usin? Oh, I
cannot leave the fort without her."

"Ha! where indeed is she?" exclaimed the youth, as he clasped his
trembling and scarcely conscious burden to his chest, "Almighty God,
where is she?" Then, after a short pause, and in a voice of tender but
exquisite anguish, "Clara, my beloved sister, do you not know me? It is
not Baynton but your brother, who now clasps you to his breaking heart."

A deluge of tears was the only answer of the wretched girl. They were
the first she had shed,--the first marks of consciousness she had
exhibited. Hitherto her heart had been oppressed; every fibre of her
brain racked almost to bursting, and filled only with ghastly flitting
visions of the dreadful horrors she had seen perpetrated, she had
continued, since the moment of her fainting in the block-house, as one
bereft of all memory of the past, or apprehension of the present. But
now, the full outpouring of her grief relieved her overcharged brain
and heart, even while the confused images floating before her
recollection acquired a more tangible and painful character. She raised
herself a moment from the chest on which her burning head reposed,
looked steadfastly in the face that hung anxiously over her own, and
saw indeed that it was her brother. She tried to speak, but she could
not utter a word, for the memory of all that had occurred that fatal
morning rushed with mountain weight upon her fainting spirit, and again
she wept, and more bitterly than before.

The young man pressed her in silence to his chest; nor was it until she
had given full vent to her grief, that he ventured to address her on
the subject of his own immediate sorrows. At length, when she appeared
somewhat more calm, he observed, in a voice broken by emotion,--

"Clara, dearest, what account have you to give me of Madeline? Has she
shared the fate of all? or have you reason to suppose her life has been
spared?"

Another burst of tears succeeded to these questions, for coupled with
the name of her cousin arose all the horrid associations connected with
her loss. As soon, however, as she could compose herself, she briefly
stated all she had witnessed of the affair, from the moment when the
boat of the schooner was seen to meet the strange looking object on the
water, to that when she had beheld her ill-fated cousin borne away
apparently lifeless in the arms of the tall Indian by whom she had been
captured.

During this recital, the heart of Captain de H