February winds blew coldly over the sea at Cape May, the day was bleak and sunless, a misty, drizzling rain fell slowly but continuously, chilling the very marrow of one's bones. No one who could have helped it would have cared to venture out in such dreary, uncomfortable, depressing weather. But up and down the beach, before the closed mansion of Sea View, walked a weird, strange figure, bareheaded in the pitiless war of the elements, bowed and bent by age, clothed in rent and tattered finery, with scant, gray locks flying elfishly in the breeze that blew strongly and cruelly enough to have lifted the little, witch-like form and cast it into the sea.

"I am a fool to come out in such stormy weather!" this odd creature muttered to herself. "What is it that drives me out of my sick bed to wander here in the rain and wind before Francis Arnold's house? There is a thing they call Remorse, ha, ha—is that the haunting devil that pursues me?"

She looked at the lonely mansion, and turned back to the sea with a shudder.

"Whose is the sin?" she said, looking weirdly out at the wild waves as if they had a human voice to answer her query. "She tempted me with her gold—she had murder in her heart as red as if she had dyed her hands in his life-blood! Ugh!" she wrung her hands and shook them from her as if throwing off invisible drops, "how thick and hot it was when it spurted out over my hands! Yet was not the sin hers? Hers was the brain that planned, mine but the hand that struck the blow!"

"Gold, gold!" she went on, after a shuddering pause, "what a devil it is to tempt one! I never harmed human being before, but the yellow glitter was so beautiful to my sight that it betrayed me. Strange, that when it had made me do her will, it should have grown hateful to my sight, and burned my hands, till I came here and cast every golden piece of my blood-bought treasure into the sea."

She drew nearer to the waves, peeping into them as if perchance the treasure she had cast into their bosom might yet be visible.

"There was a man named Judas," she muttered; "I have heard them tell of him somewhere—he sold a man's life for some pieces of silver—but when it was done he went and cast the treasure back to those who had bought his soul. He must have felt as I do. What is it that I feel—remorse, repentance, or a horror of that dreadful leap I shall soon be taking into the dark?"

Walking wildly up and down she did not see two figures coming[Pg 122] towards her through the mist of the rain—two female figures shrouded in long water-proof cloaks and thick veils.

"Miss Bonnibel," said one to the other, "'tis the wicked old witch—the fortune-teller—Wild Madge. Sure the old thing must be crazy, tramping out in such wild weather!"

Bonnibel shuddered as she looked at the weird old creature.

"Cannot we avoid her notice?" she inquired, shrinking from contact with the sibyl.

At that moment Wild Madge turned and saw them. Directly she came up to them with her fortune-teller's whine:

"Cross my palm with silver and I will tell your fortune, bonny ladies."

"No, no, Wild Madge, we haven't got time to hear our fortunes told," said Lucy Moore. "Don't try to detain us. We are on a mission of life and death."

"So am I," mocked the sibyl with her strange, discordant laugh. "Death is on my trail t............