the midst of the
bitter pain she must have known she was inflicting. No word of contrition
spoke she, but took her deed as one of her prerogatives, just as she had
always taken everything she chose. She did not even spare him the loving
salutation that had been her custom in her letters to him, but wrote
herself down as she would have done the day before when all was fair and
dear between them. She did not hint at any better day for David, or give
him permission to forget her, but held him for all time as her own, as she
had known she would by those words of hers, "I like you better than anyone
else except!--" Ah! That fatal "except!" Could any knife cut deeper and
more ways? They sank into the young man's heart as he stood there those
first few minutes and faced his trouble, his head bowed upon the
mantel-piece.

Meantime Madam Schuyler's keen vision had spied another folded paper
beside the pincushion. Smaller it was than the other, and evidently
intended to be placed further out of sight. It was addressed to Kate's
father, and her stepmother opened it and read with hard pressure of her
thin lips, slanted down at the corners, and a steely look in her eyes. Was
it possible that the girl, even in the midst of her treachery, had enjoyed
with a sort of malicious glee the thought of her stepmother reading that
note and facing the horror of a wedding party with no bride? Knowing her
stepmother's vast resources did she not think that at last she had brought
her to a situation to which she was unequal? There had always been this
unseen, unspoken struggle for supremacy between them; though it had been a
friendly one, a sort of testing on the girl's part of the powers and
expedients of the woman, with a kind of vast admiration, mingled with
amusement, but no fear for the stepmother who had been uniformly kind and
loving toward her, and for whom she cared, perhaps as much as she could
have cared for her own mother. The other note read:

"DEAR FATHER:--I am going away to-night to marry Captain
Leavenworth. You wouldn't let me have him in the right way, so I
had to take this. I tried very hard to forget him and get
interested in David, but it was no use. You couldn't stop it. So
now I hope you will see it the way we do and forgive us. We are
going to Washington and you can write us there and say you forgive
us, and then we will come home. I know you will forgive us, Daddy
dear. You know you alwa