.

When the noonday sun stood high over Pasco, the whole shameful
story had been revealed to the orphan. The great sighing of the
mountain pines seemed to blazen the secret of a great man's cowardly
crime.

And yet Hugh Worthington died with his hand feebly clasping his
motherless child's, a smile upon his lips, for she had promised
never to betray the blackened past.

"Give him back his own," muttered old Hugh, whose lips had feebly
owned that he had allowed Randall Clayton's good name to be vilely
accused. "Give him his own!" imploringly faltered the dying Croesus.

And so, the legacy of a crime came as a crushing burden to the girl
wife whose clear eyes had looked into her father's darkened soul.
The papers and telegrams which the lonely heiress was forced to
examine told her clearly how Randall Clayton's pathway had been
beset with snares.

She shuddered as she read the telegrams which proved a catastrophe
which she could not avert. "And Arthur Ferris--my husband in
name--knew all! This is his work!"

She roused herself to action and gave over the dead clay to kindly
hands when, at midnight on the day of her father's death, she had
received all the dispatches which told her of Randall Clayton's
evasion. Kneeling by her father's body she vowed herself a priestess
of Justice. "They may have killed him. I may be too late; but I
will deal with my despoiled brother's memory as my only heritage.
For he was innocent, and has been robbed of birthright, good name,
and perhaps life itself."

BOOK III.

THE MESSAGE FROM AMOY.

CHAPTER XI.

THE GIRL BRIDE'S REBELLION.

For a week after the receipt of the ominous telegram from Pasco,
Arthur Ferris sat, a gloomy tyrant, in the offices of the Western
Trading Company. There were dark circles around the young lawyer's
eyes, and his restless mind gnawed upon itself in an intolerable
agony.

Left alone by Senator Dunham's departure, the open aversion of the
company's officials had astounded him.

Even Robert Wade, so cringing before the death of Worthington, had
received his reinstatement in a sullen silence. "Do I understand
that you wish me to be responsible for the daily conduct of the
company's affairs?" gravely said Wade. "Then you must restore all
the officials or I will not act! Every one knows, sir, that your
power of attorney from the late Mr. Worthington became valueless
at his death."

Ferris, with fear and trembling, awaited the ex