“When you read this, Delaval, I shall be dead. ‘What folly!’ I hear you say. But folly or not, it is the truth. Oh, Delaval, I wonder I did not die yesterday! when you killed me with your hard words and looks. I cannot, I say, live and know that the love and caresses that are all the world to me are given to another woman. I have no home, no friends, no money. What then is left to me but death! Good-bye! my love! my love! My last prayer will be that some day you will say to yourself, ‘She loved me best of all.’ Good-bye!” “GABRIELLE.” When he has read it all, his first thought is, “What a very unpleasant state of affairs.” He cannot show the letter to his future wife or her people. He cannot give a hint that Gabrielle may have committed the atrocious folly of putting an end to herself. True, the uncertainty of her fate does not conduce to his comfort or his equanimity of mind, but it is not to be thought of that he should cut his own throat by showing her letter. “Here goes!” he says, at last, with a sigh of relief, as the torn fragments of Gabrielle’s last words scatter to the four winds, and he turns with a tender smile to meet his betrothed, who comes slowly and sadly, as it seems to him, up the garden walk. “I thought you were never coming, darling,” he whispers in his softest voice, while his ultramarine eyes look into her own longingly, yearningly. But Zai’s grey eyes do not respond, and her face is very grave as she falters: “Gabrielle! oh, how shall I tell you Gabrielle----?” “Yes,” he questions feverishly, staring at her in his bewilderment. “_Poor Gabrielle is dead!_” “Dead?” “Yes! We thought she had gone to Southampton, but she hasn’t--for--oh! _what_ could have made her do it?” she cries, looking up with piteous eyes into his white face. “She has drowned herself in the river! _What_ could have made her do such a terrible thing?” “God knows!” he says. It is quite true what Zai has told him. Close to the brink of the Urling river that runs through the Sandilands estate they have found Gabrielle’s hat. How well they know it, the dainty hat with its pompon of vivid scarlet and black! For five days they drag the river without success, but on the sixth day a human form is brought and laid on the silvery bed of sand. A woman’s form, tall and slender like Gabrielle’s, yet so unlike, for it is terrible to look upon. The light summer dress she wore is tattered and draggled and discoloured beyond recognition, and the face,--but none who have known her can look twice on the fearful lineaments that the water have so cruelly caressed and changed. Not even her own father can believe that this awful thing lying at his feet can be all that is left of his beautiful daughter, Gabrielle Beranger. * * * * *