As Ida sat alone in her desolation and shame, the thought of self-destruction had surged up in the lava of other tumultuous thoughts occasioned by the artist's scorn, and at first she had shrunk from it with natural and instinctive dread. But the awful thought began to fascinate her like a dizzy height from which it seems so easy to fall and end everything. In her morbid condition and to her poisoned imagination the act did not appear so revolting after all. She had been made familiar with it in her favorite novels. She had often seen it simulated with applause on the stage, with all the melodramatic accessories with which it is produce mere effect. Indeed, from her education, she might also think self-destruction was the only dignified and high-spirited thing to do. For a time her thoughts took the coloring of high tragedy. She would teach this proud artist a lessen, even though at supreme cost to herself. If he would never love her, she would make it certain that he could not longer despise her. She would write him a letter that would harrow his very soul, informing him that she had taken his hint and followed his suggestion. Since he had thrown away the emblem of herself as a worthless and unsightly thing, she had thrown herself away, so that faultless taste and faultless people might be no more offended by the presence of so much imperfection. For a moment her eyes glowed with exultation over his imagined dismay as he read this message from one to whom no reparation could be made; and then better and more wholesome feelings resumed their sway. Perverted, misguided, and uncounselled as she was, she was too young, too near the mother heart of nature, not to react from the false and the evil towards the simple and the true. She threw herself upon her couch. "Oh, that I might live and be happy!" she sobbed. "If in the place of the bitter frost of his words and manner he would give me but one ray of kindness, I would try to bloom, even though but a poor worm-eaten bud." Frowns blight far more flowers than October nights. Chapter XXXIII. "Hope dies Hard." When alone with his friend after supper, Stanton broke out, "Since Ida can't exist without the sight of that wretch, Sibley, I wish she would follow him to New York. If she dotes on such scum, they had better be married, as far as such people can be, and so relieve her relatives of an incubus that is well-nigh intolerable." "Are you absolutely sure that she does dote on Sibley, and that he is the cause of her evident trouble?" asked Van Berg, with a perplexed frown lowering on his brow.