wound about my darling daughter's neck.
This one only has brought me the least response. Does he know? Is he
willing that you should come up here?"

"I have come at the risk of my life," I quietly answered. "He does
not know that I have surprised his secret. He would kill me if he did.
Madame, I want to free you, but I want to do it without endangering
him. I am his wife, and three hours ago I loved him."

Her face, which had turned very pale, approached mine with a look
I hardly expected to encounter there. "I understand," she said; "I
comprehend devotion; I have felt it for my daughter. Else I could not
have survived the wrong of this incarceration, and my forcible severance
from old associations and friends. I loved _her_, and since the
knowledge of her affliction, and the still worse knowledge that she had
been made the victim of a man's greed to an extent not often surpassed
in this world, would have made her young life wretched without securing
the least alleviation to our fate, I have kept both facts from her, and
she does not know that closed doors mean bondage any more than she knows
that unrelieved darkness means blindness. She is absolutely ignorant
that there is such a thing as light."

"Oh, madame!" I murmured, "Oh, madame! Show a poor girl what she can do
to restore you to your rights. The door is open and you can descend; but
that means----- Oh, madame, I am filled with terror when I think what.
He may be in the hall now. He may have missed the key and returned. If
only you were out of the house!"

"My dear girl," she quietly replied, "we will be some day. You will see
to that, I know. I do not think I could stay here, now that I have seen
another face than his. But I do not want to go now, to-day. I want to
prepare Theresa for freedom; she has lived so long quietly with me that
I dread the shock and excitement of other voices and the pressure of
city sounds upon her delicate ears. I must train her for contact with
the world. But you won't forget me if I allow you to lock us in again?
You will come back and open the doors, and let me go down again through
my old halls into the room where my husband died; and if Mr. Allison
objects---- My dear girl, you know now that he is an unscrupulous man,
that it is my money he begrudged me, and that he has used it and made
himself a rich man. But he has one spark of grace in him. He has never
forgotten that we needed bread and clothes. He has waited on us himself