It seemed like the cruelest irony of fate that she, Love Ellsworth's wife, the real mistress of Ellsworth, should be driven in scorn from its gates, penniless, hopeless, and without a friend, her lips sealed to the truth of her wifehood, lest by speaking she should consign her beloved husband to a more cruel doom than he was already enduring. Mrs. Ellsworth had carried things with a high hand; but she had been reasonably sure of her position, having investigated Love's story of a secret marriage, and satisfied herself that it would be well-nigh impossible to prove it. Owing to Love's desire for secrecy, there was no record of the license on the books of the clerk of county court who had issued it. The clerk himself, a feeble, aged man, had died suddenly two months ago--the day previous to Lovelace Ellsworth's birthday. The minister of the little church where the ceremony had been performed had also died a month previous of a malignant fever contracted in visiting a squalid settlement of shiftless sand diggers. A terrible fatality seemed to attend poor Dainty; for in all probability these two dead men were the only persons who held the secret of her marriage, and dead men tell no tales. As the worse than widowed bride clung to the gate, taking that farewell look at her husband's window, she suddenly remembered that she had one true though humble friend in the neighborhood--poor old black mammy. "I will go to her cabin and stay to-night, and to-morrow I must try to go home to mamma," she sighed, turning toward the dark patch of woods where the lonely negro cabin stood, and followed by relentless fate in the shape of her pitiless rivals, Olive and Ela. "She is going to old Virginia's cabin, but she does not know that the negroes have all moved away to the station, and that she will find it deserted," whispered Ela. "However, she can shelter herself there for the night, though it will be very cold without a fire." "Some one ought to build one to keep her warm," Olive returned, with a significance that was not lost on her keen-witted cousin. CHAPTER XXX. A TERRIBLE DEED. John Franklin's manly blood had boiled with resentment at seeing poor Dainty driven away in disgrace from the home of which she was virtually the mistress, for he believed every word of the story she had told Mrs. Ellsworth. It made his kind heart ache to realize so fully the sad mental plight of his young master, who could sit by in apathy, and suffer such a cruel wrong to be done to his unfortunate young wife. He gloried in the pride that had made her fling back in the woman's face the offered pittance from her cruel persecutor. "Yet, poor soul, she looked shabby and penniless. Perhaps she had not the money to pay her fare to Richmond. I wonder if the unfortunate young lady would accept a loan from her husband's servant?" he thought, anxiously.