been made a wife. 'Kneel!' he cried. 'Kneel,
Amarynth! Only thus can we ask pardon of our mother.' But at that word,
a word which seemed to push her a million miles away from these two
beings who but two hours before had been the delight of her life, the
unhappy woman gave a cry and fled from their presence. 'Go! go!' were
her parting words. 'As you have chosen, you must abide. But let no
tongue ever again call me mother.'

"They found her lying on the grass outside. As she could no longer
sustain herself on a horse, they put her into the coach, gave the reins
to her devoted lackey, and themselves rode off on horseback. One man,
the fellow who had driven them to that place, said that the clock struck
twelve from the chapel tower as the coach turned away and began its
rapid journey home. This may and may not be so. We only know that its
apparition always enters Lost Man's Lane a few minutes before one, which
is the very hour at which the real coach came back and stopped before
Mr. Knollys' gate. And now for the worst, Miss Butterworth. When the old
gentleman went down to greet the runaways, he found the lackey on the
box and his daughter sitting all alone in the coach. But the soil on the
brocaded folds of her white dress was no longer that of mud only. She
had stabbed herself to the heart with a bodkin she wore in her hair, and
it was a corpse which the faithful negro had been driving down the
highway that night."

I am not a sentimental woman, but this story as thus told gave me a
thrill I do not know as I really regret experiencing.

"What was this unhappy mother's name?" I asked.

"Lucetta," was the unexpected and none too reassuring answer.

XIII

GOSSIP

This name once mentioned called for more gossip, but of a somewhat
different nature.

"The Lucetta of to-day is not like her ancient namesake," observed Mrs.
Carter. "She may have the heart to love, but she is not capable of
showing that love by any act of daring."

"I don't know about that," I replied, astonished that I felt willing to
enter into a discussion with this woman on the very subject I had just
shrunk from talking over with the locksmith. "Girls as frail and nervous
as she is, sometimes astonish one at a pinch. I do not think Lucetta
lacks daring."

"You don't know her. Why, I have seen her jump at the sight of a spider,
and heaven knows that they are common enough among the decaying walls in
which she lives. A puny chit, Miss Butt