Like one in a nightmare dream he followed her to Lelia’s room, and there in the cold, gray light of dawn, attended by the physician and a maid servant, Lelia lay gasping with pain on her white couch, just as she had been attired last evening. Evidently she had not been in bed all night. Doctor White, with a glass of medicine in his hand, was arguing, entreating, ably seconded by the maid, but all to no avail. The beautiful patient pushed them angrily away, moaning through her clenched teeth: “Let me die in peace! It is all I crave!” “Lelia, Lelia, my love, I beseech you take the antidote before it is too late! See, I have brought Laurie!” cried her mother eagerly. A delicate convulsion shook the girl’s body from head to foot, her pale face writhed with pain, her delicate blue eyes stared blankly into space. Mrs. Ritchie and the maid both screamed aloud in fear, and the physician muttered an unintelligible word of keen anxiety. “She is dying, my child is dying, and you have killed her, cruel heart!” cried the agonized mother, turning on Laurie in fierce reproach that shook his nerves, strained already to the highest tension. “What can I do?” he muttered hoarsely, all his outraged manhood shrinking from the sacrifice she demanded, even while Lelia’s pitiful plight excited his pity and sympathy. “Do! Do!” cried the frenzied mother wildly. “Give her the antidote before it is too late! Hasten, hasten, she is fast going from us to death!” It certainly looked like it the way Lelia was convulsed with spasm after spasm of keen agony, forcing groans of pain from her pallid lips till it looked as if each succeeding moment must be her last. The old doctor silently held out the glass to Laurie with two significant words: “Have mercy!” “Have mercy!” sobbed the anguished mother. “Have mercy!” echoed the maid imploringly. And a sterner voice from the open door chimed in: “Great Heaven, can my son hesitate over his plain honor and duty in such a terrible hour?” They were all hounding him to his fate, even his venerable, revered father, and there was no appeal save to Heaven, that seemed to look on in relentless silence. With a feeling like a criminal receiving sentence of death, he grasped blindly for the glass, and Doctor White put it carefully in his hand. “Lose not a moment!” he earnestly adjured. “Lelia,” he uttered, in a hoarse, strangled voice, with his hand on her arm. She quivered with pain, and her big, blue eyes flared wide open on his face. They were filled with a terrible despair. “Drink,” he said, placing the glass to her lips, but she clenched her teeth, moaning through them: “I wish to die!” “No, no, you must drink and live--live for me!” he added in a strange, far-off voice, unlike his own, like one accepting his death warrant. And, indeed, he felt he would as willingly die as put on Lelia’s fetters of love again. Her clenched teeth parted, her eyes gleamed with joy, she cried like one coming back from the dead: