e." With these few words she left the room.

Isaac was hastening after her when his mother turned and stopped his
further progress. It wrung his heart to see the misery and terror in her
face as she looked at him.

"Light gray eyes," she said, in low, mournful, awe-struck tones,
pointing toward the open door; "a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair,
with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them;
little lady's hand, with a reddish look under the finger nails--The
Dream-Woman, Isaac, the Dream-Woman!"

That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in
Rebecca Murdoch's presence was fatally set at rest forever. He had seen
her face, then, before--seven years before, on his birthday, in the
bedroom of the lonely inn.

"Be warned! oh, my son, be warned! Isaac, Isaac, let her go, and do you
stop with me!"

Something darkened the parlor window as those words were said. A sudden
chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca
Murdoch had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low
window-blind.

"I have promised to marry, mother," he said, "and marry I must."

The tears came into his eyes as he spoke and dimmed his sight, but he
could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the
window.

His mother's head sank lower.

"Are you faint?" he whispered.

"Broken-hearted, Isaac."

He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to
the window, and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.

CHAPTER IV.

THREE weeks after that day Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that
was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man's moral nature seemed to
have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailably
in his heart.

After that first interview in the cottage parlor no consideration would
induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son's wife again or even to talk of her
when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage.

This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery
of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of
that between mother and son. There was no question of anything but the
fearfully-exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the
specter-woman of Isaac's dream.

Rebecca on her side neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at
the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the
sak