infinite number of little belongings with which the house was filled.

For as yet nothing had been changed, nothing had been moved. How fitting
this was, Antoinette knew better than anybody else, perhaps, for she was
the only person whom Elvira Brown had ever allowed to spend any length of
time with her, and she could remember--alas! how vividly, in spite of the
one great fear forever gnawing at her heart--that an article, no matter
how small, when once given place in this house, held that place always
till broken or in some other way robbed of its usefulness. She looked at
her friend's pet chair standing just in the one spot where she had seen
it eight years before, and her heart swelled, and a tear rose in her eye.
But there was not time for another. A sense of the straits in which she
found herself placed by the death of this dependable friend returned upon
her in full force; the past retired into its old place, and the present,
with its maddening problems, seized upon her nerve and quelled her once
indomitable spirit.

The fate which had pursued her ever since she had left her happy home
in France had not spared her at this crisis. The storm, of so little
consequence to her, had roused the driver's sympathy. This had not only
fixed her image in his mind but given away her destination. All hope of
hiding herself among the mountains was therefore gone. She would have to
move on; but where? If she were but able to leave now, she might before
morning find some covert from which help might be given her for further
escape. But the condition of the roads, as well as her own weakness,
forbade that. She needed food: she needed sleep. Of food she would find
plenty, she was sure; but sleep! How could she sleep, with the promise
of the morrow before her? Yet she must; everything depended upon her
strength. How could she win that rest which alone would secure it.

Pausing in the midst of the hall whither her restless thought had driven
her, she stared in a fruitless inquiry at the wall confronting her. Her
mind, like her feet, was at a standstill. She could neither think nor
act. In fact, she was at the point of a nervous collapse, when slowly
from out the void there rose to her view and pierced its way into her
mind the outline of the door upon which she had been steadily looking but
without seeing it till now. Why did she start as it thus took on shape
before her? There was nothing strange or mysterious about it. It led
now