know us better than to think that we could betray our sweet young mistress,” they said. “Why, we’ve been here ever since she was a little girl, and we love every hair of her head better than our own.”

So the mystery remained a mystery still, although [Pg 208]Miss Drusilla sternly flouted Kitty’s belief in the innocence of the servants.

“It stands to reason that it was one of them, Kitty. There was no one else that knew she was here and alive.”

“Oh, Miss Strangemore, I can’t go to think that one of them servants that loved her as much as you and I did, could have turned against her. I’d sooner think it was that horrible ghost that done it all,” protested the maid.

“Mrs. St. Alban’s ghost, ma’am, that Miss Nina saw that night as well as myself.”

“Do you want me to think you’re a fool, Kitty, believing in ghosts in this practical nineteenth century?” exclaimed the old maid, severely.

Kitty remained unshaken in her belief, despite the fulminations of the old lady.

“I’m sorry for any one to think hard of me and call me names, but all the same I know that Mrs. St. [Pg 209]Alban’s spirit did come back every night almost to Selwyn Heights,” she said. “Almost every one of the servants heard it and caught glimpses of it, and at first they said it was Miss Nina because it always went into her room. So I said if my dear dead mistress walks it’s because she has something on her mind she wants to reveal, and so I slept in her dressing-room that night so that she might find me waiting for her, ready to hear the secret that troubled her spirit.”

“Well, I did sleep on the sofa in her dressing-room with the doors open, and sure enough she came. Thinks I to myself, poor darling, I’ve caught you, and I lay still and watched her with little creeping chills running down my back. It seemed strange to see a ghost light a candle, and unlock a jewel case with a key that had been missing so long. And then when she pulled out the shining jewels and talked aloud in dear Miss Nina’s voice it seemed stranger to me than ever and quite natural, too, so that presently the chill stopped creeping down my back, and I began to want to touch my pretty darling. I stole softly into the [Pg 210]room and put both arms tightly around her, and then I found out that it was not a ghost but my mistress, living, and breathing, and struggling desperately to get away from me. But I held her tight and lighted the candle that she had put out. It was just at that moment that the door opened wide, and Mrs. St. Alban, natural as life in her white dress and loose hair, looked in at us.”

“Pooh, it was only your fancy. The door was not fastened tight, and a gust of wind tore it open,” exclaimed the spinster. “Then you imagined all the rest.”

“But Miss Nina saw it, too, and she was not frightened and did not imagine it, for she did not know that that wicked woman was dead,” Kitty replied.

“It was her fancy, nevertheless. She was thinking about the woman that had caused her so much trouble, and so it was easy for her to fancy that she saw her,” declared Miss Drusilla, who was determined not to give in to Kitty’s notion. To do her justice she really believed that the alleged ghost was merely a figment [Pg 211]of imaginations stimulated too high by the recent tragedy.

“Miss Drusilla, you may think what you please, ma’am, but I’m sure I’m right,” she said, respectfully. “And if such a thing could be, I’d believe that that dreadful woman came back every night to watch for my poor darling, Miss Nina, and that she caused her arrest that awful morning.”

“Your ghosts would seem at least to be very practical beings, Kitty,” said the spinster, with a faint glimmer of amusement.

“Yes ma’am, and isn’t it strange that since that night no one has seen nor heard the ghost? Doesn’t it seem like she could not rest until she had worked evil to my mistress, and that now she rests quiet in her grave at last?” said Kitty, with something like awe, and the old maid finding her so “set in her way” desisted in disgust from the attempt to convert her into a reasonable creature.

“‘Ignorance is the mother of superstition,’” she enunciated, loftily, and so dropped the subject.

She went to Baltimore, sought out the Fieldings, told them her story, and heard theirs. They were agonized over the dreadful fate that had overtaken the lovely, and hapless young girl. Too late they repented the silence they had kept out of their great love and sympathy.

“Better to have told her the hard truth than that this should have happened,” said the doctor.

“But who would have dreamed of her returning to Selwyn Heights, the place of all others we supposed she would wish to avoid?” wept Minnie Fielding.

When Miss Drusilla told her the truth——that Nina had ventured home to procure money to give to her kind friends, they were full of remorse and despair. They understood all, then. They knew that their innocent, kindly meant words had been overheard by the invalid girl. Those words had driven her away, hurried her to her wretched fate.

“I will devote my life to her service,” said the [Pg 213]doctor, soothing his sobbing wife. “You will need a man to help you and advise you in your dreadful position, Miss Strangemore. Pray command me in any and every way.”

“I don’t think much of men usually,” the spinster replied, candidly. “It was a man that brought all this trouble upon Nina, and I like the sex that much less for his fault. But I believe that you are as good a man as there is, Doctor Fielding, and since I must have a man’s help, I will accept your offer.”

The doctor who had understood from his wife some of Miss Strangemore’s peculiarities, only smiled at this characteristic acceptance of his offer.

“I thank you for your kindly spoken compliment, and will endeavor to deserve it,” he said. “And now we must set straight to work in behalf of our poor young friend. I suppose the first thing will be to procure a good lawyer.”

“The best that can be had,” assented Miss Drusilla. “She has plenty of money, and you may spend it like water to secure her acquittal.”

Doctor Fielding secured one of the ablest lawyers in the country as Nina’s counsel. He carefully collected all the evidence for and against her. He weighed it carefully, and the result did not please him.

“The case looks very unfavorable to my client,” he admitted frankly to the doctor. “I can see but one chance for her acquittal in the awful array of damning evidence against her.”

“Is the chance of proving an alibi at the hour of the murder,” answered Mr. Davenport, the lawyer, gravely and decidedly.

“I fear that it will be impossible to do that,” Doctor Fielding answered with a heavy sigh, and from that moment hope began to fail in his breast.

“You told me that you saved her from attempted suicide that night. Surely you must have some idea of the time when it occurred,” said Mr. Davenport.

“It must have been near midnight, although I cannot tell exactly. But I remember that every person on the yacht had retired hours before and left me alone upon the deck, with my solitary cigar.”

“You say that Captain Travers assisted you in the rescue of the young lady that night. Might he not remember the exact hour at which the attempted suicide occurred?”

“Yes, he died very suddenly of apoplexy in a few days after the tragedy at Selwyn Heights.”

“And the young lady herself—has she no knowledge of the hour at which she left her home?” the lawyer anxiously inquired.

“I do not believe that she has, but it would perhaps be better to ask her,” Doctor Fielding replied.

Up to that moment Mr. Davenport had had a private [Pg 216]opinion that his client was guilty. Everything looked so black against her, the evidence was so conclusive there scarcely seemed room for doubt. It all seemed to have come about so naturally, her jealousy of the dead woman, her passionate anger and open resentment seemed to have led up so inevitably to the crime of murder that Mr. Davenport had decided in his mind that his client had scarcely the shadow of a case.

After they went to the prison, after he beheld the lovely, hapless creature whose life, as it were, seemed hanging on his hands, a great revulsion of feeling came over the lawyer.

He said to himself that although he might never be able to prove her innocence in a court of law, that the angels in heaven were not more pure and guiltless than this martyred girl.

“No, I cannot remember,” she said, hopelessly, when he entreated her to try to recall the hour when [Pg 217]she had left her home. “It might have been midnight, or it might have been earlier, I do not know how long I sat there dazed and wretched after Mrs. St. Alban’s cruel words to me. I was too miserable to note the lapse of time. When I had decided despairingly in my mind that I would drown myself, I rose, wrote a brief note which I left for my husband, mechanically donned some dark clothing, and went away. It was quite late, I suppose. I heard and saw no one, and the lights were all out in the house.”

“Try to think now,” he urged. “Did you not look at your watch before leaving? Most persons do so mechanically before going out.”

He did not tell her how hopeless all this made her case appear. He did not have the heart to do so. The beautiful, anguished young face had touched him beyond words. He vowed to himself that he would do all that he could to help her, but he did not believe that he could do much.

But although he did not tell her in what deadly peril she stood, Nina knew more than he guessed. Kitty’s anxious words to her the night she returned [Pg 218]had disclosed to her her danger. When they had left her alone again in her gloomy cell, she sank upon her knees with a passionate cry wrung from the depths of her crushed and despairing young heart.

With a passionate yearning beyond all telling, Nina longed for her husband now. Her heart turned to him instinctively, feeling that his place was by her side in this hour of her terrible trial.

“Even although he did not love me he would not willingly let me perish like this,” she thought, and it seemed to her that Talbot if he had been there could have done more for her than anyone else. It seemed to her that he had more power than any other man.

But he was far away from her, the husband whom she had loved so dearly for five long years, for whom she had waited so patiently, and whose coming at last had brought her such terrible woe. Like a mocking echo the words of her old song rose in her memory:

A bitter shame and dread were upon the girl as she shrinkingly contemplated the close of her trial. She had not been afraid to die at her own hands, but the horror, the disgrace of her impending doom shook her soul to its center.

“To die on the scaffold—oh, I cannot bear it! How can they do it when I am innocent?” she wept, over and over, and it seemed to her that she would die of terror and shame even before the day appointed for her trial—a day that was indefinitely postponed because it was so difficult to find a jury. This case had been discussed months before by the public, and it was a horrible fact that scarcely a man could be found who had not already expressed his opinion upon it, an opinion almost always adverse to the unhappy prisoner. So while the law tarried, gathering together its terrible weapons of prosecution, Nina languished in prison, and by some mysterious psychic force the yearning cry of her soul made itself audible to Talbot far across the sea:

The slow days waned and faded, and Nina seemed fading with them, so pallid and hollow grew her cheek, so large and dark her sweet, sad eyes. It was summer now, but little of its bloom and fragrance penetrated the gloomy cell where she was immured. Miss Strangemore and faithful Kitty had taken lodgings near the prison and visited her every day. They would have remained with her all the time but this was not allowable.

Miss Drusilla was nearly crazed with grief and horror over Nina’s trouble. She would have given a year out of her life to have known where to find Talbot Strangemore.

She knew that he ought to be there, that it was simply terrible for him to be absent in this hour of Nina’s supreme peril, and she had, besides, an innate knowledge [Pg 221]that in spite of all her cruel wrongs the unhappy girl secretly longed for her husband’s presence. It seemed to them both that Talbot, knowing that she had come to this awful strait by his weakness and folly, would put forth a superhuman effort to save her.

But if the exiled husband had been dead and buried he could not have remained more silent to all the efforts that were made to find him. Miss Drusilla wrote to the American Consuls at all the foreign countries. She advertised in the leading papers at home and abroad. She made every possible effort to communicate with the wanderer, but dead silence rewarded her in every instance. And meantime a jury had been convened, and the day of Nina’s trial had been set.

Oh, that awful day of fate! The frail, weak, shuddering girl wondered how she should live through it when they led her into court to face all those cold, curious faces. A low murmur ran from lip to lip, and the frightened creature believed that it was a whisper of execration. She sank shivering into her seat.

“This is what her love for a man has brought her to, poor innocent, suffering child! I wish that all the [Pg 222]men were swept from the face of the earth,” muttered Miss Strangemore in bitter wrath, as she sat down beside her niece, and glowered in impatient anger at judge and jury.

The beauty, the youth, the great wealth, the high standing of the prisoner at the bar made a great sensation. The court-room was packed with interested people. Marmaduke Cameron and his yachting friends greatly to their chagrin had been summoned as witnesses to the prosecuting attorney. Cameron indeed was the most important witness, for it was he who had taken down Mrs. St. Alban’s dying deposition.

“I wish that I had been a thousand miles away that fatal night. It goes to my heart to testify against that lovely forlorn young creature. Even if she killed Mrs. St. Alban it was because she was driven mad by jealousy and disappointed love,” he whispered to Virgie Mason, who was bathed in tears over Nina’s fate.

“But she did not do it, oh, no, no, no, I will never believe that she did,” sobbed the fair and gentle girl [Pg 223]“And it almost breaks my heart to think that they have made Helen and me come here to repeat all the things she said that night when Sibyl had driven her mad by her heartless coquetries with Mr. Strangemore. I know she did not mean half that she said, and it seems cruel for us to have to tell it for the purpose of condemning her.”

But they had no choice in the matter. They were compelled to obey the stern mandate of the law.

Nina’s lawyer argued her case in his best and most forcible style. He brought witnesses to testify to the sweet and gentle nature of the accused. No one that knew her believed that she was guilty. They knew that it was impossible for her to have committed such an act. He admitted that she had had great provocation to anger, and that she had called down the vengeance of heaven upon her triumphant and insolent rival, but he said that the very fact that she had called upon heaven to avenge her wrongs proved that she had not attempted to take the punishment of the cruel coquette into her own young hands. Nay, she had gone away and made two attempts at suicide in order to free her unloving husband that he might be happy [Pg 224]with the woman he preferred beyond her. He harangued the court for several hours, and after a brilliant, but almost hopeless effort sat down to listen to the closing speech of the prosecution.

In the slight confusion that ensued upon the closing of the speech for the defense, Virgie Mason and Helen Starr obtained permission to speak to the prisoner.

With bitter tears they kissed the fair young face whose expression of hopeless woe almost broke their hearts. They implored her to forgive them because they had been brought to court to testify against her.

“We would not have come if we could have helped it,” they said, and Virgie added, indignantly: “I think it’s real mean to make us come against our will, and I for one sha’n’t tell them anything I can help!”

But these two fair young girls had never been in a witness box and did not know that they would be subjected to so rigid an examination that they would be sure to tell all they knew. They were indignant when their turn came at the searching questions asked them by the prosecution, and try as they would they could not avoid giving a full and detailed account of the scene in the drawing room at Selwyn Heights, a few hours before the terrible tragedy. Virgie cried out impulsively:

“Nina did not mean to hurt her, I am sure, for she called on heaven to punish her for her sin, and if she meant to commit a crime she could not have taken the name of heaven upon her lips.”

Miss Strangemore, even, was compelled to go upon the stand and repeat the particulars of the drawing-room scene. Oh, cruel fate, the victim said to herself when even her friends were compelled to condemn her out of their own lips.

When all the witnesses had been examined the speech for the prosecution began. This lawyer honestly believed that the prisoner at the bar was guilty, and he tried his best to convince the judge and jury that it was so.

He said that the evidence against Mrs. Strangemore did not rest wholly upon the dying deposition of the murdered lady. The murderess had dropped a letter upon the floor of Mrs. St. Alban’s room in her hurried flight—a letter written that night by Mr. Strangemore to his wife, and which he told some one afterward he had slipped under the door of her chamber.

There was a piercing cry in the court-room. Nina sprang upon her feet pale as death, wild, excited.

“I never received that letter, I never even heard of it. Where is it now?” she cried, in deep agitation.

Mr. Davenport hastened to her side. The counsel for the prosecution was about to read Talbot Strangemore’s letter, dated on the night of the tragedy, in open court.

Nina leaned forward with parted lips and eager eyes to listen. Her veil was pushed carelessly back, and people gazed in wonder at the lovely spirituelle face, marveling that one so young and fair with the expression of a suffering angel, could be in reality a crime-stained sinner.

But she did not heed them. In that moment when [Pg 227]they were trying her for life or death, when there seemed to be no hope for her in earth or heaven, when the black shadow of the scaffold hung gloomily over her fair young head, there came to Nina Strangemore a moment of supreme and perfect joy—a moment of bliss all the fairer from contrast with the gloom that had encompassed her, a glimpse from out all the horror of a Hades at lost Heaven.

The counsel for the prosecution was reading aloud in a cold dispassionate voice:

It seemed like sacrilege to read that letter fresh from the heart of the repentant and shame-stricken husband, to that eager, gaping throng. Murmurs of pity, of sorrow, some few of derision, ran from lip to lip. Those who believed that Nina was guilty thought [Pg 229]worse of her than before. Surely when she read that letter, when she learned that her husband’s heart had returned to her, she ought to have spared that poor, pretty butter-fly Sibyl St. Alban. It was enough to triumph over her without taking her life in revenge for the past.

Through all the reading of that long letter Nina did not stir nor speak. She leaned slightly forward with her small hands loosely clasped in her lap, her lips parted just enough for one to catch the glitter of small, pearly white teeth, her eager eyes fixed upon the reader. A loose tress of golden hair had strayed over her shoulder and lay like a sunbeam against her black dress. There was an expression upon her face that puzzled the gazers, an expression so rapt, so intense, that they held their breath in wonder.

“She looks positively radiant, like one in a happy dream,” they said, and it was true, for a soft flush had risen into the wan face, and the dark eyes beamed with light—the light of an overwhelming joy.

“He loved me—my husband loved me,” she said to her beating heart, whose pulses rose to flood-tide with this joyous revelation. “Oh, what a cruel fate [Pg 230]it was that kept that letter away from me that night! How did I miss finding it? How came it to be lying on the floor in Sibyl St. Alban’s room?”

