, but shrank before
me in such terror, that, boy though I was, I knew that something
terrible, something unprecedented had happened, and thinking my one
thought, I asked if she had received bad news from father. Her answer
was a horrified moan, but it might have been a shriek. 'Our father! Pray
God we may never see him or hear from him again. If you love him, if you
love me, pray he may die in prison rather than return here to see me as
I am now.'

"I thought she had gone mad, and perhaps she had for a moment; for at my
look of startled distress a change took place in her. She remembered my
youth, and laughing, or trying to laugh away her frenzy, uttered some
hurried words I failed to understand, and then, sinking at my knee, laid
her head against my side, crying that she was not well; that she had
experienced for a long time secret pains and great inward distress, and
that she sometimes feared she was not going to live long, for all her
songs and merry ways and seeming health and spirits.

"'Not live, Evelyn?' It was an inconceivable thought to me, a boy. I
looked at her, and seeing how pale, how incomprehensibly pale she was,
my heart failed me, for nothing but mortal sickness could make such a
change in any one in a week, in a day. Yet how could death reach her,
loved as she was by Edward, by her father, and by me. Thinking to rouse
her, I spoke the former's name. But it was the last word I should have
uttered. Crouching as if I had given her a blow, she put her two hands
out, shrieking faintly: 'Not that! Never that! Do not speak his name.
Let me never hear of him or see him again. I am dead--do you not
understand me?--dead to all the world from this day--except to you!' she
suddenly sobbed, 'except to you!' And still I did not comprehend her.
But when I understood, as I soon did, that no mention was to be made of
her illness; that her door was to be shut and no one allowed to enter,
not even Mrs. Poindexter or her guardian--least of all, her guardian--I
began to catch the first intimation of that horror which was to end my
youth and fill my whole after life with but one thought--revenge. But I
said nothing, only watched and waited. Seeing that she was really ill, I
constituted myself her nurse, and sat by her night and day till her
symptoms became so alarming that the whole household was aroused and we
could no longer keep the doctor from her. Then I sat at her door, and
with one ear turned to catch her lightest m