“I am so glad that you came to me just when you did, dear Jess,” murmured Queenie, “for I was feeling my grief so keenly that I thought my poor heart would surely break.” Jess crossed the room and stood in front of the picture of the late departed Mr. Brown, studying the wrinkled face it represented; the bald head, smooth as a billiard ball; the shrunken mouth and chin, and almost sightless eyes, and her thoughts broke into words, and quite before she considered what she was about to utter, she said, impulsively: “How could you ever have loved so old and withered a human being, Queenie, let alone marrying him; and you so young and fair? I thought when I first saw the picture hanging here that he was your great-grandfather.” A flush stained Queenie’s face from neck to brow for a moment, and her heart gave a great strangling throb. It was fully a moment ere she replied, then she said slowly: “I will not tell you an untruth, Jess; it was not because I loved my husband that I married him. He saved my father from financial ruin, and I married him because he demanded my hand as the price of it. There was no question of love between us.” “I should never marry a man I could not love, no matter what the consequences of my refusing were,” declared Jess. “You have never been placed in such a position; you can hardly tell what you would do or would not do, dear,” murmured Queenie, thinking that that remark was a fine opening for Jess to make a confidant of her in regard to the lover who was to have been forced upon her by the Dinsmore will. In this surmise she was quite correct. Jess wheeled about from the picture, and flinging herself on a hassock at Queenie’s feet, she buried her young face in her false friend’s lap, exclaiming: “Ah! but I have had a most thrilling experience, I assure you, Queenie. May I tell you all about it?” “If you like, dear,” was the answer, and she lowered her white lids over her eyes that Jess might not see the hard, steely glitter in them should she chance to look up suddenly. “I did throw over a lover and a fortune into the bargain, because I could not like, let alone love the man whom I would have had to wed to gain the money, though the loss of it made me--a pauper!” “What a romance!” cried Queenie. “Do tell me all about it, dear--who would have ever dreamed that you, who look so much like a child, had ever contemplated marriage, let alone decided so important a step.” “It is romantic,” said Jess, slowly. “I doubt if any other young girl in the whole wide world ever had such a strange experience as mine has been.” And, glad enough to find so attentive and sympathetic a listener, Jess, with the confiding innocence of youth, proceeded to narrate to her new-found friend the story of her life; how, from the first recollection she had had, she had been a part and parcel of Blackheath Hall, yet had lived a life wholly apart from its inmates.