"Oh, I can tell you their value, very easily, though I might be puzzled to direct you as to the other part of your anxiety!" said the doctor, with a scarcely-suppressed chuckle at the bottom of his sneer. "They are the scrip for four thousand shares in the capital stock of the Dunderhaven Coal and Mining Company, in which, with your consent, I invested the forty thousand dollars left you by your father; and their present worth is not much, as the company unfortunately failed about six months ago, paying a dividend of five-sixteenths of a cent on the dollar. The amount would be--I remember calculating it up at the time of the failure--just one hundred and twenty-five dollars." "And that is all the money that I have in the world!" gasped the young girl, tottering towards a chair. "Every penny, if you leave my house!" answered the model guardian. "If you remain in it, as I wish, and forget all the nonsense that priests and old women have dinned into your ears, about marriage,--your fortune is just as much as my own, for you shall find that there is nothing which I can afford to purchase for myself, that I will not just as freely purchase for you!" Eleanor Hill said not a word in reply. She had sunk into a chair and covered her face with both her hands, through the delicate fingers of which streamed the bright tears, while her whole frame was shaken and racked by the violence of her mental torture. How utterly and completely desolate she was at that moment! Refused the justice of marriage by the man for whom she had perilled all, and bidden no longer even to hope for that justice--then coldly informed that if she left the house of her betrayer she went away to beggary, as all the fortune left her by her father had been squandered by imprudence or dishonesty,--what additional blow could fall upon her, and what other and heavier bolt could there yet be stored for her in the clouds of wrath? CHAPTER VIII. WHAT FOLLOWED THE REVELATION OF BETRAYAL--A GLEAM OF HOPE FOR ELEANOR HILL--A RELATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, A PROJECTED VOYAGE, AND A DISAPPOINTMENT--ONE MORE LETTER--THE BROKEN THREAD RESUMED--CARLTON BRAND'S FAREWELL, AND A SUDDEN ELOPEMENT.