ould by right be yours and mine. And, Philip,"
laying her hand upon his arm to insure his attention,--"I understand
the mother of this girl who is coming was his favorite daughter."

"Well," surprised at her look and tone, which have both grown
intense,--"that is not my fault. You need not cast such an upbraiding
glance on me."

"What if he should alter his will in her favor? More unlikely things
have happened. I cannot divest myself of fear when I think of her.
Should he at this late hour repent him of his injustice toward his dead
daughter, he might----" She pauses. "But rather than that----" Here she
pauses again; and her lids falling somewhat over her eyes, leave them
small but wonderfully deep.

"What, Marcia?" asks Philip, with a sudden anxiety he would willingly
suppress, were it not for his strong desire to learn what her thoughts
may be.

For a full minute she makes him no reply, and then, as though hardly
aware of his question, goes on meditatively.

"Philip, how frail he is!" she says, almost in a whisper, as the chair
goes creaking beneath the window. "Yet what a hold he has on life! And
it is _I_ give him that hold,--_I_ am the rope to which he
clings. At night, when sleep is on him and lethargy succeeds to sleep,
mine is the duty to rouse him and minister such medicines as charm him
back to life. Should I chance to forget, his dreams might end in death.
Last night, as I sat by his bedside, I thought, were I to forget,--what
then?"

"Ay, what then? Of what are you thinking?" cries her companion, in a
tone of suppressed horror, resisting by a passionate movement the spell
she had almost cast upon him by the power of her low voice and deep,
dark eyes. "Would you kill the old man?"

"Nay, it is but to forget," replies she, dreamily, her whole mind
absorbed in her subject, unconscious of the effect she is producing.
She has not turned her eyes upon him (else surely the terrible fear and
shrinking in his must have warned her to go no further), but has her
gaze fixed rather on the hills and woods and goodly plains for which
she is not only willing but eager to sell all that is best of her. "To
remain passive, and then"--straightening her hand in the direction of
the glorious view that spreads itself before them--"all this would be
ours."

"Murderess!" cries the young man, in a low, concentrated tone, his
voice vibrating with disgust and loathing as he falls back from her a
step or two.

The word thri