tead of the heiress you imagined me to be, I had scarcely money
enough to pay my board at that hotel. Hugh, who himself is poor,
furnished what means I had, and most of my jewelry was borrowed. Do you
hear that? Do you know what you have escaped?"

She almost shrieked at the last.

"Go," she continued, "find your Adah. It's nothing but Adah now. I see
her name in everything. Hugh thinks of nothing else, and why should he?
She's his sister, and I--oh! I'm nobody but a beggarly servant's brat. I
wish I was dead! I wish I was dead! and I will be pretty soon."

This was their parting, and the doctor left her room a soberer, sadder
man than he had entered it. Half an hour later, and he, with Anna, was
fast nearing Versailles, where they were joined by Mr. Millbrook, and
together the three started on their homeward route.

Rapidly the tidings flew, told in a thousand different ways, and the
neighborhood was all on fire with the strange gossip. But little cared
they at Spring Bank for the storm outside, so fierce a one was beating
at their doors, that even the fall of Sumter failed to elicit more than
a casual remark from Hugh, who read without the slightest emotion the
President's call for seventy-five thousand men. Tenderer than a brother
was Hugh to the sick girl upstairs, staying by her so patiently that
none save Alice ever guessed how he longed to be free and join in the
search for Adah. To her it had been revealed by a few words accidentally
overheard. "Oh, Adah, sister, I know that I could find you, but my duty
is here."

This was what he said, and Alice felt her heart throb with increased
respect for the unselfish man, who gave no other token of his impatience
to be gone, but stayed home hour after hour in that close, feverish
room, ministering to all of 'Lina's fancies, and treating her as if no
word of disagreement had ever passed between them. Night after night,
day after day, 'Lina grew worse, until at last, there was no hope, and
the council of physicians summoned to her side said that she would die.
Then Densie softened again, but did not go near the dying one. She could
not be sent away a second time, so she stayed in her own room, which
witnessed many a scene of agonizing prayer, for the poor girl passing so
surely to another world.

"God save her at the last. God let her into heaven," was the burden of
shattered Densie's prayer, while Alice's was much like it, and Hugh,
too, more than once bowed his hea