Before any one could stay her, she rose in her seat, she flashed her blazing dark eyes upon judge and jury, she shook her white hand at the counsel who was going on with his accumulated evidence against her, ruthlessly trying to rob her of her young life.

“Hush,” she said. “Listen to me, for I must speak,” and in sheer wonder he obeyed her.

“I never received that letter,” she went on. “If I had done so the whole current of my life would have been changed. If I had received that letter, if I had known that my husband loved me, I should not have gone away. I should have granted the interview he asked, I should have forgiven him and loved him, and I should have forgiven Sibyl St. Alban, too, for I could not have held resentment for any one in my great happiness.”

A subdued murmur of pity and sympathy ran through the throng like an electric current. There [Pg 231]were some there who pitied the girl and did not believe her guilty. These had tears in their eyes and their hearts ached for the hapless, beautiful creature who went on thrillingly:

“I am quite sure I can tell you why I never received that letter. You say that my husband pushed it under my door that night. Well, Sibyl St. Alban came to my room that night to goad me to despair by her cruel words. She told me that my husband wanted a divorce from me that he might marry her. I could not bear the thought of such a disgrace touching one of the proud Selwyns, I said to myself that I would fling myself from the bluff into the sea, and so free him from his fetters. I told her to be easy, she should soon have Talbot, and then I sent her away. Oh, God, I remember now that when she reached the door she stooped down for a single moment, and I believed that she had merely stumbled. But now it all comes over me, the cruel, cruel truth! While she talked to me the letter had been slipped beneath the door, and in her anger and malice she carried it away to her own room and left it there to wreak its mission of vengeance upon me.”

“Have pity upon me,” she cried to them faintly. “Do not let them swear away my life upon the evidence of that letter which my husband meant to be as the dove with the olive branch. I swear to you that I never saw that letter till this moment, and that Sibyl St. Alban herself carried it to her room that fatal night leaving me in blind ignorance that she was robbing me of a treasure more precious than gold!”

“It is mine. Give it to me,” she said, imperiously, and he leaned forward and placed it in the clasp of the trembling little fingers.

Something like a spasm of delight shook the frail young form as she held for the first time in her hands the letter so full of sweet assurances of Talbot’s love. Then, oh, matchless woman’s love, the girl standing there with the black shadow of the scaffold lowering over her golden head, in deadly peril of her life through her husband’s sin, lifted to her quivering lips [Pg 233]that strangely found treasure and kissed it once, twice, thrice!

There was a moment’s breathless pause of wonder, sorrow, pity, then an uncontrollable thunder of applause shook the court-house to its center. The heart of humanity had been thrilled to its core by this impulsive emotion. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Mr. Davenport drew his client to a seat in a glow of satisfaction, feeling that the incident of the letter had done more for her cause than all his powerful speech. Alas, the counsel had not done haranguing the jury yet.

Order was restored as soon as possible, and the lawyer resumed his speech. But he had not spoken ten words before another interruption occurred.

Kitty May, Mrs. Strangemore’s maid, who had come into court with her and Miss Drusilla, suddenly uttered a piercing shriek, and fainted.

“The devil take the women’s tongues,” savagely muttered the lawyer who was again compelled to suspend his speech until the unconscious maid was carried out of court into the fresh air.

Full of wonder and vexation Miss Drusilla Strangemore followed the bearers to the door. She was quite indignant with Kitty May for having nerves and fainting away just like a fine lady.

They laid Kitty May down in the fresh air and bathed her face and hands in cold water. Under this vigorous treatment she soon gasped and opened her eyes. Miss Drusilla who had been bending solicitously over her, immediately relaxed her anxiety and assumed an expression of acerbity.

“Kitty May, I should like to know what you mean by such foolishness,” she exclaimed, severely.

“Oh, Miss Strangemore, please don’t be angry. I couldn’t help it,” she faltered, “I was so frightened. Didn’t you see it yourself, dear Miss Drusilla?”

Kitty raised herself to a sitting posture and swept a startled glance around her. Then a sigh of relief escaped her lips.

“It is gone, it is not here. But I saw it as plain as day in the court room! Oh, Miss Drusilla,” she added, in a whisper, “it was Mrs. St. Alban’s ghost again! I saw it right there among a crowd of people. She was holding a little black veil away from her face and glaring at Miss Nina fit to kill her! Oh, me, what have I ever done to that woman that she should haunt me so?” moaned Kitty, despairingly.

“You are crazy, Kitty! you imagined the whole thing or else you have been deceived by a resemblance,” cried the spinster, in great displeasure. “Come right back into the court-house and point out to me furtively the woman you took for Sibyl St. Alban. I’ll warrant it is a creature of flesh and blood, and that some trivial likeness has misled you.”

They went back quietly to the crowded room where silence had been restored and the counsel had gone on with his speech to the judge and jury, while [Pg 236]the prisoner sat pale and drooping like a broken flower before them. They sat down softly, and then the maid lifted her eyes half fearfully to the distant spot where she had seen a black-clad figure sitting with a face like Sibyl St. Alban’s, glaring defiance upon Nina when she kissed her husband’s letter.

Among the closely crowded benches the seat where she had seen the ghostly figure sitting was empty. The woman had disappeared.

“Now where is the ghost, you silly thing?” whispered the stern old maid, and Kitty could only nervously indicate the vacant seat and whisper that it had disappeared.

“It was only your fancy at first. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such a scene for nothing,” returned the lady, tartly, and she turned her back upon the girl and gave her indignant attention to the speech of the counsel for the prosecution.

It was said then and afterward that the able lawyer had never made a more brilliant and effective speech. He brought all his learning, all his eloquence, all his [Pg 237]power to bear. He asked the jury to look at the facts as they were, not in the distorted light in which Mrs. Strangemore’s lawyer had presented them. Mr. Davenport had asked them to remember the youth, the beauty, the high position of the accused. He desired to remind them that Mrs. St. Alban had been young, lovely, and wealthy too. Life had been as sweet to her as to the cruel girl who had sent her out of it into the darkness of the tomb. He said that Sibyl St. Alban had not been a guilty woman, only a thoughtless one. She had been the betrothed of Talbot Strangemore when he was a college student, and after a lover’s quarrel, in a fit of pique, he had thoughtlessly acceded to his parent’s wish that he should marry the child-heiress, Nina Selwyn. When in after years the estranged lovers met again, all their old tenderness revived, but the man was the most to blame, because he had fostered Sibyl St. Alban’s love, declaring that he would procure a divorce from his childish bride and marry her. Nina Selwyn had been the marplot in their whole romantic history. She had parted them first, and then murdered the lovely, hapless young widow, whose only fault was that she loved the man [Pg 238]who should by every law, human and divine, have been her husband instead of Nina Selwyn’s. He went on at length, making a martyr of Sibyl St. Alban, and a human fiend of Nina until he had exhausted the vocabulary of his eloquent denunciations, and when he sat down and the jury filed out slowly one by one, no one doubted what the verdict would be.

Nina had sat and listened to him with a pale, indignant, dismayed face. That any one could have the heart to so denounce her, misrepresent her, and abuse her, seemed horrible indeed to the innocent and ignorant young girl so unversed in the ways of the world. She clung convulsively to Kitty, and the bitter tears rolled slowly down her cheeks as she heard him seemingly with malice prepense, arguing her young life away, and dooming her to a terrible, shameful death.

“I cannot die now, I must live for Talbot’s sake, for he loves me, and it would grieve him to know that I died such a terrible death,” she had been saying over and over to herself, in the blissful emotion born of the letter she clutched tightly in her hand, and the man’s dreadful denunciatory words thrilled her with horror.

She turned her great haggard dark eyes upon the [Pg 239]faces of the jurymen and scanned them piteously as if trying to read their inmost hearts.

“Oh, Kitty, will they believe that I am as bad as that man says I am? Will they say that I am guilty, and condemn me to be hung?” she whispered to her attendant, with an awful shudder.

“No, no, darling, they could not be so cruel,” she whispered back, and she tried to explain to the trembling, frightened girl that it was the duty of the prosecuting attorney to make the case out as bad as possible, but that the jurymen were not bound to believe him, and that the verdict rested with them alone.

But the long, labored speech, bristling with satire and acrimony, was over at last. The charge to the jurymen had been given, and they had filed out with solemn faces, on their errand of life and death. The court sat waiting in silence or with subdued murmurs of converse for the verdict.

And to Talbot Strangemore so far away from home there came no prescience of that awful twilight hour when his beautiful bride sat in the midst of that awful [Pg 240]throng, waiting to know whether they were going to set her free to wait for her husband’s home-coming, or whether they were going to kill her for a crime she had never committed.

It seemed to Nina a long, long time while she waited there in the great suffocating court-room crowded full of men and women, all so eager to know whether the law was going to let her live or die, that they did not go home to their suppers, but waited long after the night fell, unwilling to go away until they knew what her fate would be.

Miss Strangemore and Kitty and the Fieldings prayed silently; Nina sat still as a marble statue, holding tightly clasped in her hands her husband’s letter and a bouquet of white roses and heliotrope that Minnie Fielding had given her. In the dense, suffocating air of the court room that warm June night the fragrance of the flowers was strong and almost oppressive, but she held them in an almost mechanical grasp, while her thoughts wandered far from the scene and tried to fancy where Talbot could be in this hour of her humiliation and awful peril.

“Oh, if I had only known that he repented his [Pg 241]folly, and that he loved me that night, I would not have run away,” she said over and over to herself. “But that dreadful woman carried away his letter and so ruined my whole life. Oh, how wicked she was, and what cruel falsehoods she told me, for in the light of this letter everything she told me was a lie. Oh, I wish that I could see my husband once more even if I have to die, to tell him how dearly I loved him all the while, and how I love him still, although my love has only brought me the cruelest sorrow and shame!”

It was almost like a religion to her, this love that the dying woman had solemnly bade her give to Talbot Strangemore. It had an element of sacredness in it. Heretofore it had been all sacredness and sorrow. Now it had a thrill of joy and passion in it. Talbot, her husband, loved her back again, and would have wished no higher joy than to have her for his bride. She said the words over to herself many times, and her senses reeled with the joy of the thought until at moments she forgot the deadly peril that hung over her, and remembered only her husband and their mutual love.

“He loves me, and he would grieve if I died,” she [Pg 242]said, and there was so much gladness in the thought that she prayed heaven passionately that she might live to be happy with him yet. She repeated to herself some lines read long ago, and vaguely remembered:

The hours waned. People grew impatient in the hot close air, waiting for the verdict. How long the jury stayed! It was past ten o’clock. Minnie Fielding pressed close to her friend and former pupil’s side. She pressed her hand over the small white one that held Talbot’s letter. It was cold as ice, but Nina’s cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were bright and burning.

“Oh, my darling how cold your hands are, but your face is on fire. This suspense is killing you,” she said.

“No,” she whispered, “I am not impatient. Oh, Mrs. Fielding, do not laugh at me, please, but in thinking of my letter I forget now and then why I am here, and what I am waiting for. I am like a man drunken with strong, new wine.”

The hot tears crowded into the gentle lady’s eyes. She was about to speak but the words died on her lips, chilled by a fateful sound.

The long vigil of blended hope and fear was over. The jurymen were returning to the court-room.

Out of doors the heat of the summer night was dissolving in heavy clouds and pattering rain-drops. A peal of thunder shook the heavens, and the fierce bright lightning flashed into the room like a sword-point, keen, blue, intense, as the judge arose to receive the verdict.

They had scarcely dared to hope for anything better since the prosecuting attorney’s speech, but their hearts thrilled with anguish as the fatal words were spoken.

They could not look for a moment at the beautiful girl who had so longed to live because she had found out at last that her husband loved her. A faint cry of mortal agony had escaped her lips, and then she remained still as a statue, but holding still in her tight clasp the letter that had suddenly transformed this earth she was doomed to leave so soon into an Eden. But after that faint cry of startled horror, not a word escaped her lips.

Men and women gazed at her in pity and curiosity, and their hearts ached within them at the sight of the slight, dark figure, with the letter in one hand and the flowers in the other, standing there so quietly before the judge while his stern, judicial lips slowly and solemnly pronounced sentence of ignominious death upon her.

It was over, and the curious crowd were leaving the court-room pell-mell, heedless of the rain-storm raging outside, in their eagerness to breathe the fresh air again. In the tumult, while the crowd was pressed close to her, Kitty May fancied she heard a low, demoniac laugh of exultant triumph close to her ear. She turned around quickly, but there was no one [Pg 245]beside her. In the same moment she saw Nina looking up at her with wild, scared eyes.

“Oh, Kitty, surely that was a fiend that laughed,” she whispered, and the maid groaned to herself:

Doctor Fielding came to lead Nina to the carriage that was to convey her back to prison.

“Do not be frightened, my child,” he whispered, as he drew the small hand tenderly through his arm. “You have three months yet, and I intend to move heaven and earth to secure a pardon for you.”

“Oh, Aunt Drusilla, you must find my husband for me now. I cannot die without seeing him again. He loves me, and only think how he would feel if he came back again after long months and years had passed, and they told him what a terrible death I [Pg 246]had died,” exclaimed Nina, passionately, the day after her sentence of death had been pronounced.

A very madness of despair had taken possession of the wretched young creature. She was drowned in bitter tears of woe and pain.

“Until I knew that Talbot loved me I could have borne to die,” she said. “But now, oh, now, it is too hard to bear. Oh, if my life could be spared to me, how happy I should be when my husband came home again! There would be no more sorrow, nor regrets, no cruel misunderstandings, but only heavenly peace and happiness. And then, perhaps, after awhile we might find out the real murderer of Sibyl St. Alban. I would give half my fortune to find out who murdered the poor lady that Talbot once loved. Perhaps it was some jealous lover, goaded to madness by her open flirtations,” she added, little dreaming how near her fancy had hit the truth.

The whole passionate plaint of her heart was to see her husband again before the awful sentence of the law was carried out against her. Something told her that Talbot would not let them kill her for a crime [Pg 247]that she had never committed although the jury men had said that she had.

“I am innocent, and Talbot will not let them murder me in cold blood,” she said, passionately. “Oh, Aunt Drusilla, send some one to bring him to me before it is too late!”

“Oh, my darling, if I only knew where to send for him how gladly would I do so,” sighed the poor old lady, whose heart was nearly broken by this dreadful tragedy.

“I have heard that money will do almost anything. I will give all that I am worth to any one who will bring Talbot to me before that fatal 25th of July,” shuddered Nina.

It seemed as if neither love nor money could do anything in this case. Talbot Strangemore’s whereabouts were wrapped in the densest mystery. If the earth or the sea had opened and closed over him he could not have remained more silent to the appeals that went abroad for him. Everyone agreed that it was simply dreadful that Strangemore’s young wife should perish so miserably while he remained abroad in utter ignorance of her fate. Mr. Davenport advised [Pg 248]that a detective be sent in search of him. Nina sprang eagerly at the suggestion and desired that two should go.

So they sent two men across the sea in search of the exile, but the slow days dawned and waned and no tidings came to hint at their success. Meanwhile hope began to fade in the hearts of those at home. The pale young prisoner grew frailer and whiter daily, until life seemed to hang upon a thread so slender that her friends doubted if she would survive until that fatal 25th of July. They brought her books and flowers to beguile the weary time. She only wept over the sweet blossoms that recalled to her the days when she was free and happy. Of the books she chose only the sweetest and saddest love-stories, and the most melancholy poems.

Minnie Fielding came to see her just as often as they would admit her. To this gentle woman, her old friend and teacher, Nina showed the sadness of her heart as she did to no one else.

“I have read all the books and the stories, but I cannot find among them all a single story as sad as mine,” she said, “I do not believe that any woman’s [Pg 249]love ever had as sad an ending as mine. I loved my husband for five long years tenderly and truly, and all the while he was far away from me and hating the fetters that bound him to me, his heart given to another woman. At last when he came home and I learned the bitter truth, Fate played me one of her cruelest tricks. He learned to love me, and I missed the knowledge until all too late. If I die upon the scaffold it will not be because I am a sinner, for my hands are clear of Sibyl St. Alban’s blood. It will be because I loved so deeply, and because my jealous pain drove me momentarily mad.”

Mrs. Fielding kissed the poor, pale lips tenderly. “Poor darling! So you forgive him all the [Pg 250]sorrow his weakness and folly brought upon you,” she said.

“Yes, because he loved me at the last,” Nina answered. “Oh, Mrs. Fielding, that lawyer was unjust to me, when he said that I had parted Talbot from his love. They were parted before he came home from college. I heard him tell Aunt Drusilla that she had thrown him over to marry a rich old man.”

