"To-morrow I shall have my revenge upon her," she cries, with clenched hands. "I would not tell her to-night. My triumph would not have been complete. I will wait--wait until to-morrow, when Leslie Noble will take me by the hand and tell her to her face that he loves me, and that I am his wife!" And her strange, half-maddened laugh filled the little room with weird echoes. CHAPTER III. To-morrow, Vera's to-morrow--dawns, rainy, chilly, cheerless, as only a rainy autumn day can be. The wild winds sigh eerily around the house. The autumn leaves are beaten from the trees and swirl through the air, falling in dank, sodden masses on the soaked grass of the lawn. The sun refuses to shine. No more dreary and desolate day could be imagined. With the earliest peep of dawn Vera makes her way to her mother's room. It is lonely and deserted save for the sheeted presence of the quiet dead. The lamps burn dimly, and there is a silence in the room so deep it may be felt. With a trembling hand Vera turns down the cold linen cover for one long, lingering look at the beloved face--the strangely-beautiful marble-white face, on which the story of a life-long sorrow has carved its mournful record in the subtle tracery of grief. Mrs. Campbell has been that most sorrowful of all living creatures--a deserted wife! The beautiful, dark eyes of her daughter have never looked upon the face of the father who should have loved and nurtured her tender life. But it is all over now--the pain, the sorrow, the loneliness, the deep humiliation. The small, toil-stained hands are folded gently together over some odorous white tube-roses that Vera has placed within them! The jetty fringe of the long, black lashes rests heavily against the thin, white cheeks, the beautifully-curved lips are closed peacefully, the golden brown hair, thickly-streaked with gray, is parted sweetly on the peaceful brow. As Vera gazes, the tears, which have remained sealed in their fountains till now, burst forth in healing showers, breaking upon the terrible calm that has been upon her. Again and again she presses her hot, feverish lips to the cold, white brow of the only friend her lonely life has ever known. "Oh, mamma, mamma, if you might but have taken me with you," she sobs, bitterly. "The best thing that could have happened," says a curt, icy voice behind her, and turning with a shiver of repulsion, Vera beholds her aunt, Mrs. Cleveland, who has entered noiselessly in her furred slippers and crimson dressing-gown. She comes to the foot of the bed and stands silently a moment regarding the cold, white features of her dead sister, then hastily turns her head aside as if the still face held some unspoken reproach for her. "Cover the face, Vera," she says, coldly. "It is not pleasant to look at the dead." "Not when we have wronged them," the girl murmurs, almost inaudibly, and with deep bitterness.