"It was this secret that our old nurse revealed on her death-bed to my mother. That one of the children she claimed as her own was not hers, but she could not remember which child--you or I--was Daisy Forrest's. She told mamma that there were papers in her old chest that she thought would prove the truth. Those papers Sam hid, and to-day I searched the cabin and found them." With a moan Mrs. Fielding lifted her head, but neither of the two girls heeded her, so absorbed were they--Flower in this terrible story, Jewel in gloating over her rival's dismay. "I read the papers--the torn leaves from his diary that he flung into the fire and that Maria rescued," Jewel added, with blazing eyes. "It set at rest the doubt that has tormented my mother so long. It said that the child with his own blue eyes and golden hair was the child of Daisy Forrest, whose death drove him to suicide." CHAPTER XIV. Mrs. Fielding staggered to her feet. She stood looking at Flower with a tortured face. "Ah! even a mother's instinct has played me false in this. I thought, I hoped--" she cried out, passionately, then checked herself, and the agony of her face changed to wrath and fury. Advancing toward the shrinking, terrified girl, she exclaimed, hoarsely, angrily: "So I have wasted my love on you--you, my rival's child! She had his heart and you his face--my false husband's beautiful face! Are you not afraid that I will strike you dead for having deceived me so bitterly!" "I, mamma, I deceive you? Ah, no, no, for I did not know!" Flower moaned, faintly, and shrinking in terror from the wild-eyed woman towering over her so fiercely, and who cried out, scornfully, now: "No, that is true, you did not know what a heritage of shame was yours, what a cloud hung over your birth--and yet you proved yourself true to your inherited nature, to your mother's false, light instincts. You rushed into your sin, into shame--" "Hush!" Flower cried, indignantly, her face dyed red with shame. She stood upright, and holding to the arms of the chair to steady her trembling form, said, eagerly: "I am Laurie Meredith's wife!" "Ha! ha!" laughed Jewel, with scornful incredulity. "Ha! ha!" echoed Mrs. Fielding, and there was a sound in her voice that was terrible to hear--the tones of incipient madness. There was madness in her eyes, too, so horribly they glittered as she sprung toward Flower, and all in an instant buried her working white fingers in the girl's long tresses. "Daisy Forrest, I shall kill you!" she screamed, with an awful, blood-curdling laugh; and dragging her victim down upon her knees, she tried to clasp her fingers around the fair white throat of her hated rival's child, and strangle her life out.