"If you could go back to the forks of the road, Back the long miles you have carried the load; Back to the place where you had to decide By this way or that all your life to abide; Back of the sorrow and back of the care, Back to the place where the future was fair-- If you were there now, a decision to make, Oh! pilgrim of sorrow, which road would you take?" It would scarcely be believed that a young girl could be drugged and carried from her own room at midnight by a scoundrel, even in the great, wicked city of Chicago. But such had been the fate of our pretty Geraldine, although only by the connivance of the governess had Standish been able to accomplish the daring abduction. Having quieted her uneasy scruples by swearing that he meant to marry the girl--which, indeed, he was most anxious to do--Standish unfolded his nefarious plot, and by his threatenings forced her to consent to aid him. He told her that the girl had flirted most outrageously with him once, then thrown him over for another, and he was determined to get even with the little jilt by making her his wife. He swore that nothing should turn him from his purpose of revenge, and unless Miss Erroll aided him in this he would send Mrs. Fitzgerald a letter on the following day, acquainting her with the past history of her handsome governess. It was absolutely fiendish, his threat, but she doubted not that he would keep his word; so, promising all he asked, she hurried away from him, eager to escape the nipping winter blasts and the flecks of snow that kissed her cheeks with icy lips, the forerunner of a snow-storm that wrapped the earth in a snowy mantle long before the dawn. When the young ladies returned from the theatre, Miss Erroll was bending over her desk, where she had been busy for hours, counterfeiting Geraldine's handwriting from a bit of manuscript she had stolen from her room. She was an adept at this work, and succeeded in her task so well that the note she pinned on Geraldine's pillow somewhat later, was so cleverly done it might have deceived an expert. When Geraldine went into her own room that night she found Miss Erroll waiting for her, instead of the neat mulatto girl her mother had employed for her exclusive service. "Martha was called home by the illness of her mother, and begged me to help you if she did not return in time," she explained, smilingly. The truth was that Miss Erroll had given the girl some drugged wine that sent her into such a heavy sleep that she was enabled to steal into her place. Geraldine protested that she could do without assistance, but Miss Erroll insisted on remaining; so at last she was hurried into bed, and then the woman said, solicitously: "Now a sip of this spiced wine the maid told me to keep warm for you, to prevent a cold after being out such an inclement evening."