"Oh, Uncle Ben, I ought not to have told you this distressing story!" she exclaimed, remorsefully. "I am so glad to think that I never told papa the story I had from the dying housekeeper. It would have been so cruel for him to know that the woman he had loved and trusted had plotted away the life of my mother." "Hush, child! you drive me mad! This is too cruel!" groaned the old man. He leaned his gray head forward on the seat, and sobs, all the fiercer for being suppressed, shook his slight frame. Kathleen wept, too, and altogether it was a sorrowful journey they had to the home from which Vincent Carew had carried Zaidee, his fair young bride, to meet so dark a fate. They talked but little, for a heavy cloud of trouble hung over their spirits and shadowed the future, and the young girl at length became conscious of a strange dread of arriving at the end of the journey so long ardently desired. She ascribed it to sudden timidity at meeting strangers. She did not dream it was a warning presentiment. She was glad that the cars went straight through Lincoln Station without changing. She could not bear to be reminded of that terrible night when the talon-like fingers of her unknown assailant had closed stranglingly about her white throat, and of all the sorrows that had followed after. The girl, so young and tender, shuddered as with an ague chill, wondering how she had lived through it all. "And poor Daisy Lynn! poor Daisy Lynn! what ever became of that unhappy girl?" she wondered, pitifully, and her thoughts wandered to the girl's sad love story. "How sorrowful it is to go mad for love!" she sighed. "And yet, how sad it is to lose one's love and remain sane and conscious in the midst of all the cruel pain. Oh, God! am I fated to lose Ralph, my own true lover? How shall I bear to give my hand to another man while I love Ralph so dearly?" And when the train ran into the station at Richmond she was weeping bitter, burning tears for her love, Ralph, from whom she was so cruelly parted. "Oh, the pity of it that I did not believe in him that day that I sent him away from me in scorn, when he was already so sorrowful! Oh, Ralph, my darling! I did not think then that I should ever be suing for your forgiveness for my cruel words; but now--now I could fall at your feet for pity and pardon!" sobbed the unhappy young girl; and there came to her a memory of some verses she had read in the poems of Mittie Point Davis--sweet, sad verses from a loving heart: "I did not think that I should say it first, That summer evening when we quarreled so About some trifle you had magnified-- Men are so harsh, you know. I said some bitter words of hate and scorn; My pride was up, my temper too, indeed-- But now I know that I perhaps was wrong, And, dearest, I am brave enough to plead: Forgive me!