nd Conscience. The terrible thing that Medora had
done was revealed to her in its full enormity. She had sat in the
presence of the ungodly and looked upon the wine both when it was red
and effervescent.

At midnight she wrote this letter:

"MR. BERIAH HOSKINS, Harmony, Vermont.

"Dear Sir: Henceforth, consider me as dead to you forever.
I have loved you too well to blight your career by bringing
into it my guilty and sin-stained life. I have succumbed
to the insidious wiles of this wicked world and have been
drawn into the vortex of Bohemia. There is scarcely any
depth of glittering iniquity that I have not sounded. It is
hopeless to combat my decision. There is no rising from the
depths to which I have sunk. Endeavor to forget me. I am
lost forever in the fair but brutal maze of awful Bohemia.
Farewell.

"ONCE YOUR MEDORA."

On the next day Medora formed her resolutions. Beelzebub, flung from
heaven, was no more cast down. Between her and the apple blossoms of
Harmony there was a fixed gulf. Flaming cherubim warded her from the
gates of her lost paradise. In one evening, by the aid of Binkley and
Mumm, Bohemia had gathered her into its awful midst.

There remained to her but one thing--a life of brilliant, but
irremediable error. Vermont was a shrine that she never would dare
to approach again. But she would not sink--there were great and
compelling ones in history upon whom she would model her meteoric
career--Camille, Lola Montez, Royal Mary, Zaza--such a name as one
of these would that of Medora Martin be to future generations.

For two days Medora kept her room. On the third she opened a magazine
at the portrait of the King of Belgium, and laughed sardonically. If
that far-famed breaker of women's hearts should cross her path, he
would have to bow before her cold and imperious beauty. She would not
spare the old or the young. All America--all Europe should do homage
to her sinister, but compelling charm.

As yet she could not bear to think of the life she had once
desired--a peaceful one in the shadow of the Green Mountains with
Beriah at her side, and orders for expensive oil paintings coming in
by each mail from New York. Her one fatal misstep had shattered that
dream.

On the fourth day Medora powdered her face and rouged her lips. Once
she had seen Carter in "Zaza." She stood before the mirror in a
reckless attitude and cried: "_Zut! zut!_" She rhymed it wit