While the events we have narrated were transpiring at Millbank, the New York train bound for Albany had stopped one summer afternoon at a little station on the river, and then sped on its way, leaving a track of smoke and dust behind it. From the platform of the depot a young girl watched the cars till they passed out of sight, and then, with something like a sigh, entered the carriage waiting for her. Nobody had come to meet her but the driver, who touched his hat respectfully, and then busied himself with the baggage. The girl did not ask him any questions. She only looked up into his face with a wistful, questioning gaze, which he seemed to understand; for he shook his head sadly, and said, “Bad again, and gone.” Then an expression of deep sorrow flitted over the girl’s face, and her eyes filled with tears as she stepped into the carriage. The road led several miles back from the river and up one winding hill after another, so that the twilight shadows were fading, and the night was shutting in the beautiful mountain scenery, ere the carriage passed through a broad, handsome park to the side entrance of a massive brick building, where it stopped, and the young girl sprang out, and ran hastily up the steps into the hall. There was no one there to meet her. Nothing but silence and loneliness, and the moonlight, which fell across the floor, and made the young girl shiver as she went on to the end of the hall, where a door opened suddenly, and a slight, straight woman appeared with iron-grey puffs around her forehead, diamonds in her ears, diamonds on her soft white hands, and diamonds fastening the lace ruffle, which finished the neck of her black-satin dress. She was a proud-looking woman, with a stern, haughty face, which relaxed into something like a smile when she saw the young girl, who sprang forward with a cry, which might perhaps have been construed into a cry of joy, if the words which followed had been different. “O, auntie,” she said, taking the hand offered her, and putting up her lips for the kiss so gravely given—“O, auntie, _why_ did father send for me to come home from the only place where I was ever happy?” “I don’t know. Your father’s ways are ways of mystery to me,” the lady said; and then, as if touched with something like pity for the desolate creature who had been brought from “the only place where she was ever happy,” to this home where she could not be very happy, the lady drew her to a couch, and untied the blue ribbons of the hat, and unbuttoned the gray sack, doing it all with a kind of caressing tenderness which showed how dear the young girl was to her. “But did he give you no reason, auntie? What did he say when he told you I was coming?” the girl asked vehemently, and the lady replied: “He was away from Beechwood several days, travelling in New England, and when he came back he told me he had left orders for you to come home at once. I thought, from what he said, that he saw you in New Haven.”