Mrs. Varrick reached out her hand to Jessie, and the next moment they were sobbing wildly in each other's arms. Little by little the girl's noble spirit in all its grandeur gained the ascendency. Slowly she turned to the housekeeper, who was sobbing over the fact that there was no one to take care of Hubert's wife, until a trained nurse the doctor had expected should arrive. "She shall be _my_ care," said Jessie, determinedly. "I will go to her at once; lead the way, please." Who shall picture the dismay of Jessie when she looked upon the face of the woman who had come between her and the man she was to have wedded that day and found that it was the very creature whom she herself had sheltered--the girl whom she had known as Margaret Moore? The doctor was greatly moved at the heroic stand Jessie Bain proposed to take in nursing her rival back to health and strength. "Not one woman in a thousand would do it," he declared. "May Heaven bless you for it! Besides," he added in a low, grave voice, "you could serve poor Hubert Varrick in no better way than by restoring her. If she dies it will go hard indeed with young Varrick." Jessie realized this but too well, and bent all her energies to nurse her back to health and strength, though what she suffered no one in this world could tell. If Margaret recovered, she knew that she would go away with Hubert. He might not love her, but he would be obliged to live his whole life out with her. If she died, he would hang for it. Better that he should live, even with the other one, than die. Her heart went out to Hubert Varrick in the bitterest of sorrow. She realized what he must be suffering. She would have flown to him on the wings of love, but she dared not. She wrote a letter to him for his mother, at her dictation, adding a little tear-blotted postscript of her own, making no mention of her own great love and the sorrow that had darkened her young life. In that letter she urged him to keep up brave spirits; that everything was being done for Gerelda, his wife, that could be done; that she was sitting up night and day nursing her. When Hubert Varrick received that tear-stained missive, in the loneliness of his desolate cell he bowed his head and wept like a child, crying out to Heaven that he was surely the most wretched man on God's earth. He tried to think out all the horrors of that bitter midnight tragedy, which seemed more like a dream to him than a reality. He could not understand how Gerelda came by that wound, unless, through her terrible rage, she had attempted to take her life by her own hand; and through the same intense rage, strong even in death, wanted to persecute him even after she had known that her moments were numbered. As for Gerelda, her life hung by the slenderest of threads for many days after, and during these anxious hours no one could induce Jessie Bain to leave her bedside. But at last the hour came when the doctors pronounced Gerelda out of danger.