nothing more.
Don't let her get up--I'll come back to-morrow. Where is Mrs. Mellen?
she is so good a nurse I should like to give her my directions."

"She--she is not here," Mellen answered.

"In town, I suppose? You had better send for her, or give me her address
and I will call and tell her how much she is wanted the moment I reach
town. To-night I stay in the village."

"Thank you, I won't trouble you," replied Mellen. "You will be here
to-morrow morning?"

"Oh, certainly! Don't be at all alarmed--Miss Elsie is subject to these
nervous attacks. So I shan't call on your wife?"

"No, sir, no;" Mellen answered, impatiently. "I must return to my
sister."

He bowed the doctor downstairs and disappeared, leaving the son of
Esculapius to go on with some rather strange ideas in his head.

He had another patient in the village, and so drove over there in the
carriage which had brought him from the station. As he was standing on
the hotel porch old Jarvis Benson came up, caught him by the button-hole
and began a long story, to which the physician listened with such
patience as he could find.

CHAPTER LXVII.

UTTER LONELINESS.

When Elizabeth Mellen quitted the graveyard, she was for the moment
insane. Mellen had left her alone with the dead and the man she had so
hated. He had forsaken her there in that cold, desolate night,
regardless that she had once been his wife, scorning to remember her
even as a woman. This thought stung her proud soul through all its
anguish. She would not return home; not a single hour would she rest
under the roof which loomed up so gray and ghostly behind those weird
trees. But where could she go? in all the headlands that spread away
from the coast there was no shelter for her. Degraded, broken-hearted,
abandoned to her fate, like a wild animal, she stood alone among the
graves of those who had been happy enough to die.

This terrible blow, long as it had been dreaded, came upon the poor
woman suddenly at last. At the bottom of her heart there had been all
the while a desperate hope of escape. But it was over now. The worst had
come, and that was almost annihilation. She looked up to the sky. The
stars were all out. The soft gray clouds which had floated over them
only a little while before were turning leaden and heavy, so heavy that
the ocean was one mass of blackness, as if the mighty deep had veiled
itself with mourning, while the throes of a coming tempest heaved its
inn