“Your chances certainly do not appear good at present; but I will continue to do the best I can for your interests. But the game is in fate’s hands, and will be hard won, if won at all.” “If you could only find her and put her out of the way,” she muttered, darkly. “I will try,” he answered; and it was tacitly understood between them that the contest against Floy’s life and honor was to be waged more persistently than ever. Let her but be found again, and Otho swore that he would make it impossible for her to marry Beresford. Oh, it was cruel, shameful, wicked, this terrible warfare against a helpless orphan girl to whom life might otherwise have proved so bright and fair! It was a wonder that peaceful sleep could visit the pillows of the two arch-plotters, Otho and Maybelle. Yet the girl dreamed of a future wherein Floy should be swept from her path and Beresford won at last, while Otho--well, as for Otho, the future did not look so bright. He loved Floy, and the plot against her, though he never swerved from it, planted thorns in his own heart. So he took up the quest for the hapless little beauty, and when all inquiry failed in New York and Mount Vernon, he was obliged to consider himself baffled. “I wish I had the powers of an amateur detective,” he thought, longingly; but he did not dare to employ one. And he would have been startled if he had known that he was under the espionage of the best private detective in New York. For Mrs. Beresford’s clever employé in pursuing his search for Floy, had informed himself first of all as to whether the young girl had a lover. He found out that Otho Maury had paid her marked attention, and while he pursued his search for Floy he kept a careful eye on her lover. And his first suspicion that Otho might know the girl’s whereabouts was soon dissipated by finding out that Otho was as keenly on the alert as himself. So the mystery deepened. Neither lover nor detective could find one trace of bonny Floy after her flight from Bellevue that fateful twenty-first of May. The detective went down to Mount Vernon and spent a week. He found out everything about the girl, save and except that St. George Beresford had been her accepted lover. That affair had been so brief that none guessed it save Otho and Maybelle. Floyd Landon, the detective, intercepted Mrs. Banks in one of her visits to the cemetery, and in a casual way, introduced himself, hoping to find out something more. She was quite willing to talk on the beloved subject; but she could tell no more than the neighbors had told already--the story of Suicide Place, and the pretty child the kind carpenter had taken from her dead mother’s arms and brought to their humble cottage to be their own thereafter.