ickly toward the chimney-place. There Queenie had
stood shrinking before her like a little guilty ghost. She seemed to
be standing there still listening to the truth, and avenging herself at
last.

"Hertford is the father of your unborn child. You----"

And then it was that Queenie had fallen! had hit her head against the
andirons and was never again to suffer sanely. After that there were
the dreary weeks when the changed girl had paced the upper balcony with
her poor, vacant face set toward the hills. The pitiful story of her
weak lungs was started, the journey to the far away sanatorium, which
really ended in the cabin of a one-time slave of the family twenty
miles away! The hideous secret; the journeys by night and that last
terrible scene when the blank mind refused to interpret the agony of
the riven body and the wild screams and moans rang through the cabin
chamber. Alone, the old black woman and Ann Walden had witnessed the
struggle of life and death, which ended in the birth of Cynthia and the
release of Queenie Walden.

The four following years were nightmares of torture to Ann Walden.
After bringing her sister's body home from the supposed sanatorium she
lived a double life. As often as she dared she went to that cabin in
the far woods. She carried clothes and food to her old servant and the
little secreted child. She watched with fear-filled eyes the baby's
development, and to her great relief she knew at last that no mark of
mental evil had touched her! Then, when the old black woman died she
brought the baby thing home; had explained it according to her
knowledge of the people; they would believe what she told them--but
this stranger who had left the letter--she had not been deceived for
one moment!

The letter! While she had been reliving the past the words were
entering her consciousness. What she knew she passed unheedingly; what
she was yet to know rose as if to strike her by its force.

"I had believed that love," so Starr had written to his sister, "as men
know it, was not for me; my work, my joy in the service had always
seemed my recompense. I had asked Ann Walden to marry me because I
felt sure of myself, and in this lonely place I needed the
companionship, the wisdom and the social position her presence would
give to this great work of lifting up those worthy of recognition.
Then came the day when I saw the little sister--Ann Walden's and mine,
for we had always called her tha