“She was a bad woman, and Mr. Strangemore was weak indeed to fall a victim to her wiles again. You are very good to forgive him, dear,” said Mrs. Fielding. “Many women in your place would hate him.”

“I thought that I did at first,” Nina answered. “My pride, my resentment rose up in arms against him, and I said, I will never forgive him for his sin. But then I remembered that his dying mother had solemnly bound me to love him, and so I could not take my heart away from him even if I would. And, oh, Mrs. Fielding, I had loved him for five long years, and it was not easy to hate him then. Even if I had tried ever so hard I could not have done it. I think [Pg 251]my love was deep enough to have pleased even a poet,” and she read again from her book:

“Oh, what a future of happiness Talbot Strangemore blighted by his folly,” Mrs. Fielding thought, gazing at the fair, young face and listening to the tender, musical voice. “One heart like Nina’s, so fresh, so pure, so true, is worth a hundred fickle coquettes like Sibyl St. Alban.”

And she could not help from despising Talbot Strangemore a little for his folly. But then she did not know how the beautiful coquette had lured him on and on, until she had fatally wrecked his happiness.

The flowers bloomed, the birds sang, the gay pageant of the summer moved on. Nina’s brief respite was almost over.

And every application for pardon, every prayer for a commutation of the sentence, every entreaty for a longer respite even, had been refused! They had no longer any hope.

It seemed that public opinion was terribly against the beautiful young prisoner. The governor was afraid to show her even the slightest favor, lest it should be said that he had been tempted by the glitter of her gold. He must let the law take its due course.

There was no longer any hope, no longer any time even, for the last day of her life was ended and at sun rise she must die—die an ignominious death upon the scaffold, she the young, the pure, the lovely, the last descendant of the proud old Selwyn race!

Only yesterday she had made her will. She had given ten thousand dollars to Miss Drusilla, ten thousand to her faithful maid, Kitty, ten thousand to her dear friends, the Fieldings, and she had gratefully remembered her lawyer, her minister, her servants, and given all the rest to Talbot. At night the silver-haired old minister who had baptized her when she was a baby, who had received her into his church, who had married her to Talbot Strangemore, and who [Pg 253]had always watched tenderly over her orphan girlhood, had administered the sacrament to her and a few chosen friends, had blessed her, and gone away to return at daylight. All of earth was over now, and the dawn of the new day was rising fairly upon the closing scene in the tragedy of her brief life.

It was no wonder that Miss Strangemore’s and the lawyer’s efforts to find Talbot Strangemore had so persistently failed, for, following the bent of Oswald Ferris, he had penetrated the wilds of Egypt.

Since that day when Talbot Strangemore had sternly accused him of the murder of Sibyl St. Alban, Oswald Ferris had been a changed man, to the one whom he had once denominated his friend.

A terrible fear had come over him that was not dissipated by the efforts Strangemore constantly made to place him at his ease, and to obliterate from his [Pg 254]mind the impression made by his rash and startling accusation.

When they had first gone abroad, Strangemore hating himself for the evil he had wrought, remorseful, wretched, and heartbroken, unfitted by his incurable despair for the society of his fellow-beings, had longed with bitter impatience to forsake this self-imposed companion. Their positions were now reversed.

Oswald Ferris under the impulse of a terrible fear that made the blood run coldly through his veins, was determined to fly from Talbot Strangemore’s suspicious companionship and hide himself in the remotest accessible spot on earth. He feared and distrusted the man who had so great an interest in finding out the real murderer of Sibyl St. Alban.

“He cannot fool me now by his apparent cordiality and friendship,” he muttered, uneasily to himself, “I must go away from him, or he will track me to my doom. By my foolish outburst against Sibyl St. Alban that day I have roused his suspicion, and the instinct of the hound will never be diverted until he runs his prey to earth. I will not remain with him. [Pg 255]I must find some plausible excuse for going on alone.”

Talbot Strangemore on the other hand was equally determined not to lose sight of his companion.

He had not a single doubt over Sibyl St. Alban’s murderer. He believed firmly that the hand of Oswald Ferris had struck that fatal dagger into the false breast of the woman who had played with his heart for pastime and flung it away like a broken toy.

“He is the murderer, and in time I will bring it home to him. And to further that end I will never lose sight of him, never permit him to leave me, until I have obtained proofs of his crime. I will be like a blood-hound upon his track until the memory of my injured martyred bride shall be cleared from the foul blot cast upon it by Sibyl St. Alban’s falsehood and Oswald Ferris’ cowardly silence,” he swore to himself.

In the meantime Ferris proposed all kinds of impracticable trips and plans in the hope that his companion in misery would desert his standard and leave him alone. He was tempted often to desert Strangemore [Pg 256]and fly beyond his reach, but he dared not yield to the temptation for fear of confirming the suspicion he had already awakened. His sense of guilt made him a miserable coward.

And Strangemore in those days was imperturbably good-natured. He acceded to everything Ferris proposed. His most impracticable schemes and plans were met with careless raillery and final acquiescence.

“Where thou goest I will go,” Strangemore said to him one day, with a veiled significance, that thrilled the coward’s heart with deadly terror. He grew desperate.

“The best of friends must part,” he said to Strangemore, veiling his uneasiness under a light laugh. “To-morrow I shall bid you farewell, ‘it may be for years and it may be forever.’ I have joined a party going on an exploring tour into Egypt and Africa.”

“There is nothing that would please me better than such a tramp,” he said. “Fancy gazing at the sphinx [Pg 257]in Egypt, then shooting lions and tigers in the African jungles. Your friends must take me, too, Ferris, I would not miss the sport for the world!”

Ferris turned upon his heel with a muttered imprecation, and a frown as black as night.

“Your doom be on your own head, my implacable blood-hound,” he raged within himself, “I owe you no pity and no mercy. You took Sibyl from me, and now you have chosen to hunt me down because I revenged myself for her cursed falsity. So be it, my handsome Irresistable, but you have sealed your own fate. You will never come out of the African jungles alive. You will be the first tiger slain!”

So it fell out that in those golden May days while Nina was being tried for her life, the two men who had such a terrible interest in each other sat by night around their camp-fires amid Egyptian wilds, and thought awake, and sleeping dreamed, of the two fair women who had so blended with the current of their lives that they were exiles now for their sakes—the one dead by the assassin’s stroke, the other by the work of a doom self-sought. And who could measure [Pg 258]the agonizing remorse that preyed upon these two men’s hearts.

Not Talbot Strangemore surely, the victim of a mad remorse that “spurned atonement’s power.” A ghost went with him through those days and nights of reckless tramping and suicidal exposure. It was the ghost of the fair and trusting bride his sin had slain. And ever and always the white arms beckoned him, the dark eyes prayed him, the faint voice appealed to him to come to her. He had one answer always to excuse his tarrying:

“Wait a little while, my darling, until I have brought home his guilt to Sibyl’s murderer, and cleared your memory from all stain, and then I will hasten to greet you in the spirit land.”

Only for that mission that held him back, Talbot Strangemore would have sought death even as Nina had sought it. He was unutterably wretched, remorseful beyond all telling, and his love for the young bride, loved too late, was deeper than all. The passionate, despairing strength of his love for the dead girl startled him by its yearning force.

“I never knew that I could love like this,” he said [Pg 259]to himself, in wonder. “Surely the fancy I had for Sibyl was but a fancy compared with this, it was:

The gay party of travelers whom Strangemore and Ferris had joined did not think they had gained much by the accession to their numbers.

Strangemore was gloomy, thoughtful, grave, and appeared to be totally wrapped up in some absorbing theme within himself.

Ferris was moody and boisterously gay by fits and starts. He was “everything by turns and nothing long.” The travelers decided among themselves that these two brilliant and accomplished men had something out of the common the matter with them. They looked like men with secrets on their minds, they seemed fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

If any one had told them the actual truth—that one of these men was a cruel murderer—that he had ruthlessly killed a beautiful woman because she had played with his heart like the foolish butterfly that she was—and that the other man had been so foolish and so weak that he had driven the fairest and most loving wife in the world to her death, they would not have wondered at their grave looks, they would have recoiled from them in horror and contempt and fear. But there was no one near to betray these vital secrets, and so Strangemore and Ferris remained with the party, each a silent vigilant spy upon the movements of the other, and sometimes a terrible, murderous gleam flashed into the gloomy cavernous orbs of Ferris that boded no good to the man who was tracking him down.

“If I could only find him alone in some distant lonely spot out of sight and sound of all the others, his soul should soon follow that of Sibyl St. Alban to Hades!” he would mutter vindictively.

He knew that Strangemore watched him unrelentingly, unremittingly, for some token of his hidden sin. He knew that when for very weariness he fell asleep [Pg 261]beneath the Egyptian stars on the banks of “old Nilus” that his enemy listened breathlessly to the mutterings of his slumber, longing for him to betray himself in his feverish dreams of the past. A mad hatred for Talbot Strangemore grew within him. A thousand times he wished him dead.

“He is the only living being that suspects me, and in time he will track me down,” he thought, fearfully. “One or the other of us must die, and that soon.”

“I do not want to kill him. I wish to heaven that he would go away and forsake his deadly purpose, so that I need not be compelled to destroy him to save myself,” he thought, shudderingly, while his brow was beaded with the cold dews of horror.

In the long, horror-haunted nights and days he cursed the memory of the fair coquette who had driven him mad with her sweet words and smiles until he had forgotten everything but his burning pain and his thirst for revenge.

“I loved her, but I killed her. Ah, how horrible [Pg 262]it is to love with such madness that one slays the heartless fair one who has wrought him woe!” he thought.

He wearied of the idle dalliance of their life in Egypt. He longed to push on to Africa where the men talked of hunting lions and tigers.

“That will be the sport for me,” he said to himself. “In the keen ardor of such pursuits, I may forget myself and forget her whom in my madness I slew.”

But his comrades could not be induced to hasten their march into Africa. They had left one of their number sick in England and they could go no further without him.

“We promised to wait for him here,” they said, “and we cannot afford to leave him. He is a noted hunter. He has been in Africa before, and he knows the route.”

Strangemore and Ferris did not take much interest in the expected new-comer, until one day when they heard quite incidentally that he was an American.

“But he will never return to his native land,” they said. “He is a misanthrope and a woman-hater. His life has been blasted by the falsity of his once [Pg 263]idolized wife, and he has forsworn his country forever,” and then the two listeners felt as if they held some kinship with the absent man.

“If your friend does not come soon, gentlemen, I shall have to cut the country, even at the risk of losing your society. The Khamsin is getting to be more than I can bear,” Oswald Ferris said one night, as they lingered under the palm trees that skirted the camp that was pitched near the shores of the Nile in Upper Egypt.

The dozen men who composed the party were disposed in various picturesque attitudes about the camp. The sport of the day had been fishing, and several were collected around a huge fire preparing supper, the air being highly impregnated with the odor of broiling fish. The clear soft moonlight and starlight glimmered down upon the animated scene, upon the stalwart [Pg 264]forms and handsome faces of the men who were laughing and jesting in high enjoyment of the scene and the hour, unmindful of the grave, preoccupied faces of the two Americans whom they had become habituated to regard as deaths heads at the feast.

Leaning lightly against a stately palm tree gazing in the brilliant moonlight at the lotus lillies rocking on the breast of the storied Nile, was Talbot Strangemore. He had been thinking sadly of his beautiful dead bride, but at those words from Oswald Ferris he turned his head and looked at him.

Khamsin—the hot wind from the desert—had been blowing several weeks now, and as Ferris said, it was hard to bear. It was oppressive and unhealthy in the extreme, and every one began to chafe at the delay. The sweltering days and nights made them hot and impatient, but until now no one had spoken out his discontent.

“You are right, Ferris. The Khamsin is hard to bear,” he said. “One seems to scorch and shrivel in the intense heat. I cannot imagine what detains John [Pg 265]Armstrong so long. We expected he would have joined us several weeks ago. If he does not put in an appearance by to-morrow, I think we shall have to give him up and cut the country as you say. We cannot remain but a short while longer any-way, for it will soon be the season for the annual inundation of the country by the over-flow of the Nile.”

“You cannot get away too soon to please me!” growled Ferris. And the good-natured Wilson said again, “We will wait until to-morrow anyway,” and dropped the subject.

It was late when they retired that night, and before any one had closed his eyes in sleep a piercing cry of horror startled the camp.

Pale as a ghost and shivering with horror, Talbot was standing by his couch holding one end of the coverlet [Pg 266]clutched in his hand. He turned his burning eyes upon them.

And there, sure enough, upon the white bed lay the famed serpent that brought welcome death to beauteous, conquered Cleopatra—but this one was dead—slain in all its deadly power by a heavy blunt instrument that Talbot still held mechanically in his hand.

“Great God, how did it come there?” Wilson cried, excitedly, and then he suddenly saw a small, strong wooden box protruding from the pillow. He snatched it hurriedly out.

“Why this is my own box,” he said. “The box where I had placed a specimen of the deadly asp, naya haye, in order to take it to a museum in England. It is empty. A hole has been drilled in the side and lightly covered with thin pasteboard through which the serpent has made its way. Great heavens, it looks like a premeditated deed! What does it mean, Strangemore?”

“Some one has tried to kill me,” Talbot answered, hoarsely. “When I threw back the cover the asp lay [Pg 267]coiled in my bed. Fortunately the moonlight was so clear and brilliant that I distinguished the horrible serpent and quickly snatched up this heavy bolt and dispatched him.”

He was shuddering with horror. The shock to his nerves had been great, and his eyes gleamed wildly out of his marble white features as he looked around upon their horror-struck faces. He saw that only one was missing.

They found him lying quietly in bed and apparently asleep. The men shook him roughly.

“He must be dead or he could not have slept through the uproar we have made,” they said.

But at their rough handling he started, broad awake, sat up in bed, and gazed at them in a dull, dazed way.

“Yes, something has happened,” he said, sharply. [Pg 268]“Ferris, you were looking at the asp in the box this evening. What did you do with it?”

“I did nothing with it. I was merely peering through the glass top at your dangerous pet, and I came away and left it under the great rock where you always keep it. Has it gotten away from you?” he asked.

“Well, I always told you it would, you know, and I am glad it has done so at last without harming any one, as I always had the most horrible fears that it would do.”

“But the strangest part of it all was, that when it made its marvelous escape it carried my box with it,” said Wilson, drily.

“Yes, and the strangest part of it yet was that the asp, box and all, went and hid under the pillow of Talbot Strangemore, your friend. And this same cunning serpent of old Nile cut a hole in the side of the box which he covered with thin paste-board in order to make his exit easy at the right moment.”

In the brilliant moonlight that flooded the scene [Pg 269]with radiance he saw the men’s faces gazing at him with dark threatening looks that made the blood run coldly through his veins.

“You are jesting with me, surely, and it is an unseemly hour for pleasantries,” he said, in a tone bristling with offense. “Have you wakened me from sleep at midnight to tell me this ridiculous tale?”

Wilson gave him a glance of flashing contempt. The men crowded closely around him, casting scornful looks upon Ferris, while Wilson, who seemed to have constituted himself the spokesman, said, sarcastically:

“Is there anything ridiculous in the fact that Strangemore found that horrible poisonous serpent coiled in his bed when he was about to retire?”

“In his bed, oh, horrible! Then poor Strangemore must be dead,” Ferris exclaimed, in well simulated distress and horror, but with a wild throb of gladness and relief at his heart.

“I am forced to believe that you, Ferris, placed [Pg 270]that serpent in Strangemore’s bed with murderous intent, although you have pretended to be his friend. We have watched you two Americans, I and my comrades, and we know that you two are linked together by some mysterious bond, and that you mutually hate each other. Is it not so, my men?”

“I know that you took away the box with the asp this evening,” Wilson went on, “I said nothing for I believed that you had done it for a mere joke to alarm me over the loss of my deadly pet. But this horrible eclaircissement to-night has taught me better. You deliberately laid your plans for the death of Talbot Strangemore, whom you both hate and fear for some unexplained cause. Do you dare deny your murderous attempt?”

“I dare deny it because I am innocent. I had no cause of quarrel with Strangemore. He was my friend,” asserted Ferris boldly, yet inwardly quaking with fear.

“You are a liar!” Wilson cried stormily, and one [Pg 271]after another the voices of the men caught it up and the fierce accusation rang out upon the air.

Someone ran and brought Strangemore and placed them face to face. The would-be murderer recoiled with a cry of fear when he beheld his living foe.

“Strangemore, I thought you dead!” he exclaimed, and the other answered, with limitless contempt:

“Speak, Strangemore,” cried the leader. “Do you believe that this coward and villain quaking here, placed that serpent in your bed with the deliberate intention of destroying you?”

