Wilder turned and looked her full in the face. It was the way in which he did it that sharpened her attention, for it was a look in which she felt, rather than saw, a command. “What became of them?” he quietly asked, but she felt that the question required an answer. “Oh,” she replied, her air of indifference veiling her determination to hold control of the situation, “the vagabond fiddler was never seen again. As for Ada--but that was infinitely better than to have lived a life of wretchedness----” “As for Ada?” “She was dead in a month,”--this with a hard and defiant manner. The young man rose from his chair, which he clumsily upset. In a strangely uncertain, stumbling fashion he went to the front door, and felt for the latch, as though blind. Then he changed his mind and started for the rear door; but whatever purpose he had was interrupted by his overturning a small table and sending the books and other articles upon it clattering to the floor. Evidently startled and confused by the noise and his own clumsiness,--though hardly more so than the young woman, who was watching him in amazement,--he righted the table with difficulty, and began to pick up the articles that had fallen from it. Instead, however, of replacing them on the table, he put them on the bed. His face was livid, his eyes were sunk alarmingly deep in his skull, and he seemed to have become suddenly old and wrinkled. His hands trembled, and weakness so overcame him that he sat down upon the edge of the bed. This state quickly passed, and the young man looked at his guest, who had been compelled to turn her chair laboriously to observe him; and when he saw the perplexed and distressed look in her face--seeing nothing of the gratification and triumph that her distress partly obscured--he smiled faintly and came firmly to his feet. “It must have been an attack of vertigo,” he explained, feebly. But he continued to look at her so steadily and with so penetrating a gaze that her uneasiness increased. Had she carried her torture of him too far? Oh, well, it would do him good in the end!