the vehement efforts of his
relatives, so far as to require from Margaret a written declaration that
they had never been engaged, and that she had no claim whatever upon his
hand in matrimony. There was a quick reaction, however, and the old
relations were renewed. One who wrote of these facts said: "Amid all his
sorrow, one fear seemed to harass him perpetually--that Miss Fox might be
induced to return to the professional life she had abandoned years ago for
his sake. She was surrounded by spiritualists." * * *

In his letters to her, Dr. Kane still harped upon the one anxiety that
continually possessed him. He says: "_Do avoid 'spirits.' I cannot bear to
think of you as engaged in a course of wickedness and deception._ * * *
Pardon my saying so; but is it not deceit even to listen when others are
deceived? * * * In childhood it was a mere indiscretion; but what will it
be when hard age wears its wrinkles into you, and like Leah you grow old!
Dear Maggie, I could cry to think of it. * * * A time will come when you
will see the real ghost of memory--an awful specter!"

And again he wrote: "_Maggie, I have but one thought_, how to make you
happier; _how to withdraw you from deception; from a course of sin and
future punishment, the dark shadow of which hung over you like the wing of
a vampire_."

Then, as he claimed her more and more openly as his own, "he would not
permit her," says the writer already quoted, "even to witness any
spiritual manifestations, nor to remain in the room when the subject was
discussed. * * * 'You never shall be brought in contact with such things
again,' he would say."

The ending of this very sad tale of love, which throws a peculiar light
athwart the colder theme of this volume, was bitterly tragic. A secret
marriage under the common law was entered into, and Dr. Kane, whose health
was shattered never to be mended, went first to Europe and then to Cuba to
die. Margaret and her mother were to join him at Havana, but ere their
departure from New York he was already a corpse.

And so, a noble and generous, if sometimes faltering heart, ceased to
beat, and a gentle creature, who at last had learned to love as much as
she had honored him, was on the shores of that deep sea of infamy against
which, had he only lived, he would surely have shielded her.

CHAPTER XV.

FROM SHADOW TO LIGHT.

More than thirty years after this sorrowful event, Margaret Fox Kane, in
reviewing the past, a