dining-room door.

"Where's Rag?" said Aileen, listening intently to the muffled sounds.

"I shut him up in the dining-room closet when I see you come up the
walk; he goes just wild to get with you any chance he can, and Mrs.
Googe told me she wanted to keep him round the house nights."

"Then be careful he doesn't get out to-night--supposing you chain him up
just for once."

"Oh, I couldn't do that; Mrs. Googe wouldn't let me; but I'll see he
doesn't follow you. I do wish you would come in--it's so lonesome," she
said again wistfully.

"I can't now, Ellen; but if I can get away after eight, I may run over
and sit with you a while. I'm staying with Mrs. Caukins because the
Colonel is away to-night."

"So I heard; 'Lias told me just now on his way down to the village. He
said he wouldn't be gone long, for the Colonel wasn't to home.--I
wonder what they've turned on all the lights for?" she said, craning her
neck to look farther up the road.

Aileen made no reply. She cautioned her again to keep Rag at home. A
series of muffled but agonized yelps followed her down the walk.

She stood still in the road and looked about her. Everywhere the great
quarry arc-lights were sending their searching rays out upon the
quarries and their approaches.

"What shall I do--oh, what _shall_ I do!" was her hopeless unuttered
cry.

It seemed to Aileen Armagh, standing there in the road at the entrance
to the bridge, as if a powerful X-ray were being directed at that moment
upon her whole life so far as she remembered it; and not only upon that,
but upon her heart and soul--her thoughts, desires, her secret agony; as
if the ray, in penetrating her body and soul, were laying bare her
secret to the night:--she still loved him.

"Oh, what shall I do--what _shall_ I do!" was the continual inner cry.

Life was showing itself to her in this experience, as seen through the
lens of a quickened imagination, in all its hideousness. Never had she
experienced such a sense of loneliness. Never had she realized so
forcibly that she was without father and mother, without kin in a
foreign country, without a true home and abiding-place. Never had it
been brought home to her with such keen pain that she was, in truth, a
waif in this great world; that the one solid support for her in this
world, her affections, had been ruthlessly cut away from under her by
the hand of the man she had loved with all the freshness and joy of her
young loving hea