ght when she had parted from her husband, she slipped down in
her misery to the ground, and hid her face in her hands. Now she knew
the man she had loved, now she was learning to know the man who had
loved her. The one would drag her down to bottomless depths of blackness
and infamy; the other had given up all for her--even herself--and gone
forth a homeless, penniless wanderer, to fight the battle of life.

"Oh! truest and noblest!" her heart cried, in its passionate pain, "how
I have wronged you! Bravest and best heart that ever beat in man's
breast--am I only to know your worth when it is too late?"

It seemed so. Richard Fletcher had disappeared out of the world--the
world she knew--as utterly as though he had never been in it. The slow
months dragged drearily by; but he never came. The piteous advertisement
in the _Herald_ newspaper stood unanswered when the spring-buds burst;
and she was alone in her worse than widowhood, in the Dover Cottage
still.

With the glory of the brilliant new summer, new hope dawned for her. A
tiny messenger, with Richard Fletcher's great brown eyes, smiled up in
her face, and a baby head nestled against her lonely heart. Ah! she knew
now how she loved baby's father, when the brown eyes, of which these
were the counterpart, were lost to her forever.

So, with the great world shut out, and with only baby Richard and her
two servants, life went on in the solitary cottage. The winds of winter
had five times swept over the ceaseless sea, and little Richard could
toddle and lisp; and in Marian Fletcher's heart hope slowly died out.
She had lost him through her own fault; he, to whom she had been bound
in the mysterious tie of marriage, would never look upon her cruel face
again.

She sat one stormy November night, thinking very sadly of the true heart
and strong love she had cast away. Her boy lay asleep before the ruddy
fire; the rain and wind beat like human things against the glass. She
sat looking seaward, with weary, empty eyes, so desolate--so desolate,
her soul crying out with unutterable yearning for the wanderer to come
back.

As she stood there gazing sadly out at the wild night falling over the
wild sea, her one servant came hurriedly into the room with startled
affright in her eyes.

"Oh, ma'am," she cried, "such a dreadful thing! The up-train from New
York has had an accident, has fell over the embankment just below here
and half the passengers are killed and wounded. The