There was a moment of the deepest, most intense silence, and then Talbot Strangemore lifting his hand solemnly to heaven, answered firmly:

“That is enough,” said the spokesman, and he turned back to Ferris who had broken into fierce denials and imprecations.

“Listen,” he said. “In your own land they have a terrible and summary method of punishing offenders such as you are—men guilty of the blackest treason [Pg 272]and iniquity. I confess that in your case I could contemplate that method with unalloyed satisfaction. I see no reason why we foreigners here under the distant skies of Egypt should not have recourse to American methods to punish this native of a land which he has dishonored. My comrades, what say you? Shall we not resolve ourselves into a court of Judge Lynch?”

“Aye, aye,” the answer rang loudly, with but two dissenting voices, and those two the would-be murderer’s and his noble victim. But in the next moment the exciting scene came to an abrupt pause by a sudden interruption.

“Ho, ho, ho!” rang two blended voices, startling the actors in the drama being played, and looking quickly around they confronted two strong men who had stolen unobserved upon them.

“What, John Armstrong and his servant!” they cried, and forgetting Ferris and his sin for a moment, they gathered around the new comer plying him with eager questions.

Oswald Ferris drew a long breath of relief and crouched upon the ground by the side of the camp-bed, [Pg 273]hoping that the coming of the long expected Armstrong would turn the thoughts of his stern judges in some more kindly direction.

He knew that it would be worse than useless to endeavor to escape, and cursing his evil luck, he waited in dead silence, and with the cold dew of terror beading his brow, for the finale of his attempted crime.

“Curse me, what a bungler I was,” he said, “I was sure that the serpent would do its deadly work surely, and then I would have removed the tell-tale box and with it all trace of my crime. Fate has played me a cursed trick, and I shall most probably pay the penalty of my mistake with my life. So, Sibyl, you will be avenged after all, and my vengeance upon you will have been the primal cause of my own death.”

It was horrible sitting there so still under the burning stars of Egypt and looking death in the face. Oh how he cursed the memory of the woman who through love had brought all this awful doom upon him. It was most unfortunate that the light coquette had ever crossed his path. His passionate, intense nature, fierce and jealous to the last degree had staked everything [Pg 274]upon her, and the loss of her had made him a fiend. Everything good and noble had seemed to die within him. Like the hot Khamsin as it swept across the desert plains blighting and burning everything in its destructive course, so incurable despair had burned away everything that had been noble within him.

When John Armstrong had satisfied the curiosity of his friends over his long delay, and given them letters and news from home he claimed the right to ask some questions himself. He was exceedingly anxious to know the meaning of the dramatic scene he had come upon so unexpectedly.

Thus recalled to the terrible transgression of Ferris, the men resumed their scowling looks again, and low, threatening murmurs ran around the circle.

“I can tell you the story in a nut-shell,” answered Harvey Wilson. “When we left England there were [Pg 275]two men, compatriots of your own, who joined our party. Observation has shown us that though ostensibly friends they were secretly at war with each other. To-night we detected one in an attempt to destroy the other by placing an asp in his bed.”

“Horrible!” ejaculated John Armstrong. “And you say he was a compatriot of my own. What is his name?”

“No, I have never heard the name before, and I am very sorry that he is a countryman of mine. But what were you about to do with the traitorous wretch when I came upon the scene?”

“We were going to try him in a court of Judge Lynch,” Wilson replied, steadily, and the listener shuddered and then laughed.

“What! Judge Lynch in Egypt! You are making progress indeed,” he said. “But did the other man die of the sting of the asp?” he inquired.

“No, because he was fortunate enough to detect the serpent and kill it before he sprang into the bed. [Pg 276]But his escape does not lessen the sin of Ferris. He intended to destroy his victim, and it was only the bright moonlight that showed Strangemore the serpent, and enabled him to escape it, and thus saved his life. But Ferris is at heart a murderer still, and the best thing we can do is to destroy him just as Strangemore did the deadly serpent.”

“Strangemore! Did you say Strangemore?” exclaimed Mr. Armstrong, starting to his feet. In the clear bright moonlight they saw that he had grown suddenly pale and excited looking.

“That was what I said,” Harvey Wilson answered. “What ails you, Armstrong? Do you know the man?”

“Yes,—no. Where is he? Let me see the man?” said John Armstrong, hastily, and with strong excitement.

They looked around for Talbot Strangemore, and found that he had gone and laid down upon his bed. Several of the men went after him.

“Mr. Armstrong is very anxious to meet you,” they said, and he readily accompanied them to the spot where the others were anxiously waiting.

John Armstrong, himself a handsome specimen of athletic manhood, looked curiously at the newcomer as they went through the ceremony of introduction.

He saw a tall, finely formed man, with a noble, handsome face, and dark eyes full of fire and strength and brooding passion. He said to himself that he had never in all his life beheld a more splendidly handsome man nor one with more courteous, stately grace than this one whom Oswald Ferris had tried to murder.

They shook hands cordially, and then Mr. Armstrong said with an impatience too fiery to brook delay:

A slight air of wonder came over the face of the other, but he answered frankly:

“Yes—like yourself whom I am most happy to claim as my countryman,” answered Talbot Strangemore, with cordial grace.

“Thanks,” answered Mr. Armstrong, barely noticing the compliment in his haste to get on. “Tell me,” [Pg 278]he continued, anxiously. “Do you live in Maryland? Is your home at Selwyn Heights on the bay?”

In the brilliant midnight moonlight he saw an almost tragical emotion surge over the pale, handsome face of Talbot Strangemore. In a hoarse voice half-strangled by pain and shame he answered:

That moment was one destined to be a fadeless memory in the life of Talbot Strangemore. In his after years there was no moment in which he could not by simply shutting his eyes, recall the time and place and scene—the strange, wierd camping ground beneath the tropical palm-trees and luxuriant vegetation, the mystic murmur of old Nile as it flowed between its banks in its grand strength and power, the hot breath of the Khamsin as it swept across the desert and burned their faces, and the glorious moonlight [Pg 279]that lighted the whole scene into mystic, solemn splendor with dark shadows here and there cast fantastically by the stately palms. Blending with the tropical scene were the eager excited faces of the men, and high over all rose the voice of John Armstrong as he exclaimed earnestly, and with a note of strong indignation in his clear, high voice:

“My God, then, man, why do you dally in Egypt, when you are so sorely needed at home? Do you not know that there is a price set upon your head?”

A low hum of wonder and execration rose from the group of men. They believed that they had suddenly discovered another criminal.

“Do not be too hasty, comrades,” he said, looking round at them with a smile, “You have not unearthed another murderer to-night. It is true that this man is sadly wanted at home, and that there is a large reward offered for his apprehension. There are two detectives hunting him all over Europe, and the papers of Europe and America all contain personals inquiring for him. But in spite of all this flurry to apprehend [Pg 280]him, this man although he has committed a cruel wrong, has done no sin that the law can reach with its august lash of justice!”

Strangemore regarded him in a strange dazed silence, while the others clamorously demanded to know what he had done.

“He broke his young wife’s heart by his foolish infatuation for another woman!”

“You are right,” he murmured, lowly and mournfully. “I am a wretch whose guilt, while it is beyond the pale of the law, carries with it its own whip-lash of retribution and remorse. I broke my darling’s heart by my foolish passion for a vain coquette, and although she died by her own hand I am as guilty of her death as if I had poured the poison into her cup and pressed it to her lips with my own hand!”

They saw that he was in terrible earnest, that his heart was crushed within him by remorse and despair, and their first impulse of scorn and contempt softened [Pg 281]into the gentler emotion of pity. Armstrong said with decided kindness in his voice:

“I am glad to see that you are genuinely remorseful and repentant over your fault, Strangemore. But cheer up, man. You may yet be able to redeem your self from the blight of your thoughtless folly.”

In the moonlight Strangemore lifted his dark, sad eyes, and looked drearily into Armstrong’s face.

“You made a terrible mistake in leaving your home as you did. Your wife is not dead.”

“Not dead!” Strangemore shouted, hoarsely, and there was such a passion of joy and amazement in his voice that it touched a responsive chord of gladness in every manly breast.

“Not dead,” John Armstrong answered, gravely, and solemnly. “But she needs your presence, Talbot Strangemore, for she is in the most terrible peril at the hands of the law. She is in prison now and condemned to be hanged on the 25th of July for the murder of her beautiful rival, Mrs. St. Alban!”

Talbot Strangemore thought that he had suffered before, but no such terrible moment as this had ever come to him until now when John Armstrong’s words rang in his ears like the trump of doom. They struck him with all the suddenness of a dreadful blow, depriving him all at once of power, strength and volition. He reeled and staggered dizzily like one drunken, and if the men had not come to his assistance he would have fallen like one dead, to the earth.

“You broke it to him too abruptly,” said Harvey Wilson, compassionately, as he brought water and bathed the face of the almost swooning man.

“I am sorry, but I did not know that he would take it so hard,” Armstrong answered.

“Did you think I had no soul and no conscience, then?” demanded Strangemore, glancing weakly up at him from the chair where they had placed him. “Oh, [Pg 283]my God, sir, did you mean the horrible words you spoke to me, or was it but an unseemly jest?”

“Unhappily it was the bitter truth, although had I been more discreet I might have chosen my words so as not to shock you so much. But I will not ask you to believe my unsupported testimony. I have with me some London and New York papers, containing the whole story.”

He made a sign to his servant to unstrap his portmanteau, and bring the papers. Someone struck a light, and with a shaking hand Talbot Strangemore unfolded them. They rehearsed the whole tragic story, thrillingly. There could no longer be any doubt in his mind. His lovely girl-bride, Nina, whom he had so cruelly wronged and whom he thought had died the death of the suicide, had twice been saved from self-destruction only to meet a terrible doom upon the scaffold—dying for the crime of another.

He crushed the papers fiercely in his hand and staggered past them to the place where Oswald Ferris still crouched, wild-eyed, and in mortal terror of his life.

“Did you hear what they were saying? Nina, my young wife, was not dead as we supposed. She lives—lives, do you hear?—And she is in prison, my innocent, pure-hearted darling—in prison, and condemned to be hung for the murder of Sibyl St. Alban!”

Oswald Ferris shrank from the fiery lightning of his eyes, but he answered, sullenly:

“You heard it all? Then what have you to say?” demanded Talbot Strangemore, stormily.

“I have nothing to say. What does it matter to me that your wife will have to swing for her crime?” Ferris answered, with the brutal laugh of a fiend in Hades.

“Wretch! Coward! Liar!” Strangemore panted, springing toward him, and his two strong white hands leaped at the throat of Ferris and closed upon it with a strangling grasp.

The face of the wretch grew swollen and livid, his fierce eyes seemed to start from his head, he uttered [Pg 285]fearful inarticulate sounds of rage, fear, and suffering. Presently he grew still, and only a smothered gasp seemed to issue from his purple, foam-flecked lips. In a moment all would have been over, and his crime-stained soul would have been hurled unshriven at the judgment seat, but in that fateful moment the locked hands of Strangemore fell apart suddenly, and he reeled backward from the wretch with a cry that shrilled to the very heavens:

“My God, am I gone mad with the horror of this night that I was about to sink my soul to the level of this fiend’s?”

“Let there be no more talk of Judge Lynch, now. You have attempted my life, even as I did yours. We are quits, now,” he exclaimed.

“No, we are not quits yet—never until I wring from your cursed cowardly lips the confession of the terrible crime for which my innocent young wife is condemned to suffer death!” Talbot Strangemore answered, with terrible wrath.

Full of wonder and surprise the men gathered around them. They did not understand the new complication of affairs.

“What is the meaning of this?” they asked, and Ferris answered with triumphant malice:

“Strangemore attempted to choke me, and but for my superior strength with which I threw off the villain’s grasp I must have been a dead man now!”

Talbot Strangemore looked at him with superb scorn, and hissed out the single word:

“What, do you deny that you attempted to strangle me?” said Ferris, in pretended amazement and reproach.

“I deny that I was prevented from doing so by any superior strength on your part. I simply desisted myself because I suddenly realized to what enormities my frenzy was driving me,” Talbot Strangemore answered, folding his arms across his broad breast, and [Pg 287]looking at the man before him with proud, defiant scorn.

“You hear him, gentlemen of the jury,” he exclaimed. “It is a very plausible tale, is it not?”

They gazed in wonder, scarce knowing what to say. All had witnessed the attack, but it was not easy to determine whether Strangemore had desisted himself or been forced to do so by the superior strength of the other.

John Armstrong looked at the colorless, convulsed face of hapless Nina’s husband. Somehow he was prepossessed in favor of the man, in spite of the harsh opinion he had held before meeting him.

“He intimated that my unfortunate and innocent young wife was guilty of the crime with which she is charged,” Talbot Strangemore answered, angrily.

“And you do not believe that she is guilty?” asked Mr. Armstrong, watching his face, narrowly.

“Great heavens, no. Could one believe an angel [Pg 288]guilty of murder? No sooner could I believe that my fair, wronged Nina committed that terrible deed!”

“Perhaps you have some idea whom the real culprit may be?” said Harvey Wilson, curiously.

“Yes, I have an idea, and I have been on the track of the man I suspect of the murder for many weeks now, but I have failed as yet to fasten his guilt upon him,” Talbot Strangemore answered, with deep despondency.

The listeners started and looked at each other significantly. The coming of John Armstrong had let in a flood of light upon the mysterious shadow that seemed to hang over the lives of these two men. They began dimly to scent a tragedy.

“You say that you are on the track of the real murderer now. Is he then in Egypt?” inquired Mr. Armstrong, gravely.

“Yes, he is in Egypt; but gentlemen, let me tell you a little story that will throw light upon this subject which seems to possess a great interest for you all.”

All agreed that they were deeply interested, and anxious to hear the story he had to tell. They forgot [Pg 289]that it was long past midnight and that they had had no sleep that night. They gathered around Talbot Strangemore and waited anxiously for what he was going to say, while Ferris glared at them with the fury of a baffled tiger.

“I am not going to talk about myself,” said Talbot Strangemore. “My guilt and sin toward my fair and faithful young bride admits of no excuse or palliation. It is of that other one I would speak. The woman whose beauty cursed and ruined my life!”

“Two years ago, when I first met Mrs. St. Alban after her widowhood she had another lover,” went on Talbot. “He was fine-looking, brilliant in conversation, with many intellectual attainments, and a favorite with men. I will do him the credit to say that if he had never come under the fatal sway of that arch coquette he might have been a good man—at least he might not have gone very far wrong.”

He looked straight at Ferris and did not flinch at the angry threatening glare of his eyes.

“But Sibyl St. Alban taught to this strong, fiery [Pg 290]brilliant spirit all the madness of love,” he went on. “She made him the slave of her imperious will and idle caprices, and with her soft words and tender smiles she made him believe that she loved him in return and promised him her hand in marriage. It was while he was reveling in his Fool’s Paradise that I came upon the scene.”

“The papers have told my own story so plainly that I need scarcely rehearse it,” he said, with faint bitterness. “Sibyl and I had been lovers once in my college days when she was the poor professor’s daughter and I a student with a small income—so small that it did not tempt Sibyl to keep her troth to me when a richer man tempted her with his gold. She threw me over heartlessly, and I went home and married Nina Selwyn the little stepdaughter of my dying mother. I went abroad after my mother’s death and left my little child-bride in the care of my aunt. Three years later when I was thinking of returning to my home an evil chance threw me in Sibyl St. Alban’s way again!”

“If I had not been a vain weak fool, nothing would have happened as it did then,” Talbot continued, bitterly. “I should have known better by my experience of the past, but I fell straight into the glamour of her toils again. She threw over the lover of whom I have spoken, as heartlessly as she had once done me. She ignored him as if he had never existed. He bore all in gloomy silence, but with inward rage and fierce resentment that was all the deeper because he bore his cruel injury in silence, brooding upon it when alone and yearning for revenge upon the heartless coquette who had ruined his peace of mind.”

Instinctively every eye turned upon Oswald Ferris, and while they gazed upon his craven face Talbot Strangemore asked, with bitter emphasis:

“Is it not more likely, gentlemen, that Sibyl St. Alban met her death at the hands of that enraged and vengeful lover than from the fair, weak girl whose jealousy was manifested with simple childish directness, [Pg 292]not endured with the deep, silent cunning of the man’s vindictive nature?”

He turned his flashing dark eyes upon their eager, interested faces, and instantly every man’s hand went up in the air, and every man’s voice answered in the affirmative.

Oswald Ferris regarded the spirited demonstration with an uneasiness that he vainly strove to hide. He had seen the men’s eyes turned upon him in suspicion and distrust, and the terrible dread upon his mind grew greater every moment.

