"By helping the greatest scoundrel that ever escaped the gallows to keep prisoner an unoffending girl! Is that how you try to turn an honest penny, Susan Sharpe?" Susan Sharpe, shrinking, as well as she might, from the fiery flashing of two angry blue eyes, murmured an inaudible something, and busied herself among the dishes. "Listen to me, woman," cried Mollie, pushing back her wild, loose hair, "and pity me, if you have a woman's heart. This man--this Doctor Oleander--led me into a trap, inveigled me from home, brought me here, and keeps me here a prisoner. To further his own base ends he gives out that I am insane. My friends are in the greatest distress about me, and I am almost frantic by being kept here. Help me to escape--my friends in Now York are rich and powerful--help me, Susan Sharpe, and you will never know want more!" Mrs. Susan Sharpe had keen ears. Even in the midst of this excited address she had heard a stealthy footstep on the creaking stairs--a footstep that had paused just outside the door. She took her cue, and made no sign. "I'm very sorry, miss," slightly raising her voice--"very sorry for you, indeed. What you say may be all very true, but it makes no difference to me. My duty's plain enough. I'm paid for it, I've promised to do it, and I'll do it." "And that is--" "To wait upon you. I'll be your faithful attendant while I'm here; but to help you to escape I can't. Doctor Oleander tells me you're insane; you tell me yourself you're not insane. I suppose you ought to know best; but I've been in lunatic asylums before now, and I never yet knew one of 'em to admit there was anything the matter with 'em." And with this cruel speech, Mrs. Susan Sharpe, keeping her eyes anywhere but upon the young lady's face, lifted the tray and turned to go. "Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" she said, pausing at the door. "Is there anything nice you would like for supper?" But Mollie did not reply. Utterly broken down by fasting, and imprisonment, and solitude, she had flung herself passionately on the floor, and burst out into a wild storm of hysterical weeping. "I'm very sorry for you, Miss Dane," the nurse said for the benefit of the eavesdropper without; "but my duty's my duty, and I must do it. I'll fetch you up your supper presently--a cup of tea will cure the 'stericks." She opened the door. Mrs. Oleander, at the head of the staircase, was making a great show of having just come up. "They'll be the death of me yet--those stairs!" she panted. "I often tell my son I'm not fitted to mount up and down a dozen times a day, now in my old age; but, la! what do young men care?" "Very true, ma'am," replied the imperturbable nurse to this somewhat obscure speech. "And how's your patient?" continued the old lady. "Very bad, ma'am--'stericky and wild-like. I left her crying, poor soul!" "Crying! For what?"