g
earnestly in her face.

"It must be so," he said; "there is no alternative now."

She clung to him, whispering, and he kissed her.

I stole away. Oh! my injured, innocent mother. I do not remember exactly
what I did. I rushed from the house out into the great fir wood and wept
out my hot, rebellious anger and despair there. At breakfast time the
next morning just a gleam of hope came to me. Miss Reinhart said that,
above everything else, she should like a drive.

Whether it was my pleading and tears or the rector's visit which had
made my father think, I cannot tell, but for the first time he seemed
quite unwilling to drive her out. The tears came into her eyes and he
went over to her and whispered something which made her smile. He talked
to her in a mysterious kind of fashion that I could neither understand
nor make out at all--of some time in the future.

An uneasy sense of something about to happen came over me. I could feel
the approach of some dark shadow; all day the same sensation rested with
me, yet I saw nothing to justify it. At night my mother called me to her
side.

"Laura, you do not look so cheerful this evening. What makes my daughter
so sad?"

I could not tell her of that scene I had witnessed; I could not tell her
of what was wrong.

On the morning following this, to me, horrible day, I could not help
seeing that there was quite a new understanding between my father and
Miss Reinhart. I overheard him say to her:

"It would have been quite impossible to have gone on; the whole country
would have been in an uproar."

All that day there seemed to me something mysterious going on in the
house; the servants went about with puzzled faces; there were
whisperings and consultations. I heard Patience say to Emma:

"It is not true. I would not believe it. It is some foolish exaggeration
of the servants. I am sure it is not true."

"Even if it should be I do not know what we could do," said Emma. "We
cannot prevent it. If he has a mind to do such a bad action, he will do
it, if not at one time, surely at another."

What was it? I never asked questions now.

One thing I remember. When I went into his room that evening to say
good-night, my father's traveling flask lay there--a pretty silver flask
that my mother had given him for a birthday present. He bade me
"good-night," and I little thought when or how we should meet again.

CHAPTER XII.

I do not judge or condemn him. I do not eve