"Good evening, old lady! 'Pon my soul, you look quite romantic star-gazing here alone," he exclaimed gibingly. "So you're back, you devil!" she hissed. "What fiend's errand are you on now, I wonder?" "To ask you to congratulate me on my success in achieving the great ambition of my life, Meg." "I don't know what you mean, Farnham." "No, but I am here to tell you that the propitious fates have brought to me an hour of glorious triumph, and rewarded all my schemings with success. Come inside the house, and let me tell you the sequel of the story you heard one year ago to-night." She turned toward the cabin, the old miser following closely, and neither noticed that Jack Dineheart's trim fishing-boat had come into sight, and was riding into anchor close to shore. When the door had closed upon the wicked pair of plotters, the sailor rowed over to land in a tiny little boat, and sprang lightly up the beach toward his mother's cabin. "Poor old soul, I wonder if she's yet alive," he pondered. And, stepping lightly to the smoke-grimed old window of the cabin, he peered through with bated breath for a sight of old Meg. He recoiled with a stifled cry just as Nita had done a year ago that night, for the self-same sight met his startled eyes. Old Meg and Miser Farnham were seated by a table in earnest conversation. "Humph! hatching some new mischief, I suppose," muttered Jack, bending his ear to a convenient knot-hole in order to catch their words. The sea boomed on the shore, the moonlight silvered the waves, the wind sighed eerily round the old cabin, and the words that Jack Dineheart heard that hour paved the way for a fateful tragedy. "You say that Nita has come home to Gray Gables, yet how can that be?" cried Meg. "It was only yesterday that I was up there, and Mrs. Hill, the old housekeeper, was wringing her hands and crying because she had seen in a New York paper several days old that Nita had killed herself in a London hotel by taking poison." "It was true--and false," answered Farnham angrily. "I had a letter from Mrs. Courtney telling me all about it. She drank laudanum, and it threw her into a deep sleep. At first they thought she was dead, but a physician succeeded in rousing and restoring her to life, although she has been in a strange, dazed state ever since, and it is thought that she may never recover from the effects of the drug she used. But Mrs. Courtney telegraphed me this morning that they had arrived in New York from Europe, and would proceed immediately to Gray Gables." Old Meg listened with keen interest to every word, then exclaimed: "If Nita had committed suicide in the old, wretched days when she was my hard-worked slave I should not have wondered at it, but it puzzles me that she should attempt it now when she is rich and happy as old Farnham's ward." With a gulp of rage he answered: "I will tell you why she wished to die. She was married to a man she hated so much that she would die rather than live with him."