wife. "Why did he not love her?" was the query the
apothecary asked himself over and over again; "she is so young, so
loving, and so fair. He has cast her off, this man to whom she has
given the passionate love of her young heart."

"You see you did wrong to hold me back," she said, gently. "How am I
to live and bear this sorrow that has come upon me? What am I to do?"

She looked around her with the bewildered air of one who had lost her
way, with the dazed appearance of one from beneath whose feet the bank
of safety has been withdrawn. Hope was dead, and the past a blank.

"No matter what your past has been, my poor child, you must remember
there is a future. Take up the burden again, and bear it nobly; go
back to your home, and commence life anew."

"I have no home and no friends," she sighed, hopelessly.

"Poor child," he said, pityingly, "is it as bad as that?"

A sudden idea seemed to occur to him.

"You are a perfect stranger to me," he said, "but I believe you to be
an honorable girl, and I should like to befriend you, as I would pray
Heaven to befriend a daughter of mine if she were similarly situated.
If I should put you in a way of obtaining your own living as companion
to an elderly lady in a distant city, would you be willing to take up
the tangled threads of your life again, and wait patiently until God
saw fit to call you--that is, you would never attempt to take your
life into your own hands again?" he asked, slowly. "Remember, such an
act is murder, and a murderer can not enter the kingdom of heaven."

He never forgot the startled, frightened glance that swept over the
beautiful face, plainly discernible in the white moonlight, nor the
quiver of the sweet, tremulous voice as Daisy answered:

"I think God must have intended me to live, or He would not have sent
you here to save me," she answered, impulsively. "Twice I have been
near death, and each time I have been rescued. I never attempted to
take my own life but this once. I shall try and accept my fate and
live out my weary life."

"Bravely spoken, my noble girl," replied her rescuer, heartily.

"I must go far away from here, though," she continued, shuddering; "I
am sorely persecuted here."

The old man listened gravely to her disconnected, incoherent words,
drawing but one conclusion from them--"the lover who had cast her off
was pursuing the child, as her relentless foe, to the very verge of
death and despair."

"It is my sister who