ow."

Elizabeth did not reply. She was thinking of the books she had read, in
which women's ruin and disgrace were depicted with such thrilling force,
of the accounts in almost every daily journal of families broken up,
their holiest secrets made a public jest; of terrible discoveries
shaking a whole community with the commotion, and dragging all concerned
before the eyes of the whole world in scorn and humiliation. Yet Elsie
could say:

"Nothing ever does happen!"

She was thinking that perhaps in a few hours her beautiful home might be
agitated by a discovery, mysterious and full of shame as any of the
occurrences in the novels she was recalling; only a few hours and she
might be driven forth to a fate terrible as that of the unhappy women
whose names she had shuddered even to hear mentioned.

Not for one instant did she delude herself. She knew that the crisis was
at hand, the fearful crisis which she had seen approaching for weeks.
This time there would be no loophole of escape--this last respite was
all that would be granted her; and even now that she had gained that
much, there seemed every hour less probability of her being able to turn
it to advantage.

Then the task before her, the thing she had to do, a work at which the
stoutest man's heart might have quailed, alone in the dead of night,
with the fear of discovery constantly upon her, and the horror of an
awful task frenzying her mind!

She clenched her hands frantically as the scene presented itself, in all
its danger, to her excited fancy. She saw the night still and dark,
herself stealing like a criminal from the house; she saw the old cypress
rising up weird and solemn, she heard the low shiver of its branches as
they swayed to and fro; she saw the earth laid bare, saw----

The picture became too terrible, she could endure no longer, and with a
shuddering moan sank upon her knees in the centre of the room:

"God help me! God help me!"

Elsie sprang off the couch and ran towards her with a succession of
strangled shrieks.

"What is the matter? What ails you? You frighten me so. Are you
sick--did you see something? Is he going that way?"

But the woman neither saw nor heard; her eyes were fixed upon vacancy,
an appalling look lay on her haggard face, which might well have
startled stronger nerves than those of the girl by her side.

"Elizabeth! Elizabeth!" shrieked Elsie, in genuine terror which there
was no mistaking.

"I must do it," mutt