"To come to the point!" he suddenly exclaimed--"Will you obey me and attend this ball, or will you take the other alternative?" Cora's heart swelled; her eyes flashed; she longed to defy the despot, but she thought of her meek, patient, long-suffering grandmother, and answered coldly: "I will go to the ball, sir, since you wish it." "Very well. That will do. Now leave the room. I wish to read the morning papers." Cora went out to find her grandmother and to relieve the lady's anxiety; old Aaron Rockharrt threw himself back in his arm chair with grim satisfaction at having conquered Cora and set his iron heel upon her neck. Yes; he had conquered Cora through her love for her poor, timid, abused grandmother. But now Fate was to conquer him. But Fate had decided that Cora should not attend that ball, or any other place of amusement, for a long time. And he was just on the brink of discovering the impertinent interference of Fate in human affairs, and especially those of the Iron King. He took up a Washington paper--a government organ--and read, opening his eyes to their widest extent as he read the following head-lines: A MYSTERY CLEARED UP. _THE FATE OF GOVERNOR REGULAS ROTHSAY_. Killed by the Comanches on November 1st. A dispatch from Fort Security to the Indian Bureau, received this morning, announces another inroad of the Comanches upon the new settlement of Terrepeur, in which the inhabitants were massacred and their dwellings burned. Among the victims who perished in the flames in their own huts was Regulas Rothsay, late Governor-elect of ----, and at the time of his death a volunteer missionary to this treacherous and bloodthirsty tribe. Another man, under the circumstances, might have been unnerved by such sudden and awful news, and let fall the paper, but not the Iron King. He grasped it only with a firmer hand, and read it again with keener eyes. "What under the heavens took that man out there? Had he gone suddenly mad? That seems to be the only possible explanation of his conduct. To abandon his bride on the day of his marriage--to abandon his high official position as governor of this State on the day of his inauguration, and without giving any living creature a hint of his intention, to fly off at a tangent and go to the Indian country and become a missionary to those red devils, and be massacred for his pains--it was the work of a raving maniac. But what drove him mad? Surely it was not his high elevation that turned his head, for if it had been, his madness would never have taken this particular direction of flying from his honors. No! it is as I have always suspected. He heard, in some way, of the girl's English lover, and he, with his besotted devotion to her, was just the man to be morbidly, madly jealous, and to do some such idiotic thing as he has done, and get himself murdered and burned to ashes for his pains! Yes; and it serves him right!--it serves him--right!"