hopeless apathy. No, Ellen, there are no words can
describe what I suffered. I appealed to the girl who waited on me daily,
but who came only once a-day, and always after dark. I might as well have
appealed to the four walls of my room; the girl was utterly stolid. She
brought me everything I was likely to want from day to day, and gave me
ample means of replenishing my fire, and told me that I ought to make
myself comfortable. I had a much better life than any one in the
workhouse, she said; and I must be very wicked if I complained. I believe
she really thought I was a harmless madwoman, and that her master had a
right to shut me up in that room. One night, after I had been there for a
time that seemed like eternity, my father came----"

"What!" cried Ellen Whitelaw, "the stranger! I understand. That man was
your father; he came to see you that night; and as he was leaving you,
you gave that dreadful shriek we heard downstairs. O, if I had known the
truth--if I had only known!"

"_You_ heard me, Ellen? You were there?" Marian exclaimed, surprised. She
was, as yet, entirely ignorant of Ellen's marriage, and had been too much
bewildered by the suddenness of her escape to wonder how the bailiff's
daughter had happened to be so near at hand in that hour of deadly peril.

"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Holbrook; I was there, and I did not help you. But
never mind that now; tell me the rest of your story; tell me how your
father acted that night."

"He was with me alone for about ten minutes; he came to give me a last
chance, he said. If I liked to leave my husband for ever, and go to
America with him, I might do so; but before he let me out of that place,
he must have my solemn oath that I would make no attempt to see my
husband; that I would never again communicate with any one I had known up
to that time; that I would begin a new life, with him, my father, for my
sole protector. I had had some experience of the result of opposing him,
he said, and he now expected to find me reasonable.

"You can imagine my answer, Ellen. I would do anything, sacrifice
anything, except my fidelity to my husband. Heaven knows I would have
given twenty years of my life to escape from that dismal place, with the
mere chance of being able to get back to my husband; but I would not take
a false oath; I could not perjure myself, as that man would have made me
perjure myself, in order to win my release. I knelt at his feet and clung
about him, beseech