been brought there from Richmond, a friendless stranger, who had been
found wandering homeless in the street, raving of a lost child.

Her story was just as likely to be false as true, they said, for
lunatics imagined many things. It might be her child had died; for she
was always praying for death, that she might find her lost darling
again.

It was melancholy madness. The hardest to cure of all, said the doctors,
and she had been frustrated in several frantic attempts to end her life.
She was so clever and so cunning that they had to watch her constantly;
but even the most impatient of the attendants could not give her a cross
word, her grief was so pathetic, and she seemed so sorrowfully helpless
in her frail, gentle prettiness.

"Have you seen my daughter, my darling little Dainty? She is lost;
stolen away from me while I slept," she would say to every strange
person she saw, and her pale face would glow as she added, proudly:
"She was the prettiest girl in the world. I have often heard people say
so. She was as beautiful as a budding rose, with hair like the sunshine,
and eyes as blue as the sky. Her little hands were white as lilies, and
her feet so tiny and graceful, every one turned to watch her as she
passed; and was it any wonder she caught such a grand, rich lover? She
would have married him if she had not been lost that night. Oh, let me
out! let me go and find my darling! You have no right to lock me in
here!"

Then she would fly into paroxysms of anger, trying to batter down the
walls and escape from what she called her stony prison; and at other
times she would pray for death, crying:

"Oh, God! send me death; for surely my darling must be dead, or she
would have come back to me long before they locked me up here! They
stole her away and killed her, my sweet Dainty, the cruel enemies who
hated and envied her so much for her angelic beauty and her noble lover!
Oh, who would keep me back from death, when only through its dark gates
can I find my child again?"

But they watched her carefully; they allowed her no means of ending the
life of which she was so weary; and so the months flew by from September
to spring, and it was almost a year since Dainty had left her home so
gladly for the country visit that had ended so disastrously, and with
such a veil of mystery over her strange fate.

"Where is Annette? Where is she?
Does anybody know?"

CHAPTER XXXII.

IT WAS THE OVERFLOWING DR