"You are incomprehensible," she said. "I am gratified to know that it was not my life nor my honor, but your own name, that you saved to-night,--it lessens my obligation. Being a woman, I am nothing; being a Warburton, disgrace must not touch me! So be it. If I may not confide in my husband, I will keep my own counsel still. And if I cannot master my trouble alone, then, perhaps, as a last resort, and for the sake of the Warburton honor, I will call upon you for aid." There was no time for a reply. While the last words were yet on her lips, the heavy curtains were thrust hastily aside and Winnie French, pallid and trembling, stood in the doorway. "Leslie! Alan!" she cried, coming toward them with a sob in her throat, "we have lost little Daisy!" "Lost her!" Alan Warburton uttered the two words as one who does not comprehend their meaning. But Leslie stood transfixed, like one stunned, yet not startled, by an anticipated blow. "We have hunted everywhere," Winnie continued wildly. "She is not in the house, she is not--" She catches her breath at the cry that breaks from Leslie's lips, and for a moment those three, their festive garments in startling contrast with their woe-stricken faces, regard each other silently. Then Leslie, overcome at last by the accumulating horrors of this terrible night, sways, gasps, and falls forward, pallid and senseless, at Alan Warburton's feet. CHAPTER XX. BETRAYED BY A PICTURE. Little Daisy Warburton was missing. The blow that had prostrated Leslie at its first announcement, struck Archibald Warburton with still heavier force. It was impossible to keep the truth from him, and when it became known, his feeble frame would not support the shock. At day-dawn, he lay in a death-like lethargy. At night, he was raving with delirium. And on the second day, the physicians said: "There is no hope. His life is only a thing of days." Leslie and Alan were faithful at his bedside,--she, the tenderest of nurses; he, the most sleepless of watchers. But they avoided an interchange of word or glance. To all appearance, they had lost sight of themselves in the presence of these new calamities--Archibald's hopeless condition, and the loss of little Daisy. No time had been wasted in prosecuting the search for the missing child. When all had been done that could be done,--when monstrous rewards had been offered, when the police were scouring the city, and private detectives were making careful investigations,--Leslie and Alan took their places at the bedside of the stricken father, and waited, the heart of each heavy with a burden of unspoken fear and a new, terrible suspicion. [Illustration: "Leslie! Alan!" she cried, coming toward them with a sob in her throat, "we have lost little Daisy!"--page 155.] So two long, dreary days passed away, with no tidings from the lost and no hope for the dying. During these two days, Van Vernet and Richard Stanhope were not idle.