e experience! You have been ill, too, have you not, my
dearest one? Oh, how thin and pale you are, but just as handsome as
ever!" and she clasped him close in a warm embrace, and showered fond,
wifely kisses on his cold, unresponsive lips.

The door opened suddenly, and an intelligent-looking mulatto man came in
very softly, as if into a sick room.

Dainty knew him at once as Love's valued personal attendant Franklin.

Her arms dropped from Love's neck, and she blushed as he exclaimed:

"So it's really you, Miss Chase?"

"Why, Franklin, you knew me at once, but your master looks on me as a
stranger!" she answered, in surprise that grew boundless as the man
returned, sadly:

"Alas! Miss Chase, you and all the world must ever remain strangers to
my poor master now!"

The mulatto was a clever, well-educated person, and his words, strange
as they sounded, carried the ring of truth.

"What can you mean?" she faltered.

"Miss Chase, where have you been? Have you heard nothing of Mr.
Ellsworth's sad condition?" he asked, respectfully.

Still keeping her arm around Love's neck, the young girl answered,
gently:

"I was kidnapped the night before my wedding, Franklin, and the next day
I was told Mr. Ellsworth had been shot and was dying. Then I was taken
very ill, and knew nothing more till I returned here to-day, when I was
overjoyed to learn that he was still alive!"

The man looked at her with genuine sadness.

"Ah, Miss Chase! I do not know whether you should be glad or not. Is not
this more cruel than death?"

"I do not understand," she faltered, uncomprehendingly; and he answered,
with intense sympathy:

"You have spoken to him, and he does not know you--you, the dearest
creature on earth to him, Miss Chase! Neither does he recognize any one
else, nor remember anything. There is a bullet in his head that the
doctors can not extricate, and it has destroyed his mental faculties
completely. His health is good, but he has forgotten the past, and lost
even the power of speech. He will never be anything, they say, but a
harmless idiot."

She cried out with a terrible anger that it was not true, that she could
not believe it; he was trying to deceive her and break her heart.

He was usually a quiet, stolid man, but the tears came to his eyes as
she knelt on the floor and wound her arms about Love in passionate
embraces, and, with tears that might have moved a heart made of stone,
called on him to pity her and