She shuddered as she read the telegrams which proved a catastrophe which she could not avert. "And Arthur Ferris--my husband in name--knew all! This is his work!" She roused herself to action and gave over the dead clay to kindly hands when, at midnight on the day of her father's death, she had received all the dispatches which told her of Randall Clayton's evasion. Kneeling by her father's body she vowed herself a priestess of Justice. "They may have killed him. I may be too late; but I will deal with my despoiled brother's memory as my only heritage. For he was innocent, and has been robbed of birthright, good name, and perhaps life itself." BOOK III. THE MESSAGE FROM AMOY. CHAPTER XI. THE GIRL BRIDE'S REBELLION. For a week after the receipt of the ominous telegram from Pasco, Arthur Ferris sat, a gloomy tyrant, in the offices of the Western Trading Company. There were dark circles around the young lawyer's eyes, and his restless mind gnawed upon itself in an intolerable agony. Left alone by Senator Dunham's departure, the open aversion of the company's officials had astounded him. Even Robert Wade, so cringing before the death of Worthington, had received his reinstatement in a sullen silence. "Do I understand that you wish me to be responsible for the daily conduct of the company's affairs?" gravely said Wade. "Then you must restore all the officials or I will not act! Every one knows, sir, that your power of attorney from the late Mr. Worthington became valueless at his death." Ferris, with fear and trembling, awaited the extraordinary meeting of the Board of Directors called to meet the exigencies of the demise of Worthington and the great robbery. With a heavy heart he resigned the following up of the missing Randall Clayton to the company's advisory attorneys. Day by day he had breathlessly watched every telegram brought in, every delivery of the mails. Neither letter nor dispatch from the girl wife broke into the gloom of these days. He dared not disobey her positive injunctions. He feared to leave New York City and go to Detroit to meet her, and only the meager results of private telegraphic inquiry, as well as the chattering journals, told him of the arrival of Miss Alice Worthington, now the greatest heiress of the Lake States, in her palatial Detroit home. Senator Dunham's easy-going counsels had been of no comfort. To the millionaire politician, the natural ascendancy of Ferris over the girl's future and fortune seemed "to close the incident." Secure in his "block of stock," he returned to the delights of Newport, where the Senatorial toga was duly flourished in the gayest circles. But, a crafty scoundrel, warned by his own uneasy conscience, Arthur Ferris took alarm at the "Social items" of the Detroit Free Press.