truck her
ear unpleasantly, and the strange look in the stranger's hard,
steel-blue eyes made her feel strangely uncomfortable.

Was it a premonition of coming evil?

CHAPTER XXV.

She was not to remain long in suspense.

"In the first place," began Sally, slowly, "I wish to know what your
relations are, Bernardine Moore, with Doctor Jay Gardiner. I must and
will know the truth."

She saw that the question struck the girl as lightning strikes a fair
white rose and withers and blights it with its awful fiery breath.

Bernardine was fairly stricken dumb. She opened her lips to speak, but
no sound issued from them. She could not have uttered one syllable if
her life had depended on it.

"Let me tell you how the case stands. I will utter the shameful truth
for you if you dare not admit it. He is _your lover_ in secret, though
he would deny you in public!"

Hapless Bernardine had borne all she could; and without a word, a cry,
or even a moan she threw up her little hands, and fell in a lifeless
heap at her cruel enemy's feet.

For a moment Sally Pendleton gazed at her victim, and thoughts worthy of
the brain of a fiend incarnate swept through her.

"If she were only dead!" she muttered, excitedly. "Dare I----"

The sentence was never finished. There was a step on the creaking stairs
outside, and with a guilty cry of alarm, Miss Pendleton rushed from the
room and out into the darkened hall-way.

She brushed past a woman on the narrow stairs, but the darkness was so
dense neither recognized the other; and Sally Pendleton had gained the
street and turned the nearest corner, ere Miss Rogers--for it was
she--reached the top landing.

As she pushed open the door, the first object that met her startled eyes
was Bernardine lying like one dead on the floor.

Despite the fact that she was an invalid, Miss Rogers' nerves were
exceedingly cool. She did not shriek out, or call excitedly to the other
inmates of the house, but went about reviving the girl by wetting her
handkerchief with water as cold as it would run from the faucet, and
laving her marble-cold face with it, and afterward rubbing her hands
briskly.

She was rewarded at length by seeing the great dark eyes slowly open,
and the crimson tide of life drift back to the pale, cold cheeks and
quivering lips.

A look of wonder filled Bernardine's eyes as she beheld Miss Rogers
bending over her.

"Was it a dream, some awful dream?" she said, excitedly,