The glancing lights of the river boats, the lamps at the landing and along the shores looked strangely unreal to Lally’s dazed eyes. She crouched in a corner of the seat and peered over the parapet and tried to think, but her brain seemed paralyzed. The only thought that came to her was that she was no wife, that Rufus had abandoned and disowned her, and that he was to marry another. People crossed the bridge in laughing groups as the Strand theatres and concert-halls closed, but no one paid heed to, even if they saw, the slender, crouching figure with its wild, fearing eyes. Sometimes, for many minutes together, Lally was alone upon that portion of the bridge--alone with her desperate soul and her terrible temptation to end her sorrows in one fatal plunge. She arose in one of these intervals to her feet upon the bench and leaned over the parapet, a prayer upon her lips that Heaven would forgive the deed she meditated. And, as she stood poised for the leap into eternity, there came back to her, though years had passed since she heard it, the voice of her mother, as she had once listened to it, denouncing the self-murderer as one who destroys his soul as well as his body. The remembrance of the words, and the thought of her mother, caused her to drop again into the corner of her bench sobbing, and weeping a storm of tears that saved her reason. The wild outburst of her anguish had been succeeded by a strange dullness and apathy, when a woman--a mere girl--“bonnetless, and her hair flying,”--as the Blacks had read in the paper--came running upon the bridge with moans upon her lips. Lally was as pure and innocent as a little child, yet she knew at a glance that this poor creature belonged to that class which is often termed “unfortunate”--as Heaven knows they are indeed, in every sense of the sad word. This girl came up to the very niche where Lally was hidden, and sprang upon the bench. She gave one wild look over her shoulder, at the officer who pursued her, and then, with the name of some man upon her lips, tossed up her arms, and sprang over the parapet--into eternity! Lally uttered a cry of horror. “It might have been me!” was her first thought, and trembling and terrified, she looked over at the whirling figure as it struck heavily upon the passing boat. And in the same instant Lally’s handkerchief, upon which her name was marked, and which she had held in her hand, dropped over the parapet upon the body of the woman. That accident it was that changed poor Lally’s destiny. For the poor suicide was she of whose death Rufus Black read in the paper of the following morning, and Lally’s handkerchief found upon the water beside the dead girl gave the impression that the suicide was Lally Bird. The presence of Lally upon the bridge escaped the notice of the officer, who turned and ran along the bridge to the end, and hurried down to the pier, whither the rescued body of the suicide was being carried.