Henry stooped for the letter, and the act recalled her to herself. She thanked him for the service he had done her; told him of her intended departure; gave him some last instructions, and dismissed him with a kind good-by. [Illustration: "I took the letter before I locked the desk."--page 127.] "It is time to act," she muttered. "Good heavens! the audacity of that man and woman! She is married to my step-father, if that letter does not lie; has married him for money, and is baffled there. She hoped to become _his widow_, aha! The plot thickens, indeed! Goodness! what a household! That bad old man, the still viler woman, dangerous Lucian Davlin, and that funny, youthful, cross, 'conceited spinster,' Ellen Arthur, who has a lover, and his name is--heaven save us--Percy! That name _will_ mix itself up with my fate web, and why? Percy beloved of Claire; Percy who brought Philip Girard to his doom; Percy the lover of a rich old maid, are ye one and the same? Percy! Percy! Percy! I must cultivate the Percys at any cost." She turned and entered the house, her head bent, thinking, thinking, thinking. CHAPTER XII. A MESSAGE FROM THE DEAD. Less than a week after the events last related, and a family group surrounds the lunch table in the newly furnished morning room of Oakley. The fair and fascinating Mrs. Torrance had accomplished the purpose for which she came to Bellair. Truly had she said, "There is no fool like an old fool;" for John Arthur had been an easy victim. He had lost no time with his wooing, and so, a little less than two months from the day the fair widow came to Bellair, saw her mistress of John Arthur's household. A bridal tour was not to her taste, much to the delight of the bridegroom. So they set about refitting some of the fine old rooms of the mansion, Cora having declared that they were too gloomy to be inhabitable. As it was to her interest to keep up the deception of frank affection, she had been, during the two months of their honey-moon, a model wife. But the discovery that John Arthur could leave her nothing save his blessing, had now been made, and Cora, who was already weary of her gray-headed dupe, had been for a few days past less careful in her dissembling. For this reason John Arthur now sat with a moody brow, and watched her smile upon her brother with a feeling of jealous wrath. The bride had thrown off her badge of mourning, and was very glad to bloom out once more in azure and white and rose--hues which her soul loved. Opposite sat Miss Arthur, her sallowness carefully enameled over, her head adorned with an astonishing array of false braids and curls and frizzes, jetty in hue to match her eyes, which, so Cora informed Lucian in private, were "awfully beady." The lady was perusing a paper, which she suddenly threw down, and said languidly, while she stirred her chocolate carefully. "Should not this be the day on which my new maid arrives?"