"You must lie still and rest, darling," Lawrence Campbell whispers, pouring a little more of the stimulant between her pale lips--paler now from exhaustion than they were when she lay sleeping in the coffin, and with a faint sigh of assent she closes her eyes and lies silent, while the sexton goes out on his kindly meant errand. The moments pass, Lawrence Campbell sits still with his head bowed moodily on his hand, his thoughts strangely blended, joy for his daughter's recovery, despairing grief for his wife's loss, and unutterable hate for Marcia Cleveland all mixed inextricably together. All that he has lost by that woman's perjury rushes bitterly over him. In the stillness, broken only by the crackle of the fresh coals upon the fire, and the monotonous ticking of the clock upon the mantel, he broods over his wrongs until they assume gigantic proportions. And Vera--so strangely rescued from the coffin and the grave--she is very silent also, but none the less is her brain active and her mind busy. One by one she is gathering up the links of memory. Her strange marriage, her mother's death, her terrible defeat in the triumph she had anticipated over the Clevelands--all come freshly over her memory, with that crowning hour in which wounded to the heart and filled with a deadly despair, she had crept away to die because she could not endure the humiliation and shame of the knowledge she had gained. "I remember it all now; I could not decide upon the right vial, and by chance I took the wrong one. It was the sleeping potion. How long have I been asleep, and how came I here?" Unclosing her languid eyes, she repeats the question aloud: "Father, how came I here?" He starts, nervously, at the unexpected question. "My dear, you must not ask questions," he answers. "At least--not yet." "But just this one, father. It keeps ringing itself in my head. I am filled with wonder. I drank a vial of what I imagined contained death, and lay down on my bed to die. But I only slept, and my dreams were wild. Then I awoke in this strange room, and saw you looking at me so kindly, and I knew you in my heart for my father. My wonder is so great that I cannot rest. Suspense is worse than knowledge. Only tell me how I came to be here?" He looks at the beautiful, eloquent lips and pleading eyes, looking so dark with the purple shadows around them, and the pale, pale face. "I must not tell her the truth," he said to himself. "She looks too slight and frail to bear the shock of hearing it. She need not ever know that she had been buried alive, and rescued out of the blackness of the grave. The horror of it would be enough to unhinge her reason." "The last that I remember," she continues, "I was lying on my bed at Mrs. Cleveland's, waiting for death to come. I awoke here in this strange place. How did it happen?"