“Be quiet, my daughter,” said Mrs. Coolidge, soothingly. Then turning to Lady Randal, she asked: “Can you believe such a tissue of falsehood? No one has seen the girl from the time she parted with my children in the park that day until after her marriage. It is a preposterous story, and only fabricated to save the parties most interested from the scandal usually attending a clandestine marriage. Besides, what is all this talk about a secret chamber?” she concluded, scornfully. Lady Randal looked at her in a dazed kind of a way, while a terrible fear was tugging at her heart. “But how could she know there is a secret chamber unless she had seen it?—and it leads from Isabel’s room. Go on, Adrian, I must hear all now,” she said, in a low, concentrated tone. He gave her a look of compassion, and resumed: “Miss Douglas arranged her bed, striving to make the best of her situation, and, being very weary, soon fell into a sound slumber. She was not conscious of how long she had slept, but she was suddenly awakened by a feeling that some one was in her room, and upon opening her eyes saw the strangest being she ever beheld kneeling by her side.” “Oh, heavens!” breathed Lady Randal, sinking back in her chair, and covering her face with her trembling hands. CHAPTER XLI “WHERE IS MY BROTHER?” Isabel and her mother now forgot some of their own fear when they saw Lady Randal so unnerved. It had been a matter of great mystery to them how their prisoner escaped, and it seemed that it was about to be explained; and Mrs. Coolidge, with her ready wit, began to think that the skeleton of the house was to be revealed also. “This person,” Adrian resumed, “proved to be a young man by the name of——” “Oh, spare me!—in mercy, spare me, Adrian!” cried the guilty woman, springing toward him, with outstretched hands and agonizing face. “Spare you? Have you spared your own flesh and blood?” demanded Adrian, sternly. “Have you ever felt an atom of mercy for your own son, whom, for over twenty years, you have doomed to almost solitary confinement, away from the sunlight and fresh air, depriving him of the simplest rights which a human being craves—liberty and his own place in the world? Oh, heartless mother that you are! it is but just and right that the world should know that Herbert Randal, your third son, because of a deformity with which God saw fit to afflict him, has been loathed by the woman who bore him, and that, to further the interests of your favorite child, you have kept him secreted for years, hoping that, in his feeble state, every year would be his last, and your guilty course never become known. But God is merciful, and the time for restitution is at hand; and, be it known to you, it was through him Miss Douglas was released from her confinement.”