.

"If Lucetta suspects any one," Loreen now steadily remarked, "then I
think she ought to tell you who it is."

"You do. Then perhaps you--" commenced Mr. Gryce--"can persuade her as
to her duty," he finished, as he saw her head rise in protest of what he
evidently had intended to demand.

"Lucetta will not yield to persuasion," was her quiet reply. "Nothing
short of conviction will move the sweetest-natured but the most
determined of all my mother's children. What she thinks is right, she
will do. I will not attempt to influence her."

Mr. Gryce, with one comprehensive survey of the two, hesitated no
longer. I saw the rising of the blood into his forehead, which always
precedes the beginning of one of his great moves, and, filled with a
sudden excitement, I awaited his next words as a tyro awaits the first
unfolding of the plan he has seen working in the brain of some famous
strategist.

"Miss Lucetta,"--his very tone was changed, changed in a way to make us
all start notwithstanding the preparation his momentary silence had
given us--"I have been thus pressing and perhaps rude in my appeal,
because of something which has come to my knowledge which cannot but
make you of all persons extremely anxious as to the meaning of this
terrible mystery. I am an old man, and you will not mind my bluntness. I
have been told--and your agitation convinces me there is truth in the
report--that you have a lover, a Mr. Ostrander----"

"Ah!" She had sunk as if crushed by one overwhelming blow to the earth.
The eyes, the lips, the whole pitiful face that was upturned to us,
remain in my memory to-day as the most terrible and yet the most moving
spectacle that has come into my by no means uneventful life. "What has
happened to him? Quick, quick, tell me!"

For answer Mr. Gryce drew out a telegram.

"From the master of the ship on which he was to sail," he explained. "It
asks if Mr. Ostrander left this town on Tuesday last, as no news has
been received of him."

"Loreen! Loreen! When he left us he passed down that way!" shrieked the
girl, rising like a spirit and pointing east toward Deacon Spear's. "He
is gone! He is lost! But his fate shall not remain a mystery. I will
dare its solution. I--I--To-night you will hear from me again."

And without another glance at any of us she turned and fled toward the
house.

XXXIV

CONDITIONS

But in another moment she was back, her eyes dilated and her whole
person exhaling