After that day he watched Oswald Ferris furtively but closely. He was determined that he would ferret out the secret the man had hid so cleverly, leaving a lovely, innocent, unhappy girl to bear the brunt of his sin. “The coward, the villain,” he said to himself many times, and he was half tempted to take the wretch by the throat and throttle him until he confessed the truth. But calmer thoughts prevailed. He knew that it was necessary to hide the suspicions he had once imprudently uttered, or Ferris would fly with his guilty secret to the uttermost ends of the earth. “I must bide my time. I must watch and wait even though my little Nina is calling me to join her in the other world,” he thought, and no prescience came to him that Nina still dwelt upon this lower earth, and that by one of the strange and wondrous operations of the mind a miracle had been accomplished--that Nina, kneeling on the hard floor of her cruel prison cell, her pride, her resentment, her coldness all beaten down by her unutterable woe, had sent her soul’s cry for him ringing across leagues of sea and land that divided them, ringing on, and on, and on, until it reached his heart. CHAPTER XXXIV. THE PRISON. Innocently and ignorantly Nina had walked into a terrible trap on the night when she re-entered her home at Selwyn Heights. Before the day dawned information of her return was lodged with the authorities. Her arrest followed quickly, just as she was about to make her escape. Her youth, her beauty, her wealth were all powerless to save her now. The yawning doors of a prison received her within their gloomy embrace, she who had been cradled among the roses and lillies of life now became the inmate of a prison cell. It was hard, it was bitter, it was cruel, but she had no redress. Shivering, trembling, dazed with fear and terror, she was led away like a lamb to the sacrifice. Her friends were half-mad with grief and dread. Upon the dastardly wretch who had betrayed her presence at Selwyn Heights, Miss Drusilla Strangemore called down the deepest vengeance of heaven. But the identity of the traitor was wrapped in impenetrable mystery. She called around her the whole small staff of servants at Selwyn Heights, and after delivering a scathing exordium that she hoped would scorch the conscience of the guilty party, she called upon each one individually to confess the truth. If the occasion had not been so solemn the scene would have been ludicrous, so fierce and animated were Miss Strangemore’s gestures, and so vehement her injunctions that the truth and nothing but the truth be told. But one after another, solemnly, indignantly, even with tears in their eyes, the little group protested innocence of the alleged fault, and swore anew unswerving love and fidelity to their young and hapless mistress. The old maid was in despair at the result of her inquiries.