tempted to believe
her under the influence of some intoxicant.

Mr. Goddard found a carriage standing near the entrance to the hotel,
and they were soon on their way home.

Not a word was spoken by either during the ride, and it would have
been impossible to have found two more utterly wretched people in all
that great city.

Upon entering their house, they found Emil Correlli in a state
bordering on frenzy, occasioned by the escape of Edith, and this
circumstance served for a few moments to distract their thoughts from
their own troubles.

Mr. Goddard was intensely relieved by the intelligence, and plainly
betrayed it in his manner.

When angrily called to account for it by his brother-in-law, he at
once replied, with an air of reckless defiance:

"Yes, I am glad of it--I would even have helped the girl to get away;
indeed, I was planning to do so, for such a dastardly fraud as you
perpetrated upon her should never be allowed to prosper."

He was rewarded for this speech, so loyal to Edith, only by an angry
oath, to which, however, he paid no attention.

Strangely enough, Anna Correlli, after the first emotion of surprise
and dismay had passed, paid no heed to the exciting conversation; she
had sunk into a chair by the window, where she sat pale and silent,
and absolutely motionless, save for the wild restlessness of her fiery
black eyes.

Mr. Goddard, finding the atmosphere so disagreeable, finally left the
room, and, mounting the stairs, shut himself in his own chamber, while
the enraged lover dashed out of the house to the nearest telegraph
office to send the message that caused the policeman to intercept
Edith upon her arrival in New York.

A few moments later, Mrs. Goddard--as we will, from courtesy, still
call her--crept wearily up to her room, where, tottering to a couch,
she threw herself prone upon her face, moaning and shivering with the
agony she could no longer control.

The blow, which for twenty years she had been dreading, had fallen at
last; but it was far more crushing and bitter than she had ever
dreamed it could be.

She had come at last to the dregs of the cup which once had seemed so
sweet and alluring to her senses, and they had poisoned her soul unto
death.

She knew that never again while she lived would she be able to face
the world and hide her misery beneath a mask of smiles; and the
bitterest drop of all, the sharpest thorn in her lacerated heart, was
the fact that the lit