r, his
teeth chattering, as he muttered:

"It is her ghost!--her ghost!"

"Faynie Fairfax, why do I find you here, in the library, in the dead of
the night, in the company of the man who is to wed my daughter Claire,
and who parted from her scarcely two hours since, supposedly to leave
the house? Why are you two here together! Explain this most
extraordinary and most atrocious scene at once. I command you!" she
cried, her voice rising to a shrill scream in her rising anger.

Faynie turned a face toward her white as a marble statue, but no word
broke from her lips.

The presence of the others seemed to bring Kendale back to his senses.

"It means," spoke Faynie, after a full moment's pause, "that the hour
has come in which I must confess to all gathered here the pitiful story
I have to tell, and which will explain what has long been an unsolved
mystery to you--where, how and with whom I spent the time from the hour
in which I left this roof until I returned to it.

"You say that this is the man who is your daughter's lover, Mrs.
Fairfax--the man who is soon to marry Claire.

"I declare that this marriage can never be, because this man has a
living wife," she cried, in a high, clear voice.

"It is false!" shrieked Kendale. "The girl I married in the old church
is dead--dead, I tell you. I--I saw her buried with my own eyes!"

"She is not dead, for I am that unfortunate girl," answered Faynie, in a
voice that trembled with agonized emotion.

"Listen all, while I tell my story," she sobbed. "Surely the saddest,
most pitiful story a young girl ever had to tell."

Then, in a panting voice, she told her horrified listeners all, from the
beginning to the very end, omitting not the slightest detail, dwelling
with a pathos that brought tears to every eye, of how she had loved him
up to the very hour he had come for her to elope with him; her horror
and fear of him growing more intense because of the marriage he forced
her into, with the concealed revolver pressed so close to her heart she
dared not disobey his slightest command.

And how the conviction grew upon her that he was marrying her for wealth
only, and the inspiration that came to her to test his so-called love by
telling him that she had been disinherited, though she was confident
that her father had made his will in her favor, leaving her his entire
fortune.

Dwelling with piteous sobs on how he had then and there struck her down
to death, as he suppose