“Oh, God, this pain at my heart! That poor girl, she was so fatally like my lost daughter, my stolen child, that I could scarcely refrain from clasping her in my arms! Oh, if it should be my lost one! But, no, she said that her mother was dead! Oh, why am I idling here? I must telephone for a physician to be on hand when she is brought back. Perhaps her sweet young life may be saved, and I will make it my care henceforth for the sake of her haunting likeness to my lost darling!” * * * * * Poor Jessie had only carried out her intention on coming to see Laurier, for life held so little charm for the unfortunate girl now that all who loved her were dead that in desperation she had resolved to end it all by suicide, that last resort of the wretched. In the room she occupied at Madame Barto’s was a case of medicine, and from it she had selected the tiny vial labeled “Poison,” and filled with a dark liquid. In her agony of shame it was worse to her than if Laurier had, indeed, been dead. The dark unknown was welcome to her as the terrible present. Penniless, friendless, with no one to turn to, she yet dared not go back to Madame Barto, fearing alike her wrath at her escape, and the persecutions of her hated nephew. Crushed beneath the burden of unendurable despair, she drained the vial, and fled out into the night and the storm to die. The black night, inhospitable as the hearts she had left, greeted her with storm and fury, driving her on before a furious gale that took away her breath and tossed her to and fro, at last throwing her down heavily, and striking her head against the curbing, so that in a minute she became unconscious, and lay still at the mercy of the elements. The icy wind shrieked above her, the snow fell in thick, white sheets and wrapped her in a shroud of royal ermine, and thus she lay silent and moveless for about a quarter of an hour before she was found by the man Mrs. Dalrymple had sent to seek and bring her back. She had barely gone half a square from the mansion, but in the stormy gloom it was hard to find any one, and he was about to give up the quest in despair of success when his foot stumbled against a soft body under the snow. With a startled cry he stooped down and dragged her up in his arms, bearing her to a little distance, where a light gleamed through a window. By its aid he saw that it was she whom he sought. “But, poor little girl, she seems as dead as a door-nail! Howsomever, I’ll carry her back to my mistress, dead or alive!” he muttered, struggling on with his inert burden against the raging storm till he gained the shelter of the mansion. Mrs. Dalrymple was waiting in the wildest anxiety, the physician having already arrived, and been told the meager story that a poor young girl had attempted suicide and rushed out into the storm to die.