tments of his office, could have done it; yet each
contributed something, and all together they combined to insure his
rapid advancement in his profession.

While Alden Lytton was thus gaining fame and fortune, Mary Grey was
engaged in mystifying the minds and winning the sympathy and compassion
of all her acquaintances.

From the time of her return from Philadelphia she had exhibited a deep
and incurable melancholy.

Everybody pitied her deeply and wondered what could be the secret sorrow
under which she was suffering.

But when any friend more curious than the rest ventured to question her,
she answered:

"I have borne and am still bearing the deepest wrong that any woman can
suffer and survive. But I must not speak of it now. My hands are bound
and my tongue is tied. But the time _may_ come when a higher duty than
that which restrains me now may force me to speak. Until then I must be
mute."

This was extremely tantalizing to all her friends; but it was all that
could be got from her.

Meanwhile her face faded into a deadlier pallor and her form wasted to a
ghastlier thinness. And this was real, for she was demon-haunted--a
victim of remorse, not a subject of repentance.

The specter that she had feared to look upon on the fatal night of her
crime--the pale, dripping form of her betrayed and murdered lover--was
ever before her mind's eye.

If she entered a solitary or a half-darkened room the phantasm lurked in
the shadowy corners or met her face to face.

It came to her bedside in the dead of night and laid its clammy wet hand
upon her sleeping brow. And when she woke in wild affright it met her
transfixed and horrified gaze.

Her only relief was in opium. She would stupefy herself every night with
opium, and wake every morning pale, haggard, dull and heavy.

She must have sunk under her mental suffering and material malpractices
but for the one purpose that had once carried her into crime and now
kept her alive through the terror and remorse that were the natural
consequences of that crime. She lived only for revenge--

"Like lightning fire,
To speed one bolt of ruin and expire!"

"I will live and keep sane until I degrade and destroy both Alden Lytton
and Emma Cavendish, and then--I must die or go mad," she said to
herself.

Such was her inner life.

Her outer life was very different from this.

She was still, to all appearance, a zealous church woman, never missing
a