aught on you in favor of our mutual friend, S--y for 1300,
which you will charge on account of the tobacco.

I am, in behalf of Mr. M--e and Co., Sir,
Your most obedient, humble servant,
Gustavus.

To Mr. John Anderson, Merchant,
New York.

CHAPTER III

I

In the meantime, Marjorie was tossing restlessly, nervously in her bed,
enduring hours of disconsolate remorse and lonely desolation. She could
not sleep. She cried her eyes wet with tears, and wiped them dry again
with her handkerchief; then stared up at the black ceiling, or gazed out
through the small window at the faint glow in the world beyond. Her
girlish heart, lay heavy within her, distended almost to the
breaking-point with grief, a grief which had sent her early to bed to
seek solitude and consolation; that solitude which alone brings relief
to a heart freighted with sorrow and woe. Now that Stephen had gone, she
had time to think over the meaning of it all, and she began to
experience the renewed agony of those terrible moments by the water's
edge. It was so awful, so frightful that her tender frame seemed to
yield beneath its load, she simply had to give way to the tears.

She could not sleep, and she knew it. Scrambling out of her bed and
wrapping a mantle about her, she sat beside the window and peered into
the night. There was not a breeze to break the solemn silence, not a
sound to distract her from her reverie. Two black and uncanny pine trees
stood like armed guards near by the corner of the house to challenge the
interloper from disturbing her meditation. Overhead the stars blinked
and glistened through the treetops in their lace of foliage and delicate
branches, and resembled for all the world an hundred diamonds set in a
band of filigree work. The moon had not yet risen, and all the world
seemed to be in abject despair, bristling in horrid shapes and
sights,--a fit dwelling-place for Marjorie and her grief-stricken heart.

Stephen had gone away that afternoon, perhaps never to return. For this
she could not reproach him, for she allowed that she had given him every
reason to feel offended. But she had hurt him, and very likely hurt him
to the quick. She knew his sensitive nature and she feared the
consequence. It was that thought more than the real contrition over her
fault which had overwhelmed her. Her return for his many acts of
kindness had been one of austere repulsi