her identity. I found it in a
plain, gold ring--the same that I had intrusted to the old nurse. Some
strange impulse caused me to slip the ring upon my finger. Then I went
to the bed and threw aside the curtains to gaze upon the sleeper. My
girl--my own girl! With what strange sensations I first looked upon her
face! Her eyes were open and fixed upon mine in a panic of terror. I
stooped to press my lips to her's and she closed her eyes in mortal
fear, I carried nothing but terror with me! I withdrew from the room
and went back, sobbing, to my chamber. My poor girl next morning
unconsciously betrayed her mother. It had nearly cost me my life."

"When the Le Noirs came home, the first night of their arrival they
entered my room, seized me in my bed and dragged me shrieking from it!"

"Good heaven! What punishment is sufficient for such wretches!"
exclaimed Traverse, starting up and pacing the narrow limits of the
cell.

"Listen! They soon stopped both my shrieks and my breath at once. I
lost consciousness for a time, and when I awoke I found myself in a
close carriage, rattling over a mountain road, through the night. Late
the next morning we reached an uninhabited country house, where I was
again imprisoned, in charge of an old dumb woman, whom Le Noir called
Mrs. Raven. This I afterwards understood to be Willow Heights, the
property of the orphan heiress, Clara Day. And here, also, for the term
of my stay, the presence of the unknown inmate got the house the
reputation of being haunted.

"The old dumb woman was a shade kinder to me than Dorcas Knight had
been, but I did not stay in her charge very long. One night the Le
Noirs came in hot haste. The young heiress had been delivered from
their charge by a degree of the Orphans' Court, and they had to give up
her house. I was drugged and hurried away. Some narcotic sedative must
have been insinuated into all my food, for I was in a state of
semi-sensibility and mild delirium during the whole course of a long
journey by land and sea, which passed to me like a dream, and at the
end of which I found myself here. No doubt, from the excessive use of
narcotics, there was some thing wild and stupid in my manner and
appearance that justified the charge of madness. And when I found that
I was a prisoner in a lunatic asylum, far, far away from the
neighborhood where at least I had once been known I gave way to the
wilder grief that further confirmed the story of my madness. I h