le out to track the despairing girl on
her wretched exile.

The deep gloom of twilight had now fallen, and Dainty stood irresolute
where to go, clinging forlornly to the gate, her wistful, white face
turned back to Love's window, her tender heart wrung by the torture of
leaving him forever.

"Oh! who could have dreamed of such a strange and cruel fate for my
darling? It is indeed worse than death!" she sighed, miserably, thinking
how cruel Mrs. Ellsworth had been to drive her away so heartlessly, when
she had prayed to her humbly on her knees to let her remain as an humble
servant and nurse him.

It seemed like the cruelest irony of fate that she, Love Ellsworth's
wife, the real mistress of Ellsworth, should be driven in scorn from its
gates, penniless, hopeless, and without a friend, her lips sealed to the
truth of her wifehood, lest by speaking she should consign her beloved
husband to a more cruel doom than he was already enduring.

Mrs. Ellsworth had carried things with a high hand; but she had been
reasonably sure of her position, having investigated Love's story of a
secret marriage, and satisfied herself that it would be well-nigh
impossible to prove it.

Owing to Love's desire for secrecy, there was no record of the license
on the books of the clerk of county court who had issued it. The clerk
himself, a feeble, aged man, had died suddenly two months ago--the day
previous to Lovelace Ellsworth's birthday.

The minister of the little church where the ceremony had been performed
had also died a month previous of a malignant fever contracted in
visiting a squalid settlement of shiftless sand diggers.

A terrible fatality seemed to attend poor Dainty; for in all probability
these two dead men were the only persons who held the secret of her
marriage, and dead men tell no tales.

As the worse than widowed bride clung to the gate, taking that farewell
look at her husband's window, she suddenly remembered that she had one
true though humble friend in the neighborhood--poor old black mammy.

"I will go to her cabin and stay to-night, and to-morrow I must try to
go home to mamma," she sighed, turning toward the dark patch of woods
where the lonely negro cabin stood, and followed by relentless fate in
the shape of her pitiless rivals, Olive and Ela.

"She is going to old Virginia's cabin, but she does not know that the
negroes have all moved away to the station, and that she will find it
deserted," whispered E