that were transpiring around her. No one thought of
awakening her. The sun was shining bright and clear when she opened her
eyes on the light the next morning.

How strangely still the house seemed! For a moment Jessie was
bewildered. Had it not been that the sun lay in a great bar in the
center of the room--and it never reached this point until nearly eight
in the morning--she would have thought that it was very, very early.

"My wedding-day!" murmured the girl, slipping from her couch and gazing
through the lace-draped windows on the white world without. But at that
moment a maid entered and she told Jessie Bain the story of the tragedy.

A thunder-bolt from a clear sky, the earth suddenly opening beneath her
feet, could not have startled Jessie Bain more. A few minutes later she
recovered her composure and hurried to Mrs. Varrick's room.

Mrs. Varrick reached out her hand to Jessie, and the next moment they
were sobbing wildly in each other's arms. Little by little the girl's
noble spirit in all its grandeur gained the ascendency. Slowly she
turned to the housekeeper, who was sobbing over the fact that there was
no one to take care of Hubert's wife, until a trained nurse the doctor
had expected should arrive.

"She shall be _my_ care," said Jessie, determinedly. "I will go to her
at once; lead the way, please."

Who shall picture the dismay of Jessie when she looked upon the face of
the woman who had come between her and the man she was to have wedded
that day and found that it was the very creature whom she herself had
sheltered--the girl whom she had known as Margaret Moore?

The doctor was greatly moved at the heroic stand Jessie Bain proposed to
take in nursing her rival back to health and strength.

"Not one woman in a thousand would do it," he declared. "May Heaven
bless you for it! Besides," he added in a low, grave voice, "you could
serve poor Hubert Varrick in no better way than by restoring her. If
she dies it will go hard indeed with young Varrick."

Jessie realized this but too well, and bent all her energies to nurse
her back to health and strength, though what she suffered no one in this
world could tell.

If Margaret recovered, she knew that she would go away with Hubert. He
might not love her, but he would be obliged to live his whole life out
with her. If she died, he would hang for it. Better that he should live,
even with the other one, than die.

Her heart went out to Hubert Varrick in