ur friends in W----.

It is needless to chronicle the effect of the news of their daughter's
flight, upon Mr. and Mrs. Lamotte.

That is a thing we can all understand; we can picture it for ourselves.

Mrs. Lamotte shut herself up in her chamber, and refused to be comforted
by family or friends. Mr. Lamotte, bitterly grieved, terribly shocked,
did all that a father could do, which was in effect, nothing.

One day, the mail brought them a copy of the marriage certificate of
Sybil Lamotte and John Burrill; but that was all. Where the fugitives
had gone, could not be discovered.

Francis Lamotte went about as usual; with a little more of haughtiness,
a little more reserve, and just a tinge of melancholy in his manner. He
took Constance at her word, and came and went very much as of old, but
was so watchful over himself, so subdued, and as she thought, improved
in manner, that she declared confidentially to her aunt that he had
become "really quite a comfortable person to have in one's parlor." She
ceased snubbing him altogether, and received him with the frank
graciousness that used to charm Doctor Heath; assuring herself, often,
that "trouble was improving poor Frank."

Evan Lamotte was Evan Lamotte still. Now drunk, now sober; a little more
furious and ready to quarrel than usual, when in his cups; a little more
taciturn and inclined to solitude in his sober moments.

Doctor Heath went about among his patients, wearing his usual cheery
smile, speaking the usual comforting word, smoking, philosophizing,
rallying his friends, satirizing his enemies, genial, independent,
inscrutable as ever. He never called at Wardour Place, of course. He
never sought an opportunity for meeting or seeing Constance, and he
never avoided her; altogether, his conduct, from a romantic standpoint,
was very reprehensible.

And Constance; perhaps of them all, these three days had effected the
greatest change in her, as any chain of startling or strange events
must, in a measure, change the current of thought and feeling in a life
that has hitherto floated under a roseate cloud, on a sea without a
ripple. She had been rocked by storm waves; had seen a bark shipwrecked
close beside her; had even encountered mutiny in her own craft; when the
lull came, and she drifted quietly, she found herself forever face to
face with the facts that sorrow and trouble were abroad in the land,
that crime existed outside of the newspapers; that heartache and