He gained the door, sprang into the street at one bound, and looked about him with straining eyes. The drug store stood on the corner of two streets that intersected each other; he looked hastily up one street and then the other, but vainly. Even in that moment of time the girl had disappeared from his sight like a spirit. Not a person was to be seen, and the hard, white snow freezing sleetily upon the pavements, and shining like diamonds under the light of the flaring gaslamps, held no impression of the light feet that had sped over them so swiftly, and borne her beyond his ken. My readers, let us turn back a few pages in the tragic life-history of that unhappy creature, and read the story of those heavy sorrows that had driven the young and beautiful girl recklessly and wickedly forward upon the terrible shoals of self-destruction. CHAPTER II. WAITING AND HOPING. “‘If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day, O what a day to-day would be! But now he’s away, miles and miles away From me across the sea. “‘O little bird, flying, flying, flying, To your nest in the warm west, Tell him as you pass that I am dying, As you pass home to your nest.’” A cloudy gray sky, a chill gray sea, a stretch of sandy beach against a back-ground of rugged hills covered with trees, through whose leafless branches the March wind was eerily moaning. In all the grey monotony there was no touch of color or brightness, save the figure of a girl in a scarlet merino dress and turban, standing on the shell-strewn shore gazing seaward at a noble steamer bounding over the waves toward the landing that was hidden from sight by a turn in the shore, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. The girl had come down from the great red brick mansion that crowned a tall bluff, perhaps half a mile away, and she had no companion save the great shaggy, black Newfoundland that crouched at her feet, gazing up at her with mute, adoring eyes of almost human intelligence, as she chanted low and softly to herself: “‘If he would come to-day, to-day, to-day, O what a day to-day would be! But now he’s away, miles and miles away From me across the sea.’” Then she looked down with a laugh that was half sad, into the big brown eyes of her canine friend. “Ah, Lion, old fellow, what a silly pair we are, coming out in this wild weather watching for a ship that never comes in,” she said. “Every day for years we have come down to the wharf to wait for one who never comes. Will it always be thus, I wonder? Shall I go on waiting and hoping and loving till my hair turns gray, and will he never come? Half unconsciously she hummed over another verse of her song: “‘In this weary world it is so cold, so cold, While I sit here all alone; I would not like to wait and to grow old, But just to be dead and gone.’”