ote piped up. No it droned. No! no! no! no! I stopped
and took heart. Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the
grave? I--, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy,
gracious, and good? Impossible. I would obey the great clock's voice;
the others were mere chatterboxes.

"But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed
its tune. Now, it is Yes! Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save
Helena. But what of Bella? and O God, what of myself?"

A sigh, a groan, then a long and heavy silence, into which there finally
broke the pealing of the various clocks striking the hour. When all were
still again and Violet had drawn aside the portiere, it was to see
the old man on his knees, and between her and the thin streak of light
entering from the hall, the figure of the doctor hastening to Helena's
bedside.

When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young
girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld
her once before, and to a life which promised to compensate her for her
twenty years of loneliness and unsatisfied longing.

But a black shadow yet remained which she must cross before reaching the
sunshine!

It lay at her step-mother's door.

In the plans made for Helena's release, Mrs. Postlethwaite's consent
had not been obtained nor was she supposed to be acquainted with
the doctor's intentions towards the child whose death she was hourly
awaiting.

It was therefore with an astonishment, bordering on awe, that on their
way downstairs, they saw the door of her room open and herself standing
alone and upright on the threshold--she who had not been seen to take a
step in years. In the wonder of this miracle of suddenly restored power,
the little procession stopped,--the doctor with his hand upon the rail,
the lover with his burden clasped yet more protectingly to his breast.
That a little speech awaited them could be seen from the force and
fury of the gaze which the indomitable woman bent upon the lax and
half-unconscious figure she beheld thus sheltered and conveyed. Having
but one arrow left in her exhausted quiver, she launched it straight
at the innocent breast which had never harboured against her a defiant
thought.

"Ingrate!" was the word she hurled in a voice from which all its
seductive music had gone forever. "Where are you going? Are they
carrying you alive to your grave?"

A moan from Helena's pale lips, then si