“Mr. Strangemore has omitted the most important fact in his whole story. Is the dying testimony of the murdered woman to be wholly disregarded? Sibyl St. Alban declared that Mrs. Strangemore killed her.”

“And perjured her soul by the declaration,” affirmed Talbot Strangemore, bitterly. “She hated my innocent Nina, and so to take revenge upon her she blackened her own soul and condemned it to Hades by her lying deposition. She had first worked [Pg 293]upon Nina’s feelings until the girl had fled from her home, and I believe Mrs. St. Alban was cognizant of that fact before she was murdered, and so in her dying hours took her fatal revenge, choosing to shield the man who had killed her at the expense of my poor young wife!”

“The theory looks very plausible, certainly,” said Mr. Armstrong, with subdued bitterness, born of his own consciousness of wrong and suffering. “There is nothing too monstrous for a bad woman to do to further the ends of her despotic will.”

“Nothing!” echoed Talbot Strangemore, and suddenly one of his comrades said to him, significantly:

“And this slighted lover, this angry man whom you suspect of Mrs. St. Alban’s murder, where is he now?”

Talbot Strangemore drew his breath hard for a moment between his compressed lips. The question was taken up and repeated from lip to lip:

“You say that you have been upon the track of the murderer for many weeks. Where is he now?”

A snarl of tiger like rage and hate came from the lips of Ferris at those few emphatic words from the lips of his foe. He growled, hoarsely:

“Curse you forever for that base lie! How dare you thus condemn an innocent man?”

“You know now, my friends, why the asp was placed in my bed to-night. Oswald Ferris knew that I suspected him and that I would follow him from one end of the earth to the other to convict him of his sin and clear the memory of my martyred bride, so he took that means of ridding himself of his foe.”

“It is false, false!” the accused ground out between his clenched teeth, vindictively, but no one paid any regard to his denials. Every man was against him. The terrible purpose that had been frustrated by the [Pg 295]arrival of John Armstrong flamed up into their minds again.

“Do not let this horrible thing go on, do not let them murder me,” he cried, imploringly.

“What can I say or do to prevent them from carrying out their threat? You have shown yourself such a wicked wretch that the injuries of your victims cry out against you for vengeance!” he said.

“But I tell you solemnly that I have injured no one. The evidence against me is all of a purely circumstantial nature. You say yourself that Mrs. Strangemore has been proven guilty of the murder of Sibyl St. Alban. That fact clears me fairly from Strangemore’s idiotic charge. For the other, no one can swear that I placed the serpent in his bed. They merely supposed so from the fact that Wilson saw me looking at his pet asp last evening. I ask you, are [Pg 296]these baseless accusations sufficient evidence for Judge Lynch to proceed upon?” clamored Ferris, sharply.

“He took away the box with the asp and I could swear that he placed it under the pillow of Strangemore. He is a guilty wretch, and deserves to have summary justice executed upon him!” exclaimed Harvey Wilson, threateningly.

“We will take him out to the highest palm-tree we can find and swing him from the end of a rope,” shouted the men.

“We will thus avenge the murder of Mrs. St. Alban and the attempted one of Talbot Strangemore,” added Harvey Wilson.

“No, no, no,” shrieked Ferris, and again he clutched Mr. Armstrong’s arm, imploringly.

“For God’s sake, exert your influence and save me from the fury of this mob!” he cried. “You will not permit them to commit a cold blooded murder!”

But John Armstrong had become thoroughly imbued with the belief in his guilt, and his indignation ran as high as that of the others. He resolutely refused to speak one word to the excited and angry men.

“You overrate my influence,” he said, coldly. “What can the word of one man avail against a determined mob?”

“Then help me to fight for my life and I will at least sell it at as dear a cost as possible,” exclaimed the shuddering victim, to whom retribution was now hastening on.

“I will have nothing to do with the matter. I believe it was all settled before I came upon the scene and I have no wish to meddle with the decision of the self-constituted judge and jury,” Mr. Armstrong replied, decisively, and then, suddenly bursting into a gust of passion, he added, furiously:

“Rather would I see you hanged for the murder of that poor soulless butterfly, Sibyl St. Alban, than lift a finger to save you! Man, do you guess who I am whom you are begging to save you from the consequences of your double sin?”

Every one stared in amazement at this sudden change of manner in one whom they had always known as cold, reserved and proud. Oswald Ferris stammered, faintly:

“No, you do not even know my name,” he said. “I am not John Armstrong as I call myself, and as these trusty comrades call me and believe me. I am a man supposed to be dead, a man to whom a costly monument has been erected by his widow. I am a man whose happiness was ruined like yours by Sibyl St. Alban, but who did not have the cruelty that you did, to kill her for her sin!”

What dazed, wondering faces that moon of Egypt shone upon as they crowded around the excited speaker. Oswald Ferris cried, blankly:

“I am Ralph St. Alban, the husband of the woman whom you ruthlessly murdered,” the man answered, unhesitatingly.

No one spoke for a moment, so great was the shock of wonder. Then Talbot Strangemore sprang forward, hastily, and faced the speaker.

“Let me see if you speak the truth,” he cried. “I knew Ralph St. Alban, and I hated him once because [Pg 299]he took Sibyl from me. The years have changed you, but, yes, I remember you now. You are indeed St. Alban, but how have you come to life again from the grave where they laid you?”

In the moonlight a weary smile flickered over Ralph St. Alban’s thin, worn face.

“I was never dead,” he said. “I was half maddened by Sibyl’s coquetries and cruelty. She was vain, light, false, falser than all fancy fathoms, falser than all songs have sung! I soon learned that she did not love me. She actually disliked and defied me. Her brilliant successes in the social world filled her with such intoxicating triumph that she had no other thoughts but to ruin the peace of other women and to break men’s hearts as well. With all her folly and wrongdoing I adored her, but no expostulation availed to turn her from her wild career. Then my love changed to hatred and despair. I might have divorced her and so freed myself from the incubus she had become upon me, but I was too proud to drag my name through the scandal of a divorce court. After wretched days and nights while my life was a torture to me I hit upon a startling plan to free myself from [Pg 300]her. With the aid of a party too heavily bribed to betray me, I carried out my plan. The man that dropped dead suddenly in the street was not Ralph St. Alban, but a dead man from the morgue, dressed in my clothes, and propped up in my carriage, from which, of course, he tumbled lifeless into the street when the driver opened the door. But I practised the fraud triumphantly upon everybody, and while Sibyl was ordering the grand monument for my grave I was en route for Egyptian deserts. I had been in Egypt as a boy with my father who was a noted traveler, and in my misery my thoughts turned thitherward again. You know it has been written,” he added, with a cold, sad smile, “that ‘he who has drunk of the Nile will always long to return and drink of its waters again.’”

Every one was gazing at him in wonder and amazement while he talked, and seeing this, he turned suddenly upon Oswald Ferris and said, hoarsely:

“Now you know why I will not help you, why I am ready to see you perish. It was my wife whom you slew in your murderous wrath, and for this I hate and loathe you. She had wronged me more than any human being on earth, but I never once thought of [Pg 301]ending her frail, butterfly existence by violence. I exiled myself for her sake, and left her to the pleasures that tempted her, the pleasures she could buy with the gold for which she had sold herself to me. And, God help me, some of the love I once bore her lingers in me yet, and prompts me to pity her for her terrible fate, and to hate you because your cruel hand plunged the murderous dagger into the white breast that was once mine!”

He paused, and one of those men who loved him as chosen comrades love each other, called out furiously:

The men sprang at him in a body, and in spite of his desperate struggles and outcries they succeeded in pinioning his arms and legs so that it was impossible for him to move from the spot. During the enactment of the dreadful scene, Talbot Strangemore, Ralph St. Alban, and Harvey Wilson stood apart with folded arms and gloomy brows looking on.

Pity and humanity alike prompted him to rescue Oswald Ferris from the wrath of the justly angry mob, while at the same time the natural indignation and resentment within him held him sternly back.

“He deserves his fate,” clamored justice. “Think of Sibyl St. Alban’s dreadful death, and of Nina’s unmerited disgrace and suffering with the shadow of the scaffold looming over her golden head. Let him die the most ignominious death possible, and even then he would scarcely have atoned for his sins.”

And yet his better nature revolted against the horrible deed they were going to do out there beneath the palms of old Egypt with the murmur of the storied Nile in their ears. It was a horrible thing after all, he thought, to thrust a guilty, craven, crime-stained soul out of its earthly tabernacle and send it wandering through space to the terrors of judgment. Unconsciously he lifted his eyes to the sky. The blue dome sprinkled with innumerable stars, and the great calm moon rolling through illimitable space, suggested heavenly witnesses.

“Do God’s angels behold this scene?” he asked himself in fear and dread, for already the men had selected a rope and a tree, and without even the formal ceremony of a mock trial were about to lead their captive to his doom.

Suddenly even as they had dragged him to the chosen spot and were adjusting the terrible slip-knot about his neck, Talbot Strangemore stepped boldly forward, held up his hand, and hoarsely shouted:

“Say your prayers if you know any, quick now, while we see what Strangemore wants,” one said, carelessly, to the prisoner, while another asked:

There ensued a moment of ominous, unbroken silence. While it lasted Talbot Strangemore advanced through the little group of men that surrounded the [Pg 304]prisoner. He put up his hand and touched the rope about his neck.

“Let me take this away, please. Let us be men, not devils,” he said, boldly.

There was a low murmur of anger and dissatisfaction. Harvey Wilson advanced a step nearer.

“Better leave them alone, Stangemore,” he said. “The villain richly merits his fate, and the men will not easily be balked of executing justice upon him.”

“But surely they will listen to me,” Talbot said. “Remember I am the one most deeply wronged, and they must hear me when I beg for mercy and not justice for Oswald Ferris.”

“Yes, because I want him to live. I have a great boon to ask of him, and I believe that surely if you spare his life at my request he will have mercy upon me!”

They stood round about the prisoner listening silently for Talbot’s further speech.

“Friends and comrades,” he continued, “At the dawn of day I must leave you to journey back to my own land to my wife who lies in prison in deadly peril [Pg 305]of her life. But even when I go how can I deliver her from the fatal power of the law unless I can carry with me the confession of the real murderer of poor erring Sibyl St. Alban?”

“We will make him confess the truth before we hang him!” they exclaimed, and Ferris who had been listening in silent hopefulness to the colloquy, uttered a howl of rage and fear at learning from those words how determined they were to destroy him.

“Will you give us a written confession of the murder of Mrs. St. Alban before we hoist you up?”

“Will you confess to the murder if we spare your life in return for it?” they asked him, and he burst into a fit of hoarse, dreadful laughter.

“Truly you are terrible tempters,” he said. “You offer me death on the one hand, life and perjury on the other. I am reminded of a certain mythical personage with a cloven hoof who tempted a divine One in the centuries gone by the promise of all things if he would fall down and worship him. But let that pass. Listen to me, my recreant comrades! Listen to me, Talbot Strangemore, while I ask you of what avail would be a confession wrested from me under peril of ignominious death? What court and jury in the realms of free America would accept such a confession at any value if you said to them, ‘We told Oswald Ferris that if he would confess that he murdered Sibyl St. Alban we would spare his life, if not we would hang him to the nearest tree!’ Ha, ha, I think I hear them crying down as a falsehood a confession that a [Pg 307]frightened man made to save his life from the violence of an infuriate mob!”

They all remained silent through sheer mortification and disappointment. They knew that every word he had spoken was true. No enlightened jury would pay any attention to a confession extorted from a man under peril of death.

“He is right,” said Talbot Strangemore. “If he made a full confession in order to escape punishment it would not avail my little Nina in her terrible strait. Do you not see, comrades, that you must not take his life because it is worth too much to me? Let him live I pray you, until he repents his sin, or until I can bring it home to him!”

So dark and threatening were the frowns the men cast upon Ferris that if looks could have killed, Talbot Strangemore’s prayer would have availed nothing against their deadly wrath. But they drew aside again and consulted together. Presently one who had been chosen as spokesman approached Ferris and Strangemore where they stood side by side beneath the stately palm-tree, selected for so dreadful a purpose.

“We cannot decide in so great haste to release the [Pg 308]prisoner,” he said. “But we will reprieve him until noon to-morrow, and in the morning we will give him a fair, impartial trial that shall decide the case. In the mean time we will hold him under arrest.”

“Thanks for even that respite. I am sure you will consider the case with cooler heads to-morrow,” Strangemore answered, and with his own hands he removed the rope from the neck of his foe, and loosened the painful thongs that bound him.

Too sullen and enraged to utter a word of thanks for this signal interposition in his favor, Oswald Ferris retired to his couch, where he threw himself angrily down and was soon seemingly lost to everything mundane in a deep slumber.

The men all weary with the vigils and excitements of the night followed his example after appointing a posse to guard the prisoner. These few unused to keeping vigil and oppressed with the hot, breathless air, soon slumbered at their posts and the dawn already near broke without rousing one of the camp from the lethargy that seemed to have fallen upon them.

But though seemingly wrapped in the embrace of Morpheus there were two whose minds were too terribly [Pg 309]active for repose. They were Oswald Ferris and Talbot Strangemore.

Strangemore had thrown himself down like the rest upon his rude camp-bed and closed his eyes, but not in sleep.

His mind momentarily diverted from the contemplation of Nina’s peril by the episode just related, now recurred with agonizing persistency to her, his beautiful, deeply wronged, and too lately loved wife.

He longed for wings that he might fly to her side, and whisper in her ears while he held her close to his throbbing heart, the story of the deep all-absorbing devotion he felt for her.

“I must go home to her at once, and I will move heaven and earth but that I will secure her acquittal,” he vowed to himself.

It lacked scarce an hour to dawn, but in the burning impatience that possessed him it seemed that the night would never pass, but at last the “stars paled their ineffectual fires,” the dark hour before the dawn came and passed, the grey gleam of the new day appeared in the orient east, and he sprang impatiently from his couch.

“I can dally here no longer. Every hour is an eternity of woe, while I linger!” he exclaimed.

He went to rouse Harvey Wilson to ask him if he could have a guide as far as Khartoom.

“A guide? Why of course—” he began, and even while he spoke he looked over toward the posse whom he had set to guard Oswald Ferris. Every man was sleeping serenely on his post.

With a ringing cry he roused the camp from the weary slumber that brooded peacefully over it.

“Wake, every one of you,” he cried, hoarsely. “The guard have slept upon their posts and the prisoner has fled into the desert!”

In the early dawn of the new day a small, determined band moved out of the camp in search of the missing man.

In spite of his anxiety to be gone Talbot Strangemore decided not to leave until he learned the fate of Ferris. Bad and cruel as the man had shown himself his heart revolted from leaving him to the certain doom that awaited him if caught by the incensed party who had set forth in search of him. He therefore joined the company going out, with the inward determination of rescuing the runaway from violence if he could.

Something of irresistible pity mingled with his thoughts for he knew that the man must have been a victim to a deadly fear indeed to have ventured out alone into the Egyptian desert in order to escape his enemies. The desert was known to be infested with wolves, hyenas, and lesser beasts of prey. How horrible [Pg 312]if he should be attacked by these creatures alone and unaided.

A vague presentiment of horror crept into his thoughts. He was very quiet as they moved on mile after mile, and his thoughts were strangely blended. Past and present mingled with his teeming fancies. While he tried to think of Nina’s terrible grief and peril now, he found his thoughts wandering back to the child Nina who had been so fond of him in his boyish days, and the memory of her childish love smote him with bitter reproach.

“From first to last she has been fond of me and true to me,” he said to himself. “And I, how have I deserved the gift of her heart and life? I have been a traitor to her trust, an incubus, a marplot. But for my mother’s mistaken kindness the child might have had a life all sunshine and beauty. She had wealth and honor and many friends. These would have made her life a dream of happiness but for me—me, who have blighted and ruined it all, who have darkened her young days with shame and sorrow, and perhaps a horrible doom. Oh, better for her had she never seen me!”

Before his mind’s eye came a vision of Nina as he had seen her first on the day of his home coming to Selwyn Heights with his sore, rebellious heart.

“What a grey day it was,—grey sky, grey sea, grey hills in the background. Nothing bright in all the picture except Nina in her crimson dress, and with her proud, lovely face, and great wistful dark eyes. Ah, it was a grey day for her, too, poor child. A black day—black with the shadow of creeping horror! Oh, God forgive me for the weakness and folly that wrought all her woe!”

He felt like shrieking aloud as he saw in memory the lovely white figure that had come to him in the drawing room that night, and fancied that lissom bride-like figure upon the awful black scaffold.

