marked by the fact that her eyes were
in keeping with black hair, while with her own bright locks they always
gave you a shock as of something strange and haunting--I gave up my will
as if forced by a magnetic power, and not only opened the house to her
but my heart as well; swearing to all she demanded and keeping my oath
too, as I would preserve my soul from sin and my life from the knife of
the destroyer."

"But, when she went," broke from the pallid lips of the man before her,
"when she was taken away from the house, what then?"

"Ah," returned the agitated woman, "what then! Do you not think I
suffered? To be held by my oath, an oath I was satisfied she would wish
kept even at this crisis, yet knowing all the while she was drifting
away into some evil that you, if you knew who she was, would give your
life to avert from your honor if not from her innocent head! To see you
cold, indifferent, absorbed in other things, while she, who would have
perished any day for your happiness, was losing her life perhaps in the
clutches of those horrible villains! Do not ask me to tell you what I
have suffered since she went; I can never tell you,--innocent, tender,
noble-hearted creature that she was."

"Was?" His hand clutched his heart as if it had been seized by a deathly
spasm. "Why do you say was?"

"Because I have just come from the Morgue where she lies dead."

"No, no," came in a low shriek from his lips, "that is not she; that is
another woman, like her perhaps, but not she."

"Would to God you were right; but the long golden braids! Such hair as
hers I never saw on anyone before."

"Mr. Blake is right," I broke in, for I could not endure this scene any
longer. "The woman taken out of the East river to-day has been both seen
and spoken to by him and that not long since. He should know if it is
his wife."

"And isn't it?"

"No, a thousand times no; the girl was a perfect stranger."

The assurance seemed to lift a leaden weight from her heart. "O thank
God," she murmured dropping with an irresistible impulse on her knees.
Then with a sudden return of her old tremble, "But I was only to reveal
her secret in case of her death! What have I done, O what have I done!
Her only hope lay in my faithfulness."

Mr. Blake leaning heavily on the table before him, looked in her face.

"Mrs. Daniels," said he, "I love my wife; her hope now lies in me."

She leaped to her feet with a joyous bound. "You love her? O thank G