"You have spoken to him, and he does not know you--you, the dearest creature on earth to him, Miss Chase! Neither does he recognize any one else, nor remember anything. There is a bullet in his head that the doctors can not extricate, and it has destroyed his mental faculties completely. His health is good, but he has forgotten the past, and lost even the power of speech. He will never be anything, they say, but a harmless idiot." She cried out with a terrible anger that it was not true, that she could not believe it; he was trying to deceive her and break her heart. He was usually a quiet, stolid man, but the tears came to his eyes as she knelt on the floor and wound her arms about Love in passionate embraces, and, with tears that might have moved a heart made of stone, called on him to pity her and speak to her, his love, his Dainty, his true wife, whose heart was breaking for one tender word from his dear lips! CHAPTER XXIX. AS WE KISS THE DEAD. Alas! nor words, nor tears, nor embraces, nor reproaches could move Love Ellsworth from his statue-like repose. He suffered Dainty's caresses passively, but he did not return them, and his large, beautiful dark eyes dwelt on her face with the gentle calm of an infant whose intellect is not yet awakened. "You see how it is, Miss Chase, and God knows how sorry I am to see my dear master so," Franklin said, sorrowfully, as she desisted at last, and gazed in silent anguish at the mental wreck in the chair. A new thought came to her, and she exclaimed: "Where is my mother?" "She returned to Richmond almost a month ago, Miss Chase." "Why did she not remain and nurse poor Love?" she groaned. Franklin hesitated a moment, then returned in a respectful undertone: "I can not say for a certainty, miss, but it is whispered among the servants that Mrs. Ellsworth sent her away because the young ladies wished it." "The young ladies?" inquiringly. "Miss Peyton and Miss Craye, your cousins. Mrs. Ellsworth has adopted them as her joint heiresses since she came into the fortune that my master lost by his failure to marry on his twenty-sixth birthday." He gave a great start of surprise when the lovely, sad-eyed girl answered quickly: "He did not lose it, for in the fear of some such treachery as afterward really happened, your master persuaded me to consent to a secret marriage in the middle of July, so that I have really been his wife going on three months." "It is false!" cried an angry voice; and there in the door-way towered the tall form of Mrs. Ellsworth, pale to the very lips, but with an ominous flash in her dark eyes. She had recovered from the faintness that had seized her at first sight of the supposed ghost, on being assured by a servant that she had seen Miss Chase in the flesh entering the room of Mr. Ellsworth. As soon as she could command her shaken nerves, she followed Dainty just in time to hear her avowal of her marriage to Love in July.