“They shall not murder her, my love, my bride,” he swore, frantically to himself. “I will snatch her from the arms of the law, aye, from the arms of death itself, or failing, I will die with her and beside her, and my death may be some atonement for my fault.”

Oh, the sadness, the madness, of a love felt too late! Talbot Strangemore knew it all now as he [Pg 314]journeyed mechanically on while that lovely, bride-like figure of Nina kept pace with his dreadful thoughts of her impending doom.

Lost in his own thronging thoughts he has unconsciously lagged behind the others until the murmur of their voices falls but indistinctly on his ears.

But suddenly he is startled from his dreamy trance of painful thought, by a loud cry of alarm mingled with unmistakable horror and dismay. Looking ahead of him he sees that the party of men have come to an abrupt halt and are huddled around something that seems to be lying in a heap upon the ground.

Strangemore’s heart gives a quick throb. His fears for Ferris rush over him with renewed force.

Hastening his footsteps, he seeks the scene, but before he reaches it the echo of horrified words apprises him that something very terrible has happened.

“Poor fellow, what a terrible retribution has overtaken him,” one is saying, as Talbot comes up and pushes his eager way into the group.

Then although his nerves are strong and his heart brave, Talbot Strangemore reels backward a moment, and a deadly faintness and sickness comes over him, for the sight upon which his eyes have fallen is one to chill the stoutest heart.

The earth for yards around is splashed with blood and gore. Two great fierce looking wolves lie dead in a horrid crimson pool, and close beside them the body of a man, his blood-spattered garments almost torn from his form by their horrid fangs. He has fought bravely for his life as is shown by the gaping wounds of his two vanquished foes, and by the crimson blade of the long, keen knife lying near to his hand. But strangest sight of all the dread scene was [Pg 316]that in one hand of the dead man was extended a sheet of paper from his note book, while a pocket pen lay as if it had fallen from his grasp. With it he had traced in the crimson fluid formed by his spouting life-blood, a few lines of incoherent confession. All seemed to shrink from that blood-written note on which the awful ink was scarcely dry, and one man kneeling on the wet ground, and bending closely over, read it aloud:

All present stood rooted to the ground in silent [Pg 317]horror gazing at the bloody victim of the ravening wolves. He seemed almost sacred in their eyes now, having suffered such awful retribution for his sins.

So Talbot Strangemore advanced and with an awful shudder took up the blood written confession that meant deliverance from her awful peril, life and love and happiness to Nina Strangemore. He said, reverently, and with bent head:

“He must have died but a few minutes ago, for the blood is not yet dry upon the paper. Perhaps life yet lingers. Will not Doctor Lewis see?”

The physician bent down assuming his formal professional air, and made a brief examination. He started and uttered a cry of surprise.

“His heart beats faintly. He is not dead, but in a terribly death like swoon.”

When they found that life still lingered they tore their handkerchiefs into strips and bound up his dreadful wounds. The physician applied restoratives. So great a sympathy does the sight of suffering stir in the human breast, that those who had been the most anxious to see him hanged last night now vied with each other in efforts to restore Oswald Ferris to life.

And after a while their assiduity was rewarded, for with a long shiver from head to foot he opened his eyes and gazed around him. When he saw them all gazing at him with kind, anxious eyes, he was amazed.

“I thought I had died,” he said, in a weak voice. “But how came you all here?”

In the face of the actual pity and sympathy with which they now regarded him it was rather embarrassing to own the truth, but there was nothing else to do, really, and so, as he hastily compounded something out of his convenient pocket case of medicines, Doctor Lewis said, soothingly:

“Well, the truth is, my poor fellow, we are here because we came out to look for you, and deuced [Pg 319]lucky for you that we found you, too, for otherwise you must have perished unaided!”

An expression of deep bitterness came over the face of the wounded man, and he turned impatiently from the potion Doctor Lewis extended to him.

“You are determined not to cheat yourselves of the pleasure of stringing me up to a tree,” he moaned, weakly, yet sarcastically.

Harvey Wilson came forward with rather a shamed look on his manly, bronzed face.

“You are quite safe from our vengeance now,” he said. “Get well as fast as you please, Ferris, and no one will molest you for what you have done. These horrible creatures with their dreadful fangs have made us ashamed of having nearly been human wolves. Henceforth, we will leave vengeance to Him who has said, ‘Vengeance is mine.’”

“And,” said Doctor Lewis, briskly, “We must construct a litter to carry this wounded man back to camp. He will need careful nursing if he recovers.”

“I shall not recover—I do not wish to recover,” Ferris answered. “Do not trouble yourselves to take me back to camp. In a few hours I shall be dead.”

“I had a letter,” he said. “When I found that I was dying I wrote down the truth with a pen dipped in my heart’s blood. Did anyone find my confession?”

“I have it here, my poor fellow,” he said, gently, and he stooped and pressed his hand, adding, gratefully, “Thank you for remembering me when you believed that you were dying.”

In spite of Ferris’s objection they carried him back to camp carefully on a litter. Ralph St. Alban and a few others who had stayed behind were amazed when they bore that burden into camp. They shuddered when they learned how he had come by those terrible wounds.

“It is very unlikely that he will recover, but I shall do all that human skill can do for the poor fellow,” said Doctor Lewis.

When Talbot Strangemore had seen the wounded man made comfortable, he again renewed his request for a guide to Khartoom.

“It lacks barely a month to that terrible day,” he said, shudderingly. “I shall have to make all haste to reach home in time to save my darling.”

“Yes—and to America, too,” answered the gallant Englishman. “You will need a friend, a witness, perhaps, and if you will have me I will go with you, most willingly.”

His offer was gratefully accepted, and they made hasty preparations for leaving. Oswald Ferris watched their leave-takings with wistful eyes.

“Ask her—your beautiful bride—to forgive me for all that I caused her to suffer. Tell her that in dying, I repented my sin and all the suffering it brought upon others. I wish now that I had let poor heartless Sibyl live out the brief summer of her butterfly existence. And you, Strangemore, you can forgive me for what I did to you?”

Gazing at the poor suffering face on which the grey pallor of death seemed already settling, Strangemore felt that this was no time to harbor resentment. He gave his hand to his late foe in token of his hearty forgiveness, and commending him to the care of his comrades, bade him a last adieu and passed out of his sight with Harvey Wilson, taking the road for Khartoom where they would find transportation to England.

With what burning impatience he contemplated the days and weeks that must elapse before he reached the side of his doomed Nina!

“But I shall save her at last. Oh, how glad I am that fate having first made me the cause of her unhappiness, has now selected me as the instrument to deliver her from her peril,” he said to himself, gladly, [Pg 323]and it seemed to him that this would be something like an atonement to Nina.

“When I tell her that although I thought she was dead I followed Ferris like a bloodhound to obtain proof of his guilt in order to clear her memory from all stain, when I tell her that I have traveled night and day to bring her the news of her release, when I tell her, above all, that I love her with such a love as until now I never knew, perhaps she will find it in her tender heart to forgive my madness and to be friends with me again, and—who knows?—in time, perhaps,—even if it were years I would be patient—I may teach her to give me back the love I slighted and scorned in the days when the poison of a false woman’s love worked in my veins,” he thought.

But though he tried to teach himself to be hopeful, there was a brooding fear in his heart. What if Nina were wounded beyond all reparation? What if she refused her forgiveness to him, and withdrew herself from him forever? He could not contemplate the thought with any equanimity. It sent cold thrills of anguish running over his frame.

“I could not bear it, and she will not be so cruel, surely, my little, tender-hearted Nina,” he said over and over to himself, and Harvey Wilson found him but a dull companion, for he moved and spoke like one in a dream, and he had but one thought, and that was to hasten all the time. He barely gave himself time to eat, and sleep was a luxury that he seldom knew.

Fortunately they had no delays in reaching England, and when they arrived in London at last Talbot Strangemore did not stop to rest an hour. They were so fortunate as to find a steamer within an hour of sailing, and they embarked with her for their tour across the broad Atlantic.

When they were fairly launched upon the blue waves Talbot counted what days of grace remained to him. If they made the trip successfully in ten days, as the captain expected to do, he would get to Baltimore [Pg 325]in time to stay the execution of the death-warrant. They had started on the 13th of July. On the 25th Nina Strangemore was to suffer death for a crime she had never committed.

“My God, if anything should happen to delay us,” Talbot groaned to his friend in agony of spirit.

“We will hope and pray for the best,” Harvey Wilson answered, sympathizingly.

He told his friend’s story to the captain and passengers. Their deepest sympathy was excited for the worn, haggard, anxious-looking man who leaned listlessly over the vessel’s side day by day, looking into the foam-capped waves as if into a grave, and whose only interest centered in the weather, who grew frantic almost if a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came over the sun, and who could not rest for studying the stars by night.

Seeing how great and terrible was the anxiety of his passenger, the noble Christian commander was moved to pity and sympathy. Every morning and night he assembled the crew and passengers together and read from the prayer book the prayers for fair weather and a safe and speedy voyage. Everyone [Pg 326]responded with full hearts and overflowing sympathy to the prayer.

Surely heaven heard and answered those appeals so full of faith and hope. Through that whole anxious voyage the elements smiled upon the flight of White Wings, as the gallant ship was called. The sun shone by day, the stars beamed by night. Only one untoward event occurred in the whole trip. By some accident a part of the ship was broken that caused her to sail just a little more slowly, and the trip to New York consumed eleven days instead of ten as they had expected.

“I have only one day now,” Talbot said to his friend, with a look of terror on his haggard, pain-drawn face. “Let us go now and ask a lawyer what I must do to effect the release of my darling.”

They went immediately from the ship to a lawyer. He told them briefly what to do.

“You must place your evidence before the governor of Maryland and get him to sign a warrant for the pardon of Mrs. Strangemore.”

“It is most unfortunate for you that the governor [Pg 327]is not at home now. I read in my morning paper that he had left Saturday for Old Point where he expected to spend several weeks at the Hygeia.”

“My God,” Talbot Strangemore cried, and, dizzy with despair, he reeled backward, and would have fainted but that they hastily brought restoration for his overtasked nerves.

“What shall we do now?” asked Harvey Wilson, pale too, with the anxiety of the moment.

While he walked nervously up and down and pondered the case the two men looked at their watches.

Strangemore’s hollow groan of misery startled the lawyer. He looked up with an air of pity on his hard lined face.

“And that?” Harvey Wilson asked, hoarsely, for the parched lips of his friend refused to utter a word.

“Telegraph to the governor of Maryland at Old [Pg 328]Point, a brief statement of the urgency of your case and ask him to meet you in Baltimore by the earliest route to-night.”

The lawyer hastily consulted a schedule that hung against the wall of his office. A smothered cry of dismay came from his lips.

“He will reach the city at about the same time as yourselves—between four and five o’clock in the morning,” he said.

“And to-morrow is the fatal day?” Harvey Wilson whispered very low with a pitying glance at his friend.

The lawyer hurriedly took up a paper from his desk and ran his eyes over a largely lettered column.

“To-morrow, the 25th—yes, at seven o’clock in the morning,” he answered, with professional brevity, and then here was an awful pause.

Harvey Wilson looked at his friend. He was shuddering from head to foot, and seemed about to fall. An awful pallor like the greyness of coming death covered his face.

“Strangemore, bear up, for heaven’s sake? Don’t give up now, don’t sink when every moment is worth its weight in gold to us. Think of Nina’s peril!” he implored, touching his arm, gently.

The half-closed eyes flared open widely. Talbot answered, with feverish incoherency:

“Lead on, Wilson, I shall not sink, never fear. I will go through fire and water to save her, my martyred love, my wronged darling!”

“Will you come with us to the nearest telegraph office?” Wilson asked the lawyer.

They put on their hats and went out. The day was beautiful and bright, but they paid no heed to it. The faces of the hurrying throng seemed like faces seen in dreams to Talbot Strangemore. The world seemed full of shadows, blackest and darkest of all the shadow of that awful scaffold that to-day they were building in far off Baltimore for Nina, his fair young wife whose summers had not yet reached nineteen. They went to the telegraph office and dictated their urgent message to the governor of Maryland asking him to come home that night. Then they went to a [Pg 330]railway station and took the earliest train for Baltimore. The interested lawyer accompanied them of his own will, anxious to see the end of what might be a woeful tragedy.

“The last hour of my life!” said Nina Strangemore, solemnly, and with an awful shudder.

It was the morning of the 25th of July and already the merciless hands of time were pointing to the seventh hour. She stood trembling among the little group of beloved friends who thronged the narrow cell to bid a last good-by to the lovely girl going forth to meet ignominious death at the strong arm of the law.

She had chosen for her dress this morning a long clinging black velvet gown from which her pale face [Pg 331]gleamed with marble whiteness and delicacy. Her rippling, waving, golden hair had been gathered into a gleaming braid at the back of her small head, and the unusual style of coiffure, while it lent added dignity and gravity to her youthful beauty, also showed a new charm in the stately grace of the white neck and delicate shell-like ears. She was changed greatly, but none the less beautiful for the cruel tragedy and the waves of anguish that had swept across her life. Sorrow and suffering had etherealized her beauty until it was almost unearthly.

She lifted her great dark eyes heavy with despair, and looked into the blanched faces of her friends.

“The last hour of my life!” she repeated, solemnly, and with something like awe in her quivering voice.

It was terrible to her, so young, so lovely, so loving, with such a beautiful life lying before her, to be cut off abruptly from it all, to be standing there face to face with death and the other world. They all felt the full force of the fact, and for a moment no one could answer her. Only the silver haired minister said with a quiver in his reverent voice:

“The last of earthly life, dear daughter, but the [Pg 332]beginning of a more blessed one eternal in the heavens.”

Then he knelt down and prayed for the young soul about to be torn from its earthly tabernacle, for the husband who was an exile in foreign lands knowing nothing of the terrible doom hanging over his wife, for the friends who were rendered desolate by her loss, and lastly for the judge and jury who had ordered this judicial murder, and for all those concerned in it, and when he had again commended Nina’s soul to heaven and uttered in a quivering voice the last amen, the sheriff came in to conduct his prisoner to the scaffold.

Minnie Fielding and Virgie Mason fell fainting to the floor. Helen Starr went into strong hysterics, Kitty, the maid, sobbed from the depths of a breaking heart, while Miss Drusilla with a heart as sore as any repressed her emotion with an iron will, and stood gravely and tenderly by the side of the girl who was the only creature upon earth she loved and cared for.

“And when they have killed my innocent white lamb I shall die of grief,” she said to herself. “But now I will be calm for my poor Nina’s sake. I will not be fainting and shrieking like these poor hysterical women, and disturbing the child when she is trying to fix her thoughts on heaven.” So she walked to the foot of the scaffold with her arms around the poor trembling child, who whispered forlornly in her ear:

“Dear Aunt Drusilla, I wonder how long it will be after I am dead before Talbot learns the terrible truth? Do you think he will come back soon?”

“He did not talk as if he would ever come back, dear, I believe he will be an exile all his life,” Miss Drusilla answered.

“I hope so. I hope he will never come back after I am dead. I should not like for him to know that I died—like this!” moaned the girl. “I hope he will never know the dreadful truth, never, until he comes to heaven and finds me there waiting.”

“But if he should come home, Nina, and have to hear the cruel truth? What can I say to him, darling? Will you leave him one last word?”

She looked anxiously into the beautiful agitated [Pg 334]young face, wondering if in this last terrible hour the young wife’s love and tenderness for the husband who had brought her such sorrow would fail her.

“For myself I shall always hate my nephew, Talbot Strangemore,” the spinster vowed, grimly to herself.

And then she suddenly lifted her eyes and saw the great black scaffold looming in horrible menace above her head.

A faint cry of mortal agony came from Nina’s lips. Her head drooped a moment on her breast.

A low murmur of pity and sorrow rose upon the soft air of the summer morning from the lips of those who had sought the court yard of the jail to witness the execution that was the theme of every tongue and the topic of every newspaper. Although popular opinion adjudged her guilty of the murder, there was a great amount of pity and sympathy felt for her. [Pg 335]She was so young and lovely, and she had had such terrible provocation, they said.

But pity and sorrow and sympathy and even the most faithful love had proved futile to save her from her dreadful fate. Doctor Fielding and her lawyer had done all that lay in human power to secure her pardon, but Governor Steele had steadily refused even a reprieve. He believed that she was guilty, and his stern sense of duty forbade him to temper justice with mercy.

So, on this golden summer morning when the world was at its fairest, when the roses and lillies were blooming, when the birds were singing and the tiniest little brooks were laughing with delight, they had come here to see her die.

