This was impossible. He could not do it; he loved her too madly. He would go away, if she liked, and leave her to reign "queen of the isle." She should have everything which heart desired--everything save permission to leave the place. To this Gerelda was forced to submit. "If I were convinced that Hubert Varrick loved another, life would be all over for me," she moaned again and again. Meanwhile, as days and weeks rolled by, and no tidings reached Hubert Varrick of the bride who, he supposed, had deserted him at the very altar, his heart grew bitter against Gerelda. He plunged into his practice of law, with the wild hope that he might forget her. The only diversity that entered his life was the letters which he received from little Jessie Bain. Girl-like, she wrote to him every day. "I do wish you would adopt me, guardy," she wrote one day, "and bring me home; I am so tired of this place. The principal always calls upon me to look after all the little young fry in his school. Morning and night I have to hear their prayers and hunt the shoes and stockings that they throw at one another across the dormitory. Each one denies the throwing, and I slap every one of them right and left, to be sure to get the right one. I'm sick and tired of books. I wish I could come to you." Suddenly the letters ceased, and, to Varrick's consternation, a week passed without his hearing one word from little Jessie Bain, and he never knew until then, how deep a hold the girl had on the threads that were woven into his daily life. In his loneliness he turned to the letters, and read and reread them. It was like balm to his sore heart to find in them such outpourings of love and devotion. Was she ill? Perhaps some lover had crossed her path. The thought worried him. He was just on the point of telegraphing, when suddenly there was a rustling sound at the open French window, a swish of skirts behind him, and the next instant a pair of arms were thrown about his neck. "Now don't scold me, guardy--please don't! I am going to own up to the truth right here and now. I ran away. I couldn't help it, I got so tired of hooking young ones' dresses and hearing their prayers." With an assumption of dignity, Hubert Varrick unwound the girl's arms from about his neck. But somehow they had sent a strange thrill through his whole being, just such a thrill as he had experienced during the hour in which he had asked Gerelda to be his wife, and she had answered in the affirmative. He tried to hold her off at arm's-length, but she only clung to him the more, giving him a rapturous kiss of greeting. The story of little Jessie Bain had been the only one which Hubert Varrick had kept from his mother. It seemed amusing, he had told himself repeatedly, for a young man of five-and-twenty to be guardian, as it were, to a young girl of sixteen--that sweet, subtle, dangerous age "where childhood and womanhood meet." "Aren't you glad to see me, Mr. Varrick?" cried Jessie.