ing so much as to be left alone and free to indulge
in the emotions which were fast getting the mastery of her. Covering her
face with her hands, as the door closed after Mrs. Dobson, she sat for a
moment bereft of the power to think or feel. Then, as things became more
real, as great throbs of heat and pain went tearing through her temples,
she remembered that she was in Richard's house, up in the room which
Mrs. Dobson had termed the bridal chamber, the apartments which had been
fitted up for Richard's bride, whoever she might be.

"I never counted on this," she whispered, as she paced up and down the
range of rooms, from the little parlor or boudoir to the dressing room
beyond the bedroom, and the little conservatory at the side, where the
choicest of plants were in blossom, and where the dampness was so cool
to her burning brow.

It did not strike her as strange that Richard should have thought of all
this, nor did she wonder whose taste had aided him in making such a
home. She did not wonder at anything except at herself, who had missed
so much and fallen into such depths of woe.

"Oh, Richard!" she sighed, as she went back to the bridal chamber. "You
would pity me now, and forgive me, too, if you knew what I am suffering
here in your home, which can never, never be mine!"

She was standing now near the low window, taking in the effect of her
surroundings, from the white ground carpet covered with brilliant
bouquets, to the unrumpled, snowy bed which looked so deliciously cool
and inviting and seemed beckoning the poor, tired woman to its embrace.
And Ethie yielded at last to the silent invitation, forgetting
everything save how tired, and sorry, and fever-smitten she was, and how
heavy her swollen eyelids were with tears unshed, and the many nights
she had not slept. Ethie's cheeks were turning crimson, and her pulse
throbbing rapidly as, loosing her long, beautiful hair, which of all her
girlish beauty remained unimpaired, and putting off her little gaiters,
she lay down upon the snowy bed, and pressing her aching head upon the
pillows, whispered softly to her other self--the Ethelyn Grant she used
to know in Chicopee, when a little twelve-year-old girl she fled from
the maddened cow and met the tall young man from the West.

"Governor Markham they call him now," she said, "and I am Mrs.
Governor," and a wild laugh broke the stillness of the rooms kept so
sacred until now.

In the hall below Hannah overhear