“Oh, Miss Nina, my darling, where are you?” cried the poor girl, beginning to sob with fear and excitement, and she ran to the dressing-table in her flurry and began to shake the perfume boxes aimlessly as if her missing mistress might, perchance, be hidden there. And so in a minute she came upon the note. “It is mine,” cried Talbot Strangemore, taking it from her hand with a swift, terrible throb of the heart. By this time several people had followed them into the room. They watched him curiously as he tore open the note. They never forgot the cry of anguish and despair that thrilled over his lips as he read it. “What is it?” cried Miss Drusilla. “What is it?” cried every one crowding around him, but he crushed it in his hand and turned upon them like some fierce, wounded creature at bay. “No one shall ever see, no one shall ever know,” he answered, with a ring of strange defiance in his voice, and lifting his arm, he thrust the crumpled note into the flame of the lamp, and held it aloft until it shriveled into ashes. The flames burned his hand, but not so deeply as the words had burned themselves into his heart. And then, strong man as he was, the horrors of this awful night overcame him. For a moment he staggered dizzily, then fell like a log to the floor and lay there for long minutes wrapped in merciful unconsciousness of his misery. “He’s dead--Mr. Strangemore’s dead, and, oh, where is my young mistress?” cried Kitty, wildly weeping and bewailing, her honest heart nearly broken with sorrow. But Miss Drusilla only looked grimmer and sourer than ever. “He’s not dead, but it might be better if he were,” she said. “I wish indeed he had died long ago, before he and his mother brought all this trouble on poor Nina Selwyn! Poor child, I expect she’s run away, but I know she never hurt that beautiful fiend in there! Dear girl, she would not have harmed a worm! She has run away from her own misery, that’s all. She’s innocent, poor pretty Nina, as innocent as a lamb!” “I’d stake my life on that!” sobbed Kitty, and Miss Drusilla suddenly felt a soft hand touch her arm, and Virgie Mason said, with streaming eyes, “I believe she’s innocent, too--as innocent as an angel!” CHAPTER XVIII. RESCUED. “Fate is above us all,” has been aptly written by the poet. Our hapless young heroine found it true in her own case. It was not destined that the spark of her life should go out in the black waters into which she had hurled herself in a very desperation of despair. In her excitement she had not observed that Marmaduke Cameron’s yacht, the Sea Bird, lay at anchor near the spot where she had sprung into the water. But it was there, and through the gloom and darkness a pair of horrified eyes had witnessed from the deck her desperate plunge into the sea.