Moved by a sudden impulse, she slipped from the bed, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went over to the window. She peered down through a crevice in the curtain at the wonderful garden whose blooming beauties had lured her so innocently to her fate. Oh, how changed was the scene as she gazed upon it now! The roses all were dead, the leaves were blown from the trees, and lay in sodden drifts across the path. Some late autumn flowers, chrysanthemums, asters, and others of their kind, were breaking into lavish bloom in their neglected beds, but the rain and storm had beaten them prostrate to the ground, with broken stalks, and faces prostrate on the earth. All was dreariness and desolation, and the gray stone towers of grim Delaney House seemed to frown more darkly than ever now that she knew what influence potent for evil pervaded its gloomy interior. She gazed wistfully at it through the fine impalpable mist of rain that obscured all things. She saw a figure emerge from the gloomy portals into the deeper gloom of the rainy dawn. It was Mr. Delaney. He walked slowly with downcast head and his hands behind him, smoking a cigar as was his usual morning habit. Its fiery spark gleamed fitfully in the dull light, and the fine blue smoke curled upward and lost itself in the mist. Drawing the curtain closer Aline watched him, herself unseen. She found a singular fascination in doing so, and when she saw his glance turn musingly once or twice up to her window her heart beat strangely--with anger she thought. “He has spoiled all my life, but does he realize that he has done so?” she asked herself, musingly. “Could he be so deliberately cruel?” It almost seemed to her that he would not have done so could he have known. “Could any one be so hard, so cruel, as to willfully blight a young girl’s life?” she asked herself, with a sort of wonder, as her eyes followed Oran Delaney in his dreary saunter along the wet, graveled paths. “He saved my life once. Why should he make it valueless to me?” As she gazed at the dark, grave face under the brim of the wide slouch hat, it seemed to her that it was not hard nor cruel, only profoundly grave and sad. A longing came over her that he should know all that had transpired that night since she came home. “If he knew, he might perhaps relent and release me from my vow of silence,” she thought, eagerly. She remained at the window watching him thoughtfully until he disappeared from view in a turn of the path, then she turned aside to her writing-desk and drew out pens and ink and paper. She wrote hastily, and almost incoherently: