the bitterest of sorrow. She
realized what he must be suffering. She would have flown to him on the
wings of love, but she dared not.

She wrote a letter to him for his mother, at her dictation, adding a
little tear-blotted postscript of her own, making no mention of her own
great love and the sorrow that had darkened her young life. In that
letter she urged him to keep up brave spirits; that everything was being
done for Gerelda, his wife, that could be done; that she was sitting up
night and day nursing her.

When Hubert Varrick received that tear-stained missive, in the
loneliness of his desolate cell he bowed his head and wept like a child,
crying out to Heaven that he was surely the most wretched man on God's
earth.

He tried to think out all the horrors of that bitter midnight tragedy,
which seemed more like a dream to him than a reality. He could not
understand how Gerelda came by that wound, unless, through her terrible
rage, she had attempted to take her life by her own hand; and through
the same intense rage, strong even in death, wanted to persecute him
even after she had known that her moments were numbered.

As for Gerelda, her life hung by the slenderest of threads for many days
after, and during these anxious hours no one could induce Jessie Bain to
leave her bedside. But at last the hour came when the doctors pronounced
Gerelda out of danger.

CHAPTER XXXII.

CAPTAIN FRAZIER PLOTS AGAIN.

We must return to Captain Frazier, whom we left standing at the gate
when he had parted from the minister, who had gone into the Varrick
mansion to make arrangements for the wedding which was to take place on
the morrow.

"Gerelda must have made herself known to them by this time, and a lively
scene is probably ensuing," he muttered. "I should like to have seen
Varrick when Gerelda confronted him, and cheated him out of Jessie Bain.
In that moment, perhaps, it occurred to him what I must have suffered
when he cheated me out of winning lovely Gerelda Northrup at the
Thousand Islands last summer--curse him for it! How strange it is that
from that very date my life went all wrong! I invested every dollar I
had in that stone house on Wau-Winet Island, and that fire wiped me out
completely. I have had the devil's own luck with everything I touched.
Everything has gone back on me, every scheme has fallen through, and the
best of plans panned out wrong. I should say that I am pursued by a
relentless Nemesis