s. If this is to be
a child, what is it to be a woman?

I love you dearly,--and your brother is almost to me as if he were mine.
I love our sweet, patient Bathsheba,--yes, and the old man that has
spoken so kindly with me, good Master Gridley; I hate to give you
pain,--to leave you all,--but my way of life is killing me, and I am too
young to die. I cannot take the comfort with you, my dear friends, that
I would; for it seems as if I carried a lump of ice in my heart, and all
the warmth I find in you cannot thaw it out.

I have had a strange warning to leave this place, Olive. Do you remember
how the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph and told him to flee into
Egypt? I have had a dream like that, Olive. There is an old belief in
our family that the spirit of one who died many generations ago watches
over some of her descendants. They say it led our first ancestor to come
over here when it was a wilderness. I believe it has appeared to others
of the family in times of trouble. I have had a strange dream at any
rate, and the one I saw, or thought I saw, told me to leave this place.
Perhaps I should have stayed if it had not been for that, but it seemed
like an angel's warning.

Nobody will know how I have gone, or which way I have taken. On Monday,
you may show this letter to my friends, not before. I do not think they
will be in danger of breaking their hearts for me at our house. Aunt
Silence cares for nothing but her own soul, and the other woman hates me,
I always thought. Kitty Fagan will cry hard. Tell her perhaps I shall
come back by and by. There is a little box in my room, with some
keepsakes marked,--one is for poor Kitty. You can give them to the right
ones. Yours is with them.

Good-by, dearest. Keep my secret, as I told you, till Monday. And if
you never see me again, remember how much I loved you. Never think
hardly of me, for you have grown up in a happy home, and do not know how
much misery can be crowded into fifteen years of a young girl's life.
God be with you!

MYRTLE HAZARD.

Olive could not restrain her tears, as she handed the letter to Cyprian.
"Her secret is as safe with you as with me," she said. "But this is
madness, Cyprian, and we must keep her from doing herself a wrong.

"What she means to do, is to get to Boston, in some way or other, and
sail for India. It is strange that they have not tracked her. There is
no time to be lost. She shall not go out into the w