accept my thanks for this great
happiness. A mother and a brother found."

"And husband, too," chimed in the doctor, eagerly, "thank Him for me,
Adah. You are glad to find me?"

There was pleading in his tone--earnest pleading, for the terrible
conviction was fastening itself upon him, that not as they once parted
had he and Adah met. For full five minutes Adah lay upon the hay, her
whole soul going out in a prayer of thankfulness for her great joy, and
for strength to bear the bitterness mingling with her joy. Her face was
very white when she lifted it up at last, but her manner was composed,
and she questioned the doctor calmly of Spring Bank, of Alice, of Hugh,
of Anna, but could not trust herself to say much to him of Willie, lest
her calmness should give way, and a feeling spring up in her heart of
something like affection for Willie's father. Alas, for the miserable
man. He had found his wife, his Adah, but there was between them a gulf
which his own act had built, and which he never more might pass. He
began to suspect it, and ere she had finished the story of her
wanderings, which at his request she told, he knew there was no
pulsation of her heart which beat for him. He asked her where she had
been since she fled from Terrace Hill, and how she came to be in Mrs.
Ellsworth's family.

There was a moment's hesitancy, as if she were deciding how much to tell
him of the past, and then resolving to keep nothing back which he might
know, she told him how, with a stunned heart and giddy brain, she had
gone to Albany, and mingling with the crowd had mechanically followed
them down to a boat just starting for New York. That, by some means, she
never knew how, she found herself in the saloon, and seated next to a
feeble, deformed little girl, who lay upon the sofa, and whose sweet,
childish voice said to her pityingly:

"Does your head ache, lady, or what makes you so white?"

She had responded to that appeal, talking kindly to the little girl,
between whom and herself the friendliest of relations were established
and whose name she learned was Jenny Ellsworth. The mother she did not
then see, as, during the journey down the river she was suffering from a
nervous headache, and kept her room. From the child and child's nurse,
however, she heard that Mrs. Ellsworth was going ere long to Europe, and
was anxious to secure some young and competent person to act in the
capacity of Jenny's governess. Instantly Adah's decis