“I will stay with you a little while, Kitty, dear, and then you must let me go. But tell me something about them all--about Aunt Drusilla, and--yourself--and--and”--she broke down, crimson with shame and pain, angry with herself because in her secret heart she was longing for tidings of Talbot Strangemore. “I love him still! cruel, neglectful, and unkind as he has been to me, I cannot tear his image from my heart!” she moaned within herself. The maid was quick to interpret what she meant by her broken-off speech. “About Mr. Strangemore,” she said, “Oh, my dear, he went back to Europe after he saw that piece in the paper about your taking the laudanum. He thought you were dead--we all thought so--and he said he could not bear to stay at Selwyn Heights after that.” “But--but”--Nina began, and broke off the sentence--indeed it was interrupted by a startling occurrence. The door had suddenly opened wide and a slight figure all in white, stood upon the threshold gazing in at them. When it saw the light upon the table, and the startled women, it suddenly turned around and fled swiftly and silently down the gloomy hall. “Great heaven, that dreadful woman, she is here yet,” Nina exclaimed, but her words were drowned by a succession of piercing shrieks from Kitty that brought every inmate of the great house rushing to the scene. CHAPTER XXIX. NINA LEARNS THE TRUTH. Miss Drusilla, the maid-servants, the boy-of-all-work, all in various disheveled stages of attire that but for the warmth of the night might have been productive of colds and catarrhs, appeared precipitately in the room, and when they saw the young mistress of Selwyn Heights they thought they understood the meaning of Kitty’s outcry. “It is the ghost, the ghost! Kitty said she would sleep in the room and catch it,” cried the maids, and one or two, more fearful than the rest, ran out into the hall again, unable to endure the proximity of a visitant from the other world. But Miss Drusilla Strangemore being made of sterner stuff than those weak-minded ones, walked straight up to her niece and laid her hand on her shoulder. “So it is really you, Nina,” she said, with a touch of tenderness in her stern, old voice, “Oh, my dear, how glad I am that you have come home at last. We have grieved for you so much, for we believed you dead.” And she put her arms around the trembling girl and shed some furtive tears of joy on the top of the golden head. “I would have been dead if I had had my way, Aunt Drusilla,” the girl answered, bitterly, but she returned the caresses of the old lady, and felt as she had done with Kitty that it was pleasant to be with her again, for although Miss Drusilla had a hard, stern nature, she had always been kind to the orphan girl confided to her care.