the train for the North.

They reached New York on Thursday night, had one intervening day to see
something of the city and to make some few last purchases for their
voyage, and on Saturday at noon they embarked on the magnificent ocean
steamship "Pekin," bound from New York to Southampton.

We must leave them on board their ship, and return and look up Mary
Grey.

CHAPTER XLI.

MARY GREY'S MYSTERY.

After Mrs. Grey's last interview with Alden Lytton, during which, partly
because she lost her self-command and partly because she did not care
longer to conceal her feelings, she had thrown off her mask, she sat
down to review the situation.

"Well, I have betrayed myself," she mused. "I have let him see how I
really feel about this marriage engagement between him and Emma
Cavendish. He knows now how I loved him; if he has eyes in his head he
sees now how I hate him.

"All right. I have now no further reason to deceive him. He has served
my utmost purpose for his own and her own destruction. I no longer need
his unconscious co-operation. I have his honor and his liberty, and her
reputation and peace, in my power and at my mercy.

"And I have done all this myself, without the voluntary help of any
human being. I have used men as the mechanic uses tools, making them do
his work, or as the potter uses clay, molding it to his purpose.

"Let him marry Emma Cavendish. I can part them at any moment afterward
and throw them into a felon's prison, and cast her down from her proud
place into misery and degradation.

"I _could_ stop their marriage now, or at the altar. But I will not do
that; for to do that would be only to disappoint or grieve them. But my
vengeance must strike a deeper blow. It must degrade and ruin them. I
will wait until they have been married some time. Then, in the hour of
their fancied security, I will come down upon them like an avalanche of
destruction."

In the feverish excitement of anticipating this fiendish consummation of
her revenge she almost forgot her heinous crime, and ceased to be
haunted by the hideous specter of her murdered lover.

It was on the fifteenth of the month, when she happened to take up the
morning paper.

She turned first--as she always did--to the column containing notices of
marriages and deaths.

And her face grew wild and white as she read:

MARRIED.--On the morning of the 10th instant, at Blue
Cliff Hall, Virginia, the seat of the bride, by th