And all said to each other that they were sorry for her—that she was too young and beautiful to have been such a sinner and to have to die for her sin. When that low moan of agony issued from her lips and her fair head dropped for a moment on her breast every heart was shaken to its center—every heart save the one that beat in the breast of a slender, blue-eyed lad who had pressed almost to the foot of [Pg 336]the scaffold in his eagerness to see and hear all. On the half-averted face of this handsome fair-haired lad there was a glittering smile of almost demoniac triumph. His eyes laughed with delight. He appeared like a human vampire delighting in the scent of blood.

But he took care that no one should catch the expression of evil joy upon his face. He held his white handkerchief over his face, and peered above it with those wicked, laughing blue eyes at the tall scaffold and the shrinking victim whom they were now leading up the steps.

She stood there before them all, a sight to make the angels weep for pity, with that horrible rope about that beautiful white neck that they were about to break, and her face shining above it like a tender white flower crowned with gold, while Kitty May’s loud wails of despair rose up from the foot of the gallows and almost drowned the broken prayer of the aged minister.

From the street outside there suddenly arose a hubbub of noise and confusion. The clatter of a vehicle driven at break-neck pace grated on the flinty [Pg 337]pavement, and loud, excited voices were distinctly heard. No one paid much heed to it. All thought that there were some more people clamoring to get in at the iron-barred gate for a peep at the terrible show.

The official advanced shrinkingly to place the black cap over Nina’s face and cover its marvelous beauty, so soon to be blighted, from the view of the curious crowd.

A piercing shriek broke from those death white lips at that awful moment. She tried to lift her poor pinioned hands and wave him off. He retreated a step, full of grief and repugnance at his dreadful task.

“Oh, not yet,” she cried to him, lifting to his her imploring eyes shining like black jewels through a rain of terrified tears, “Oh, not yet! Give me just one minute more of life that I may gaze upon the beautiful world I am going to leave!”

The time was up but he could not refuse that thrilling prayer. He had a daughter of his own at home—a gentle dark-eyed girl no older than this one who pleaded with him so frantically for just one minute more of life. He thought of that child, and his [Pg 338]heart swelled within him at the exigencies of his terrible duty.

“One moment, then, my poor girl,” he said, huskily, and stood waiting while she looked with straining, tear-dimmed gaze upon the earth and sky.

In that moment while she gazed the air was rent by a shout from myriad throats outside the prison walls—a shout of triumph and exultation. The iron gates flew open, and three men rushed into the enclosure pushing aside the crowd, and making their way to the scaffold. The prison official and many others recognized the tall form and stern face of Governor Steele in the foremost figure. As he ran he waved a white paper in his upraised hand, and shouted in clarion tones:

At that wild shout outside, and the hubbub that arose within the prison yard, Nina’s dark eyes came back in bewilderment from the clear blue heaven where they had yearningly fixed themselves. Her glance fell on the men who were rushing toward her and then for an instant of delirious joy she believed [Pg 339]that the longing wish of her heart had embodied itself in a ghostly shape, for she was gazing once more upon the face of her husband, Talbot Strangemore, and he looked more like a dead than a living man, so worn was he with grief and woe, and so pallid with fear and horror.

He gained the scaffold, he ran up the steps, and with a muttered malediction he tore the dreadful rope from her white neck.

“Nina, my darling, I have saved you!” he cried, encircling her frail form with his tender arms, and, dizzy with joy, she fell forward unconscious on his breast.

No one noticed at first in the terrible excitement of the whole affair that Kitty May had suddenly turned around and grappled with a slim, dandy looking youth who had been looking at the prisoner on the scaffold almost over the maid’s shoulder. She had suddenly whirled herself about and grasped the elegant youth by the waist, and despite the frantic efforts he made to escape, Kitty held him tightly in her strong young arms and they rolled upon the ground together, while [Pg 340]Kitty shouted, frantically. “Help! help! Don’t let him get away. It’s Sibyl St. Alban, that she-devil dressed up in boy’s clothes! She isn’t dead, but alive, and as wicked as ever!”

Several men went to Kitty May’s assistance, and helped her to secure the handsome young dude. Having lost his hat in the mélee with the maid it was discovered that a quantity of pretty flaxen hair had been rolled in a twist on the top of his head and adroitly covered by a fair wig. The wig having been torn off, the long hair rolled luxuriantly over his shoulders, and he stood confessed—a woman!

“Didn’t I tell you ’twas Sibyl St. Alban?” cried Kitty, puffing and blowing with her valiant exertions but triumphant. “Oh, you wretch, you she-devil, you! Do you know what they ought to do with you now? They ought to take you up on the gallows [Pg 341]there and hang you till you’re dead for the awful slanders you uttered against my angel mistress! How did you get out of your grave anyhow, and come back to curse the earth again?”

“You lie. I am not Sibyl St. Alban,” answered the elegant youth; but denial was useless. There were many present who had seen the pretty belle, Mrs. St. Alban, and who now identified her instantly. Murmurs of wonder and execration arose on every hand, but all became suddenly silent as Governor Steele mounted the scaffold and asked for the attention of the crowd.

In brief eloquent language he told them all the truth—he told them of the jealous lover who had killed his fickle love, and who in his dying hour, torn by the fierce wolves of far-off Egypt, had written down a confession of the truth in his heart’s blood. He held up the paper with the dark crimson letters upon it to their view, and Sibyl St. Alban who had stood without a shudder to see her innocent rival die a shameful death, reeled and fainted at the appalling [Pg 342]sight of the evidence against her, written in the heart’s blood of Oswald Ferris.

They carried her into the prison—into the very cell where Nina had languished away hopeless months of anguish—and laid her down to recover from the swoon into which she had fallen.

When she recovered all her bravado and defiance had vanished. The sight of the gloomy cell in which she was lying filled her with terror and disgust. Seeing how useless was all denial, and in hope of escaping from the power of the law, she was ready to confess all.

“My wound was not mortal,” she said, “and I discovered the fact in a few minutes after Oswald Ferris had left the room. Then a diabolical plot entered my head. My love for Talbot Strangemore had turned to bitterest hate, for he told me that night in the conservatory at Selwyn Heights, where I got up a scene to make his wife jealous, that he had discovered that his fancy for me was the merest fancy after all, and that he had never loved until he met his beautiful bride the night of his return home. He begged me to forget our foolish and wicked love-dream, and to go [Pg 343]away from Selwyn Heights and leave him in peace to woo and win his gentle girl-bride. Oh, how I hated him, then, and I could have killed him on the spot, but happening to turn my head, I saw Nina looking in at the door, and I instantly threw my arms around him and laid my head on his breast, arousing her anger to such a degree that she accused me before them all of taking her husband from her. Well, I had my revenge. I went to her room that night and goaded her to madness until she promised to leave Talbot free to marry me. I watched until I saw her leave her home, then I retired to bed, gloating over the misery I had caused Talbot and Nina in thus separating them. I fell asleep and knew no more until I felt the assassin’s knife enter my breast, and waking in fear and agony, I recognized the desperate man with whom I had coquetted so heartlessly. He fled, and when my loud shrieks brought assistance I did not choose to betray Oswald Ferris, for then I should have had to own that I had driven him to frenzy by my falsity. I had stolen a letter from Nina’s door that night and brought it away with me. When they found it and wondered over it, I at once conceived the plan that I [Pg 344]afterward carried into execution. Thirsting for vengeance on those whom I hated so bitterly I charged Nina with the murder, knowing that her flight would lend color to the accusation. Afterwards I bribed the physician who was called to attend me, and with his help I carried out my daring scheme. I apparently died and was buried, but he resurrected me secretly, and I went on then alone with the plan I had laid out. I haunted Selwyn Heights, playing ghost, until I caught Nina home again, and then I caused her arrest in a few hours of her return.”

“My God, and to think that I ever fancied I loved such a fiend!” she heard a voice exclaim, in accents of the most passionate self-contempt.

She turned her head and saw Talbot Strangemore sitting just inside the cell, with Nina beside him. On her wasted, yet still lovely face was a look of such rare and perfect happiness, that the guilty woman gnashed her teeth in rage and despair.

“You have foiled me, Talbot Strangemore, and, oh, how I hate you both!” she hissed, with the venom of a serpent.

“Fortunately your hatred has no further power to [Pg 345]harm us,” he replied, coldly; and she saw the re-united husband and wife look into each other’s eyes with a tenderness that almost maddened her.

“Well, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I never lost an opportunity of harming you both while I had the power,” she said, sullenly. “I laid my plans long before I came to Selwyn Heights. Do you know,” she said, bitterly, looking at Nina, “why you received no letters from your husband for two years before he came home? It was because I intercepted them all, using my influence over Oswald Ferris as a cat’s-paw to secure the letters before they were sent on shore and posted. Oh, I hated you, Nina Strangemore, long before I ever saw you, because you had married the only man I ever loved in my life. I was determined to separate you from him if possible, but I suppose,” she added, sullenly, “that there is more mysterious force in the marriage bond than I ever suspected. The moment he saw you he was attracted by you, and that moment made of me a devil. I hated you so much that I came to see you hung to-day, without the least twinge of conscience or compunction!”

“Yes, and my only regret is that Talbot’s coming was not delayed a little longer, so that you might have been dead before he came,” added the wicked woman.

“Oh, Sibyl, I did not know you could be so cruel and wicked!” cried a fresh young voice, indignantly, and Mrs. St. Alban saw Virgie Mason leaning on the arm of Marmaduke Cameron, and looking at her with reproach and scorn on her frank young face. Beyond her was Helen Starr, with Virgie’s handsome young brother. Both their faces expressed amazement and contempt.

“Dear me,” she cried, with a wretched attempt at sarcastic mirth. “So you are all here to witness my downfall? It is quite a melodramatic performance, is it not, but with the villain left out, as Oswald Ferris, who tried to murder me, is absent, and dead, let us hope, from the fangs of the Egyptian wolves.”

They gazed at her in disgust and abhorrence. Her appearance in her improper attire brought blushes to the cheeks of the fair young girls. They withdrew [Pg 347]in disgust, and Sibyl raved when she found that she would not be permitted to leave the cell also. She was retained in durance vile to stand trial for the crime she had committed in conspiring against the life of Nina Strangemore by her novel and terrible plot.

If popular indignation had had its way, Sibyl St. Alban would have suffered death on the scaffold from which our beautiful, innocent Nina had been so opportunely saved, but a jury more merciful than the one that had tried Nina, awarded her a long term of years in the penitentiary. We will forestall time by informing our readers that she died before her sentence had expired, so she was never let loose upon the world again, to do evil with her wonderful beauty and her false heart.

Her co-conspirator, the physician, hearing of the arrest of Mrs. St. Alban, and her confession implicating himself, escaped the punishment due to his sin by a hasty flight to a foreign land, with his ill-gotten gains, the fruits of his crime.

Harvey Wilson and Talbot Strangemore never betrayed the fact of Ralph St. Alban’s existence in Egypt to those who believed him dead, but they lost [Pg 348]no time in writing tidings to him under his assumed name of John Armstrong of all that had happened in Baltimore.

Several months elapsed before John Armstrong’s answer was received. Then it contained a bit of news that astonished them.

Oswald Ferris had not died after all. He had survived his terrible wounds and was well and strong again. He had bitterly repented his sins, and the tidings that he had not killed Sibyl St. Alban after all had made a new man of him.

John Armstrong added that neither he nor Ferris would ever again return to America. He was sorry for the terrible punishment his erring wife had brought upon herself, but he could do no good to her by returning, so he chose to remain dead forever to those whom he had once known.

Oswald Ferris wrote himself to Talbot Strangemore to express his joy that Nina was saved from her terrible fate, to implore forgiveness again and again, for his fault, and to assure them of his penitence and shame.

Remembering all that had passed, and how Sibyl [Pg 349]St. Alban had driven the strong man mad, Talbot and his fair and happy young wife tried to think of him as gently and mercifully as they could. He never returned to his native land. He and Ralph St. Alban formed a strange bond of friendship and companionship that endured until their death which occurred long years after under the foreign skies that they had chosen for home.

And now, having disposed of all our characters, reader, you think it is time to write the Finis to this story. Nay, having followed our heroine through the vicissitudes of her sorrow and deadly peril, we would fain bask for a little while in the beautiful reflected sunshine of her wonderful happiness.

Talbot Strangemore felt that he could never be grateful enough to Doctor Fielding, who had twice rescued Nina from the sin of self-sought [Pg 350]death, and so nobly cared for her in her sickness and sorrow afterward. He knew that the physician was struggling hard to maintain his family while he established his practice in the city, and he longed to help him, but Doctor Fielding steadily refused all offers.

“It was only my duty in the first place,” he said, “and in the second it was a pleasure, because I had done a kindness for the gentle pupil whom my wife loved so dearly. No, the offer of a reward in such a case is almost an insult. I can accept nothing but your friendship, and that of Mrs. Strangemore, which I hope to enjoy all my life.”

But happy and generous Nina was not content to enjoy her happiness and affluence alone, while those noble friends, who had done so much for her, were fighting the battle of adversity, although its horrors were softened by the sweetness of true and faithful love. She knew that Doctor Fielding, both in her sickness and in her after imprisonment, had been compelled to lose much time from his practice in order to attend to her, and she was determined that he should not suffer for his kindness.

So it was barely a week after Nina’s opportune rescue that Minnie Fielding, looking out of her window one morning at the sound of wheels, saw a dainty equipage pausing at her door, out of which stepped a lovely vision in rich blue silk, with streaming azure ribbons and creamy laces, her gold curls falling beneath a broad hat covered with azure plumes. The large dark eyes were laughing with delight as they were lifted to Minnie at the window.

“Come down!” she called, in her tender, musical voice, that had such a note of happiness in it that it thrilled Minnie’s heart in unison.

“It is Nina—oh, how lovely she is in her new found happiness,” she exclaimed, hastening down to meet her.

They were soon seated in the neat little parlor, with the baby, Nina’s pretty little namesake, playing on the floor beside them.

“Oh, my darling girl, how beautiful and happy you look!” cried Mrs. Fielding, gazing in irrepressible admiration at the charming face, that with its radiant eyes and dimpling smiles and rose flushed cheeks did not look much like the marble-pale one in the prison [Pg 352]cell a week ago. She was a perfect picture of grace and beauty and happiness now.

“I am happy,” she said, softly. “As happy as I was wretched a week ago, and I cannot express my happiness in stronger terms than that.”

And a moment later she added: “And only think that but for Doctor Fielding I might have been dead by my own hand and never have lived to know that Talbot loved me, and that after my terrible trial a long future of love and happiness lay before me. You must not be jealous, dear, when I tell you that next to my own husband I shall always love Doctor Fielding better than any other man on the earth because I owe him so much.”

The sweet little lady only laughed at this impulsive outburst from her beloved pupil.

“You may love my dear old darling as much as you please. I shall not be jealous,” she said, brightly.

“Mrs. Fielding, you know I made my will the 24th of July,” she said, repressing a slight shiver.

“Yes,” Nina answered with a smile, “I left legacies to a number of my kind friends and the bulk of my great fortune to my husband.”

“Dear Nina, you were very generous. I knew that you had made your will that day, but I had no thought that my name was mentioned in it,” said the little lady.

“Did you really think I could be so ungrateful as to leave your name out of my will after all the years of kindness I owe you, and all the goodness of Doctor Fielding besides?” inquired Nina, with shining, reproachful eyes.

“My dear girl, we had no thought of gain. We were acting solely from love and duty.”

“Yes, I know how truly good and unselfish you are, and that Doctor Fielding has refused to let my husband help him in any way. But shall I tell you what we have decided to do?” asked Nina, with a [Pg 354]pretty blush drifting over her face as she pronounced the suggestive pronoun “we.”

“You know of course, that papa left me a great deal of money,” said Nina. “Much more than Talbot and I shall ever use, and then there will be plenty for our heirs if we ever have any,” the pretty blush deepening to scarlet. “So we have decided to carry out the conditions of my will just the same as if I had really died.”

“Oh, no, no, no! No one would expect it or wish it!” cried Mrs. Fielding, hastily.

“No one’s wishes will be consulted,” exclaimed Nina, with a pretty, imperious smile. “I am going to have my own way even if—even if my friends get so angry they will never speak to me again. But you could not be so cruel to me, no matter what I did, could you, my dear old friend and teacher?” cried Nina, suddenly falling into the pretty coaxing ways which she remembered had always vanquished gentle Miss Minnie Selden in the by-gone days.

“It would be hard to be angry with you, dear, but I cannot permit such lavish generosity,” she said.

