How weird the place looked, how gaunt and bare the great oak-trees looked, looming up darkly against the moonlit sky! The dead leaves rustled across her path as she crept around to the rear door.

She looked up at her mother's window, and another great chill crept over her. All was dark there. It had always been her mother's custom to place her lamp on the broad window-sill at night. Many a time it had been her beacon-light in cutting across lots from the station on evenings when she had been detained by her work. How strange it was that the light was not in the window to-night!

"Mother is not expecting me to-night," she said to herself, "that is the reason it is not there."

But ah, how she missed it! How her heart had yearned to behold it, with a yearning so great that it had been the most intense pain. She lifted the latch and entered tremblingly, hesitatingly. It had been over two months since her mother had heard from her.[41] How had her patient, suffering mother lived through it?

As she crossed the hall she heard the sound of Mrs. Deering's voice in a sharp, high key. Perhaps the horrible nephew was with her. She paused in a paroxysm of terror. She was talking to her husband, scolding him, rather.

"It isn't my fault that we lost the fortune," he was answering her meekly. "You brought your nephew out of the asylum too soon. You knew he would not be here a fortnight before he would do some terrible deed—burn the house down over our heads, or kill himself when the attendant was not watching, or some other horrible deed of that kind. When he did succeed in mutilating himself before any of us was aware of it, instead of sending him back to the asylum, to be cared for, you kept him here under lock and key thinking to cure him yourself in a couple of months or so."

"Ah!" thought Ida May, leaning faint and dizzy against the wall, "now I understand why Mrs. Deering consented to let me go away. Anything to get me out of the house while she was curing the insane nephew whom she had vowed I must wed."

The next words, while they shocked her inexpressively, lifted a world of woe from her heart.

"Well, despite our watchfulness, he succeeded in killing himself at last; so there's the end of it. The fortune is lost, and there's no use in raving over it, and in venting your bitter wrath upon everything and every one that comes within your range."

Mrs. Deering's anger was so great that she could not utter a word. She flung open the door and dashed into the hall. The very first object that met her gaze was[42] the cowering little figure leaning against the balustrade.

"You!" she cried, quite as soon as she could catch her breath. "How dare you come here, Ida May, you wicked girl! I am amazed that you have the effrontery to face honest people after what you have done! We read all about it in the newspapers—how you ran away from Newport with a gay, dashing fellow who soon after deserted you. Don't attempt to tell me anything about it. I won't listen to a word. Get out of this house as quick as you can! Go, before I bid the servants throw you from the house!"

"But my mother! Surely you will let me see my mother!" sobbed the girl, piteously. "The whole wide world may be against me, but she will believe me guiltless! Please let me see her."

A laugh that was horrible to hear broke from Mrs. Deering's thin lips.

"Your mother!" she sneered; "much you cared about her, or how your doings affected her. That article in the newspapers did the work, as you might have known it would. I carried the paper to her myself, and when she read it she fell to the floor with a bitter cry, and she never spoke again. It was her death-warrant!"

For one moment the girl looked at the woman wit............