ntrol.

"'Another carriage for Miss Leighton!' I now heard uttered somewhere
like a command. And startled at the pang it caused me, I darted back
into the house, determined to have one parting word with my lost love.

"She was not there, nor could she be found by any searching."

CHAPTER XV.

THE CATASTROPHE.

[Illustration: I]

"I have but little more to tell," Mark Felt continued, "but that little
is everything to me.

"When we became positively assured that Miss Leighton had disappeared
from the house and would not be on hand to take the stage to
Schenectady, the excitement, which had been increasing on all sides
since the ceremony, culminated, and the whole town was set agog to find
her, if only to solve the mystery of a nature whose actions had now
become inexplicable.

"I was the first to start the pursuit. Haunted by her last look, and
thrilled to every extremity by the terror of the shriek she had uttered,
I did not wait for the alarm to become public, but rushed immediately up
stairs at the first intimation of her disappearance.

"Though I had never pierced those regions before, my good or evil fate
took me at once to a room which I saw at one glance to be hers. The
boxes waiting to be carried down, the tags and ends of ribbons that I
recognized, the nameless something which speaks of one particular
personality and no other, all were there to assure me that I stood in
the chamber which for six months or more had palpitated with the breath
of the one being I loved.

"But of that I dared not think; it was no time for dreams; and only
stopping to see that her bonnet had been taken, but her gloves left, I
hurried down again and out of the house.

"An impulse which I cannot understand took me to Edwin Urquhart's house,
or, rather, to that portion of a house which he had hired for his use
since he had been looking forward to his marriage with Miss Dudleigh.
Why I should go there I cannot say, unless jealousy whispered that only
in this place could she hope for one final word with him, as he and his
bride stopped at the door for his portion of the baggage. Be this as it
may, I turned neither to right nor left till I came to his house, and
when I had reached it I found that, with all my haste, I was too late,
for not a soul was in its empty rooms, while far down the street which
leads to the bridge I saw a carriage disappearing, which, from the wagon
following it so closely, I knew to be the one c