ened its brown eyes
questioningly.

"How are you today, Bessie?"

"Mad'len--I want Mad'len," moaned the little plaintive voice.

Magdalen came over and stood beside Marian Lesley.

"She wants me," she said in a low, thrilling voice; free from all
harsh accent or intonation. "I am the only one she seems to know
always. Yes, darling, Mad'len is here--right beside you. She will not
leave you."

She knelt by the little cot and passed her arm under the child's neck,
drawing the curly head close to her throat with a tender, soothing
motion.

Esterbrook Elliott watched the two women intently--the one standing by
the cot, arrayed in simple yet costly apparel, with her beautiful,
high-bred face, and the other, kneeling on the bare, sanded floor in
her print dress, with her splendid head bent low over the child and
the long fringe of burnished lashes sweeping the cold pallor of the
oval cheek.

From the moment that Magdalen Crawford's haunting eyes had looked
straight into his for one fleeting second, an unnamable thrill of pain
and pleasure stirred his heart, a thrill so strong and sudden and
passionate that his face paled with emotion; the room seemed to swim
before his eyes in a mist out of which gleamed that wonderful face
with its mesmeric, darkly radiant eyes, burning their way into deeps
and abysses of his soul hitherto unknown to him.

When the mist cleared away and his head grew steadier, he wondered at
himself. Yet he trembled in every limb and the only clear idea that
struggled out of his confused thoughts was an overmastering desire to
take that cold face between his hands and kiss it until its
passionless marble glowed into warm and throbbing life.

"Who is that girl?" he said abruptly, when they had left the cottage.
"She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen--present company
always excepted," he concluded, with a depreciatory laugh.

The delicate bloom on Marian's face deepened slightly.

"You had much better to have omitted that last sentence," she said
quietly, "it was so palpably an afterthought. Yes, she is wonderfully
lovely--a strange beauty, I fancied. There seemed something odd and
uncanny about it to me. She must be Mrs. Barrett's niece. I remember
that when I was down here about a month ago Mrs. Barrett told me she
expected a niece of hers to live with her--for a time at least. Her
parents were both dead, the father having died recently. Mrs. Barrett
seemed troubled about her. She sa