again the stars
vanished. Nora was now once more under the dominion of a single thought,
as she had been when she fled from her bridal home. Then, it was to
escape from her lover,--now, it was to see him. As the victim stretched
on the rack implores to be led at once to death, so there are moments
when the annihilation of hope seems more merciful than the torment of
suspense.

CHAPTER XVII.

When the scenes in some long diorama pass solemnly before us, there is
sometimes one solitary object, contrasting, perhaps, the view of stately
cities or the march of a mighty river, that halts on the eye for
a moment, and then glides away, leaving on the mind a strange,
comfortless, undefined impression.

Why was the object presented to us? In itself it seemed comparatively
insignificant. It may have been but a broken column, a lonely pool with
a star-beam on its quiet surface,--yet it awes us. We remember it when
phantasmal pictures of bright Damascus, or of colossal pyramids, of
bazaars in Stamboul, or lengthened caravans that defile slow amidst the
sands of Araby, have sated the wondering gaze. Why were we detained in
the shadowy procession by a thing that would have been so commonplace
had it not been so lone? Some latent interest must attach to it. Was it
there that a vision of woe had lifted the wild hair of a Prophet; there
where some Hagar had stilled the wail of her child on her indignant
breast? We would fain call back the pageantry procession, fain see again
the solitary thing that seemed so little worth the hand of the artist,
and ask, "Why art thou here, and wherefore dost thou haunt us?"

Rise up,--rise up once more, by the broad great thoroughfare that
stretches onward and onward to the remorseless London! Rise up, rise up,
O solitary tree with the green leaves on thy bough, and the deep rents
in thy heart; and the ravens, dark birds of omen and sorrow, that build
their nest amidst the leaves of the bough, and drop with noiseless
plumes down through the hollow rents of the heart, or are heard, it may
be in the growing shadows of twilight, calling out to their young.

Under the old pollard-tree, by the side of John Avenel's house, there
cowered, breathless and listening, John Avenel's daughter Nora. Now,
when that fatal newspaper paragraph, which lied so like truth, met her
eyes, she obeyed the first impulse of her passionate heart,--she tore
the wedding ring from her finger, she enclosed it, with the parag