by Fair-Star, who began to
plunge and caper at the sight of his mistress. Agnes looked keenly at
Mrs. Harrington's flushed face; but, the covert smile, dawning on her
lip, vanished, as she saw Ralph in the chair his mother had abandoned,
bending over Lina; who sat upon the cushion, trifling with her guitar,
from which, in her confusion, she drew forth a broken strain, now and
then.

CHAPTER XXIV.

A MEETING IN THE HILLS.

"Mammy, this is too much. I can endure it no longer. You keep me working
in the dark, and every step I take but adds to my own misery. I am
baffled, defeated, almost exposed, and yet you say, go on."

Agnes Barker spoke in a harsh, angry tone. Her eyes blazed with passion.
Her features had lost all their usual grace. She was not the same being
whom we saw creeping softly into the family circle at General
Harrington's with that velvety tread and sidelong glance of the eye.

The woman who stood before her, regarded this outbreak with signs of
kindred impatience, and gathering a vast blanket shawl of crimson and
green around her imposing figure, she stood with her arms wreathed
together in the gorgeous folds, steadily regarding the impetuous young
creature, till the fury of her first onset had exhausted itself.

They had met upon the hill-side, upon the very spot where Mabel
Harrington rested after her rescue from the Hudson, and the charred
trunk of the cedar stood like a pillar of ruined ebony, just behind the
woman, with the sunset playing around it, and spotting the rocks behind
with flecks and dashes of golden light.

This, with naked trees, and a broken hill towering upward, formed a
background to the two persons who had met by appointment, and who always
came together with a clash which made each interview a mental and moral
storm.

The woman remained silent for a moment after this rude assault, and
fixed her dark, oriental eyes with a sort of fascination on the flushed
face lifted in audacious rebellion to hers.

"Agnes," she said at last, "I am weary of this rebellion, of this rude
questioning. In intrigue, as in war, there can be but one commander, and
there must be implicit obedience."

"I am obedient--I have been so from the beginning," answered the girl,
yielding to the frown of those eyes, "until you asked me to stand by and
witness the triumphs of a rival--to see the man I love better than my
own soul, better than ten thousand souls, if I had them, parading his
passion