stions.

"Go in!" she says, spinning the other round, and pushing her towards the
door of the state-room. Then, attuning her voice to cheerfulness, she
adds:--

"In, and set the game of _vingt-un_ going. I'll join you by the time
you've got the cards shuffled."

Jessie, glad to see her sister in spirits unusually gleeful, makes no
protest, but glides towards the cabin door.

Soon as her back is turned, Helen once more faces round to the river,
again taking stand by the guard-rail. The wheel still goes round, its
paddles beating the water into bubbles, and casting the crimson-white
spray afar over the surface of the stream.

But now, she has no thought of flinging herself into the seething swirl,
though she means to do so with something else.

"Before the game of _vingt-un_ begins," she says in soliloquy, "I've got
a pack of cards to be dealt out here--among them a knave."

While speaking, she draws forth a bundle of letters--evidently old
ones--tied in a bit of blue ribbon. One after another, she drags them
free of the fastening--just as if dealing out cards. Each, as it comes
clear, is rent right across the middle, and tossed disdainfully into the
stream.

At the bottom of the packet, after the letters have been all disposed
of, is something seeming different. A piece of cardboard--a portrait--
in short, a _carte de visite_. It is the likeness of Charles Clancy,
given her on one of those days when he flung himself affectionately at
her feet.

She does not tear it in twain, as she has the letters; though at first
this is nearest her intent. Some thought restraining her, she holds it
up in the moon's light, her eyes for a time resting on, and closely
scanning it. Painful memories, winters of them, pass through her soul,
shown upon her countenance, while she makes scrutiny of the features so
indelibly graven upon her heart. She is looking her last upon them--not
with a wish to remember, but the hope to forget--of being able to erase
that image of him long-loved, wildly worshipped, from the tablets of her
memory, at once and for ever.

Who can tell what passed through her mind at that impending moment? Who
could describe her heart's desolation? Certainly, no writer of romance.

Whatever resolve she has arrived at, for a while she appears to hesitate
about executing it.--

Then, like an echo heard amidst the rippling waves, return to her ear
the words late spoken by her sister--

"Let us think o