“Talbot says,” said Nina, with a world of happy love-light irradiating her exquisite face under the drooping blue plumes that shaded it, “that as I have suffered so much, everyone ought to try to make me happy now. He says he will not permit any one to refuse any request of mine if he can prevent it. So, my dear old friend, there is ten thousand dollars in bank to your credit, and here is your check-book. You must not refuse it. It is for you and my little namesake, Nina. You know she is so pale and puny that she ought to go to the mountains or the sea-shore for the rest of the summer, so you must accept the legacy for baby’s sake!”

When Nina went back to the hotel where she was staying after her successful mission of love and generosity she found her husband entertaining some callers who were anxiously awaiting her appearance.

They were her devoted friends, Virgie Mason and Helen Starr, attended by their respective cavaliers Duke Cameron and Sydney Mason.

They had thought that Talbot Strangemore’s slighted bride was lovely when they met her first at Selwyn Heights, but they thought her doubly beautiful now with love and happiness brightening her face into peerless beauty. Talbot Strangemore too, looked like a changed man, so bright and handsome was the face that they had been wont to see sad and weary and hopeless looking, in the days when he had been so mad and foolish as to rebel against the fate that had given him this charming bride. It was quite evident that he idolized Nina now, and that she with the angelic [Pg 357]forgiveness of woman had pardoned him for the masculine folly that had so nearly ruined their lives.

“Are you going to the Governor’s reception to-night, Nina?” asked Virgie. “But then of course you will be there as it is given in your honor.”

“Yes, we are going,” said Talbot. “We did not care to attend, in fact we were leaving town, but Governor Steele made such a point of it that we could not well refuse especially as his motive was so kind, desiring to atone to Nina for his harshness that he now sees in the light of the most cruel injustice.”

“I am so glad you are going. We are all going, too. I have such a pretty dress to wear—pink brocade and cream lace with moss rose-buds, and our stately Helen will wear blue velvet and diamonds. What shall you wear, Nina?” exclaimed the vivacious Virgie.

“White satin and lace and pearls, like a bride. This is really our honey-moon you know,” said Talbot, answering for his wife.

He did not understand at first why the two girls blushed so rosily at his words, but in a moment Duke Cameron said with an arch laugh:

“Apropos of brides, girls, it is a good time to get in the petition that brought you here this morning.”

Virgie and Helen blushed more rosily than ever. Their attendant cavaliers only laughed mischievously.

“What is it?” she asked, with her ready woman’s wit. “Are Virgie and Helen going to be married?”

“We are all going to be married,” laughed Sydney Mason. “Helen and I, and Duke and Virgie, and we have come to invite you to our double wedding and to receive your congratulations.”

They were heartily offered amid a good deal of mirth and laughter, then Duke Cameron said, gaily:

“But that is not all yet. As the ice is broken now, my bashful Miss Virgie, perhaps you will tell the rest.”

“And,” said the more dignified Helen, “We want you and Mr. Strangemore to go with us. Will you do so, dear Nina?”

The happy young wife looked wistfully at her husband. He smiled, for he was already beginning to understand the expression of those soft dark eyes.

“I think we must refuse,” he answered. “You see, Nina and I are scarcely acquainted with each other yet, and we have planned to spend our honey-moon quietly at Selwyn Heights, and make each other’s acquaintance at our leisure. Does not this suit you best, Nina?”

“Some other time I will go with you with pleasure, but I think,” shily, “I would rather stay at home now with Talbot. We have never been at home much together since we were married, you know.”

Seeing how tranquilly happy they were alone, their friends forbore to press the claim for their company.

Nina and her husband were right. They were best alone for a time, and in reality they needed no companionship but their own. They were all in all to each other.

The beautiful Mrs. Strangemore with her romantic history, carried Baltimore by storm on the night of the Governor’s reception. The best people of the city had been bidden to honor her for whom barely a week ago a scaffold had reared its ghastly front in the face of heaven. All vied with each other to do her honor. It was a perfect ovation. People went wild with enthusiasm over the peerless beauty that had been hidden so long in the gloom of the prison cell. They raved over the gold hair, the dark eyes, the perfect face with its rare red lips and sea-shell coloring. The dress that Talbot had chosen for his darling was perfect in its way. It was creamy satin embroidered in pearls and with flouncings of costly lace. A rope of large moon-white pearls clasped the slender white throat, and the bouquet she carried in her hand was of fragrant pure white flowers. She looked bride-like, queen-like, and even her own husband was amazed at the perfection of her beauty.

“Nina, you are as lovely as a queen,” he whispered to her, “I cannot help thinking that my mother was wrong when she bound you to me in your youth and [Pg 362]innocence. She should have left you free to choose and be chosen. You are a fitting mate for a king.”

“Oh, Talbot do you regret that I belong to you, beyond all chance of change?” she inquired.

His heart thrilled with happiness at the expression of radiant joy that beamed upon her face. She stole her dainty hand into his one moment as she said, softly:

“Nina, you are an angel!” he exclaimed. “I believed that years must elapse before you would pardon my fault and love me again, and yet you have already filled my life with the bliss of your forgiving love. I do not know how to thank you enough for the mercy you have shown me. May God bless you forever, my sweet one.”

“Aunt Drusilla is quite disgusted with the readiness with which I have pardoned you,” she observed. [Pg 363]“She says if she had been in my place she would have held you at arm’s length a year at least, before she condescended to forgive you and love you again.”

“I told her that she had never known what true love was, or she could not have fancied a loving wife being hard and cold to her husband when he came to her truly repentant for his fault.”

“Wise, loyal little wife!” he exclaimed, fondly. “And what did my aunt say to that noble little speech?”

“She answered that it was quite true she had never known anything about that kind of love and she hoped she never would, either, for women had made themselves fools over men ever since the world began, and would continue to do so to the end of the chapter.”

“It was most fortunate that she did not succeed in imbuing your mind with her peculiar sentiments,” laughed Talbot Strangemore. “I shudder to think of the risk I ran in leaving you to her care all those years. She might have made a man-hater of you.”

“Never, for I was in love with my husband long before I ever saw his Aunt Drusilla,” she answered, with a glance that set all his pulses beating with rapture.

The day after the governor’s reception Talbot and Nina went home to Selwyn Heights.

Miss Strangemore had preceded them several days in order to have everything in readiness for their return. Kitty May had remained in the city with her mistress, and had received her share of lionizing as the brave girl who had captured Sibyl St. Alban in the jaunty dude’s costume under which she had cleverly masked her identity.

Kitty had briefly narrated the manner in which she had been led to suspect the identity of the false woman.

“You see I had seen her several times while she was playing ghost, and was frightened out of my wits every time, so I began to expect to see her, or to hear her dreadful laugh, everywhere I went. But that day when they were about to hang my poor young mistress I forgot all about the dreadful ghost that had [Pg 365]frightened me so often. I was standing as close to the gallows as I could get, sobbing and crying, when the uproar began, and all at once I saw Mr. Strangemore brush past me, and run up the steps and tear the rope from Miss Nina’s neck. I knew what it all meant in a minute, and I believe I should have fainted with joy only that at that moment I heard just behind me a smothered cry of the bitterest rage and hate, and in the very voice of the ghost that had haunted me ever since Mrs. St. Alban was buried. I turned sharply around and saw her very face behind me although it was shaded by a boy’s hat. I had always wanted to touch that ghost ever since the first time I saw it, but it had always been too sharp for me. But this time she was too close to flee. I whirled about and caught her in my arms, and, lo, she wasn’t a ghost at all, but that living, breathing sinner!”

So Kitty had her share of newspaper fame when the wonderful story went the rounds, and she enjoyed it mightily, too. She went to court to testify against Mrs. St. Alban, and she was devoutly sorry that the jury did not punish the sin of the beautiful conspirator by death.

“Lord bless you, there would be no more harm in putting that woman out of the world, than there would be in killing a snake or a spider,” she declared.

But the jury thought differently, perhaps, and so Kitty had to be satisfied with the sentence of imprisonment for a term of years. When she heard of her death in prison some years later, she said, soberly:

“I can’t say I’m sorry she died before it was time for her to come back into the world again. Perhaps it was for the best. But I hope she repented of her wickedness before it was too late.”

She was so anxious on this point that she paid a special visit to the prison chaplain to inquire about it. He pleased her very much by the information that Mrs. St. Alban had indeed repented of her sins, and left her blessing to those whom she had so cruelly wronged.

Kitty did not share Miss Drusilla’s opinion that Nina had been in too great haste to forgive her husband. She had heard from Harvey Wilson, Mr. Strangemore’s friend, the whole story of Talbot’s discovery of the real murderer, and his almost reckless haste to reach home with the news, so she thought [Pg 367]that Talbot’s repentence, and, above all, his timely rescue of Nina at the last fatal moment, had fairly earned him his wife’s pardon.

So they went home to Selwyn Heights, where they received a perfect ovation, and where Nina’s old friend and playmate, Lion, almost went mad over her return. He looked askance at Talbot at first, but he soon came to understand that the obnoxious man stood very high in the affections of his mistress, so after some jealous sulking, Lion capitulated to the exigencies of the case, and himself adopted Talbot as a favorite.

Miss Drusilla Strangemore did not give in so readily as the Newfoundland in her anger against her nephew. In her character of a man-hater, she maintained an animosity against him for some months.

But when she came to know Talbot better, when she understood that his one great fault was counter-balanced by a thousand sterling virtues and graces, she gradually softened, and all the more rapidly because she saw that her favorite Nina was cruelly hurt by the coldness and distrust displayed toward her husband.

The day came when Miss Drusilla made quite an [Pg 368]exception in favor of her nephew whom she declared far superior to the generality of men whom she continued to despise with unabated vigor. She was almost as proud as Nina herself when Talbot went into public life and rose rapidly from one distinction to another until he became a senator in the halls of the national capitol. Then Miss Drusilla said that there was really more in her nephew than she had ever supposed, and Nina declared that she was the happiest woman in the world, her love and her ambition both being satisfied.

No honor that ever came to him ever made Talbot Strangemore so proud and glad as those words from his wife’s lips. It was the aim of his life to make her so happy that she would almost, if not quite, forget the tragedy that had so nearly ended her sweet young life. When he found that he had succeeded, that she had put away from her heart the brooding shadow of the tragic past and lived only in the present and the future, he said to himself that now he could ask no more of fate. His cup was full to the brim.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nina's peril

NINA’S PERIL.

CONTENTS.

NINA’S PERIL.

CHAPTER I. A BEAUTIFUL FACE.

CHAPTER II. WAITING AND HOPING.

CHAPTER III. SKETCHING THE PAST.

CHAPTER IV. COMING HOME.

CHAPTER V. “NOTHING CAN UNDO THE FOLLY OF FIVE YEARS AGO.”

CHAPTER VI. “CAN THIS REALLY BE NINA?”

CHAPTER VII. PRIDE.

CHAPTER VIII. “I HAVE SWORN AN OATH AND I SHALL HAVE TO KEEP IT.”

CHAPTER IX. JEALOUSY.

CHAPTER X. “I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER.”

CHAPTER XI. THE SHADOWS FALL.

CHAPTER XII. AN INTERVIEW DECLINED.

CHAPTER XIII. NINA’S SACRIFICE.

CHAPTER XIV. A MADDENED LOVER.

CHAPTER XV. THE TRAGEDY.

CHAPTER XVI. THE FLIGHT OF NINA.

CHAPTER XVII. SIBYL’S ACCUSATION.

CHAPTER XVIII. RESCUED.

CHAPTER XIX. WITH FRIENDS.

CHAPTER XX. THE FIELDINGS.

CHAPTER XXI. “MAD FROM LIFE’S HISTORY.”

CHAPTER XXII. REMORSE.

CHAPTER XXIII. COMPAGNONS DU VOYAGE.

CHAPTER XXIV. “SHE IS DEAD TO ALL.”

CHAPTER XXV. POVERTY.

CHAPTER XXVI. I MUST HAVE MONEY.

CHAPTER XXVII. BACK TO SELWYN HEIGHTS.

CHAPTER XXVIII. ENTRAPPED.

CHAPTER XXIX. NINA LEARNS THE TRUTH.

CHAPTER XXX. A GHOSTLY LAUGH.

CHAPTER XXXI. THE ARREST OF NINA.

CHAPTER XXXII. TALBOT’S SUSPICIONS.

CHAPTER XXXIII. TALBOT’S DREAMS.

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PRISON.

CHAPTER XXXV. NINA’S DESPAIR.

CHAPTER XXXVI. THE TRIAL.

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE LETTER.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE GHOST AGAIN.

CHAPTER XXXIX. NINA FORGIVES TALBOT.

CHAPTER XL. IN EGYPT.

CHAPTER XLI. FERRIS GROWS DESPERATE.

CHAPTER XLII. THE NAYA HAYE.

CHAPTER XLIII. JUDGE LYNCH.

CHAPTER XLIV. ARMSTRONG’S NEWS.

CHAPTER XLV. TALBOT LEARNS ALL.

CHAPTER XLVI. TALBOT ACCUSES FERRIS.

CHAPTER XLVII. RALPH ST. ALBAN.

CHAPTER XLVIII. FLIGHT INTO THE DESERT.

CHAPTER XLIX. TORN BY WOLVES.

CHAPTER L. JOURNEYING HOMEWARD.

CHAPTER LI. ON THE SCAFFOLD.

CHAPTER LII. SIBYL’S PUNISHMENT.

CHAPTER LIII. NINA’S HAPPINESS.

CHAPTER LIV. THE INVITATION.

CHAPTER LV. “IT’S WE TWO FOR AYE.”

Mary J. Holmes’ Novels.

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Josh Billings.

Charles Dickens.

CHAPTER I.
A BEAUTIFUL FACE.

CHAPTER II.
WAITING AND HOPING.

CHAPTER III.
SKETCHING THE PAST.

CHAPTER IV.
COMING HOME.

CHAPTER V.
“NOTHING CAN UNDO THE FOLLY OF FIVE YEARS AGO.”

CHAPTER VI.
“CAN THIS REALLY BE NINA?”

CHAPTER VII.
PRIDE.

CHAPTER VIII.
“I HAVE SWORN AN OATH AND I SHALL HAVE TO KEEP IT.”

CHAPTER IX.
JEALOUSY.

CHAPTER X.
“I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER.”

CHAPTER XI.
THE SHADOWS FALL.

CHAPTER XII.
AN INTERVIEW DECLINED.

CHAPTER XIII.
NINA’S SACRIFICE.

CHAPTER XIV.
A MADDENED LOVER.

CHAPTER XV.
THE TRAGEDY.

CHAPTER XVI.
THE FLIGHT OF NINA.

CHAPTER XVII.
SIBYL’S ACCUSATION.

CHAPTER XVIII.
RESCUED.

CHAPTER XIX.
WITH FRIENDS.

CHAPTER XX.
THE FIELDINGS.

CHAPTER XXI.
“MAD FROM LIFE’S HISTORY.”

CHAPTER XXII.
REMORSE.

CHAPTER XXIII.
COMPAGNONS DU VOYAGE.

CHAPTER XXIV.
“SHE IS DEAD TO ALL.”

CHAPTER XXV.
POVERTY.

CHAPTER XXVI.
I MUST HAVE MONEY.

CHAPTER XXVII.
BACK TO SELWYN HEIGHTS.

CHAPTER XXVIII.
ENTRAPPED.

CHAPTER XXIX.
NINA LEARNS THE TRUTH.

CHAPTER XXX.
A GHOSTLY LAUGH.

CHAPTER XXXI.
THE ARREST OF NINA.

CHAPTER XXXII.
TALBOT’S SUSPICIONS.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
TALBOT’S DREAMS.

CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE PRISON.

CHAPTER XXXV.
NINA’S DESPAIR.

CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE TRIAL.

CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE LETTER.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE GHOST AGAIN.

CHAPTER XXXIX.
NINA FORGIVES TALBOT.

CHAPTER XL.
IN EGYPT.

CHAPTER XLI.
FERRIS GROWS DESPERATE.

CHAPTER XLII.
THE NAYA HAYE.

CHAPTER XLIII.
JUDGE LYNCH.

CHAPTER XLIV.
ARMSTRONG’S NEWS.

CHAPTER XLV.
TALBOT LEARNS ALL.

CHAPTER XLVI.
TALBOT ACCUSES FERRIS.

CHAPTER XLVII.
RALPH ST. ALBAN.

CHAPTER XLVIII.
FLIGHT INTO THE DESERT.

CHAPTER XLIX.
TORN BY WOLVES.

CHAPTER L.
JOURNEYING HOMEWARD.

CHAPTER LI.
ON THE SCAFFOLD.

CHAPTER LII.
SIBYL’S PUNISHMENT.

CHAPTER LIII.
NINA’S HAPPINESS.

CHAPTER LIV.
THE INVITATION.

CHAPTER LV.
“IT’S WE TWO FOR AYE.”