my money was invested. Had I not come into Love's money, I should
not now have a thousand dollars to my name!"

"How unfortunate!" cried a ringing, sarcastic voice, and glancing up,
all three beheld Lovelace Ellsworth standing before them in his right
mind.

He was accompanied by the party that he had brought from the station,
and on his arm leaned his drooping bride, pale from illness, but with
the light of her joy shining in her great luminous eyes. Black mammy
brought up the rear with the lovely infant in her arms.

To Mrs. Ellsworth's consternation all seated themselves as coolly as if
they had a right in her elegant parlor, while Olive and Ela strained
their eyes in horror at the fair cousin whose ashes they had believed to
be lying still beneath the _debris_ of the burned cabin.

Lovelace Ellsworth alone remained standing, and turning toward his
startled step-mother, he began one of the most scathing arraignments to
which any one had ever listened.

He told her in fiery words of all the crimes and cruelties she had
practised on himself and Dainty, and how, through God's help, they had
escaped all.

In vain were her frightened denials; he laughed them all to scorn.

"When Dainty was immured in that dungeon where you expected her to die,
your tool, Sheila Kelly, threw caution to the winds, and betrayed to her
in boastful words your agency in her kidnapping. It is not your fault
that my wife did not die of the poison you gave her to swallow, but only
that the wind and rain revived her when she lay out in the road where
you had her placed, believing her dead, with her lips sealed to your
part in the martyrdom.

"It is not your fault," he added, turning to Olive and Ela, "that you
failed to destroy her when you followed to the cabin where she lay
unconscious, and fired it like the remorseless fiends that you are. But
for John Franklin, who discovered your crime and saved her sweet life,
she must have perished in those flames. But my wife, like the angel she
is, forgives you everything, and will not let me prosecute you for your
crimes. But you three guilty, shameless ones must leave Ellsworth at
dawn, and it is best never to show your faces here again; for in making
public the proofs of my marriage with Dainty and the strange
interruption of the second ceremony, I shall not hesitate to expose your
treachery."

So at dawn they went away--as far as they could on their scanty
means--and the veil of a merciful