in a second wife to
rule over his household.

Ay, from that hour he and his daughter had seemed to drift apart.

Nerving herself for the ordeal, the girl crept to the door and timidly
swung it back.

There was a figure bending over the writing desk; not the tall form of
her father, but her stepmother.

Faynie drew back with a startled cry.

In a single instant, with the swiftness of a lioness, the woman who had
been examining the desk, cleared the space that divided her from the
girl, and clutched her by the shoulder.

"You!" she panted, in a voice that was scarcely human, it was so full of
venomous hatred. "You!" she repeated, flinging the girl from her, as
though she had been something vile to the touch. "How dare you come
here?"

Faynie looked at her for a moment with dilated eyes gazing out from her
pale face.

Had her stepmother suddenly gone mad? was the thought that flashed
through the girl's brain.

"I--I have come back to my father, and--and to his home--and mine. Any
explanation I have to offer will be made to him alone."

The woman laughed a sneering, demoniac laugh, and her clutch on the
girl's shoulder grew stronger, fiercer.

"How lovely, how beautifully worded, how dutiful!" she sneered. "By that
I judge that you have not been keeping abreast of the times, or you
would have known, girl, that your father is dead, and that he has
disinherited you, leaving every dollar of his wealth to me."

"Dead!" Faynie repeated the words in an awful whisper.

It seemed to her that every drop of blood in her veins seemed suddenly
turned to ice. A mist swam before her eyes and she put out her hand
gropingly, grasping the back of the nearest chair for support.

She did not even hear the last of the sentence. Her thoughts and hearing
seemed to end with that one awful word.

"That is what I said," replied her stepmother, nonchalantly, "and you
are his murderess, girl, quite as much as though you had plunged a
dagger in his heart. Your elopement caused him to have a terrible
hemorrhage. He knew all the details about it in less than an hour's
time, learning from one of the servants how you stole out of the house
and met the tall man at the gate, who took you off in a closed carriage,
and just as he made this discovery one of the maids handed him your
note, which you left pinned to the pillow, addressed to him. He had no
sooner read it than he fell into a rage so horrible that it ended as I
have said, in a he