She was thinking of Lancelot Darling--her betrothed husband--and now and then hot tears welled from her eyes and rolled down upon her pale cheeks. She wondered if he still remained faithful to her memory, or if, indeed, the wily widow had won him from her, as Doctor Pratt and Harold Colville had so confidently asserted. "It is false," she said to herself, through her fast falling tears. "Lance loved me too truly to forget me so soon. What if I did see him bending over that wicked woman, turning the leaves of her music as he was wont to do for me? She had beguiled him to her side by the fascinating arts which a true woman would disdain. It was to win him that she tried to murder me. But though I never see my lover again I will not believe he could love her after having loved me, even though she might try to poison my memory with her false tale of suicide. No, no; I will believe in the loyalty of my lover until my latest breath." She was sitting near the side of the fireplace, and on the other side of the wall old Peter and Haidee, who had retired to their room for the night, were sitting over their fire and talking earnestly together. She could hear the sound of their voices quite distinctly, for on her side of the room there was a large cracked place in the wall from which the plaster had fallen out, leaving a thin aperture through which voices were distinctly audible. Lily had never felt any desire before to hear the conversation of the old couple, but at this moment a sudden curiosity seized upon her as she heard the sound of her own name distinctly repeated. Rising noiselessly from her chair she knelt upon the floor, and, placing her ear against the broken place in the wall, listened intently. Their words and even the tone of their voices were plainly audible to her trained and acute hearing. Words were being spoken by that wicked old pair that seemed to chill the blood in her veins to an icy current as she knelt there listening to the awful doom she had no power to avert. "Yes," said the woman's voice, sharply, "I hate the girl so that I could strangle her with my own hands! Ever since the day she knocked me down and escaped from me, I have hated her with the hate of hell!" "Aye, aye," said old Peter; "then why delay the deed we have long been determined upon. I am in favor of getting it done and over with." "If I were not afraid of the vengeance of Pratt and Colville," said she, hesitating. "It's a terrible risk to run." "Ten thousand dollars is worth running a considerable risk for," answered the old miser. "Now, here is the way we are placed, Haidee: Harold Colville will give us a few paltry hundreds for keeping the girl here, but her father will pay ten thousand dollars to the person who delivers her dead body, and no questions asked. How can you hesitate which to choose?" "My God!" thought the wretched girl, with a wildly beating heart, "they are planning to murder me."