"Leslie Dane has killed him!" echoed her mother, wildly. "It is false, woman! How dare you accuse him of such a deed?" Bonnibel cried out fiercely, wild with grief and horror; then suddenly she looked at the half-dazed men-servants standing around their master helplessly. "Idiots!" she cried, "why do you stand here idle? Why does not some one bring a doctor? Perhaps he is not dead yet--he may be revived." They brought a physician at her bidding, but when he came his services were needed for her, not for the pale corpse down stairs that would nevermore want the physician's potent art. They had taken her by force to her room, where she was wildly walking the floor, wringing her hands and raving over her loss. "You are dead, Uncle Francis," she cried, passionately; "you will never speak to me again. And I had left you in anger. We never quarreled before--never! And without a good-bye kiss, without a forgiving word, you are gone from me into the darkness of death! They have killed you, my dear one!--who could have been so cruel?--and you will never know how I loved you, and that I forgave you for your cruelty so soon, or that I wished to be reconciled. Oh, God! Oh, God!" She told her story frankly to the good old doctor when he came and questioned her. She and her uncle had quarreled because he had denied her a darling wish. She had rushed out of the house in a fit of anger, and moped about the seashore until late into the night. Then she had returned, and seeing him sitting there on the piazza she had felt her anger melting into tenderness, and stolen up to give him the kiss of reconciliation, but found him cold and dead. She told the same story when the inquest was held next day, blushing crimson when they asked her what she and her uncle had quarreled over. "It was a purely personal matter," she answered, hesitatingly. "Is it necessary to reveal it?" They told her it was necessary. "He refused to sanction my engagement to my lover, and drove him away from the house with cruel, insulting words," she answered briefly through her tears and blushes. "And you were very angry with your uncle?" "Yes; for a little while," she answered frankly; "but when I came back to the house I was ready to forgive him and be friends with him again. He had never been unkind to me before, but indulged me in every wish, and petted me as my own father might have done had he lived. I was almost wild at first with surprise and anger at the first denial I had ever received from him; but I soon overcame my indignant feelings, and when I came back to the house I loved him as fondly as ever." She left the room immediately after giving in her evidence, overcome with grief and emotion, and going to her room, threw herself down upon the bed, from which she did not rise again for many weeks. Grief and excitement precipitated her into a brain fever, and for many days life and death fought persistently over their unhappy victim.