scaped from Louis, but I had not a thought of finding you
here. When I saw you in my room, however, a great fear came over me that
you would yet prove my ruin. I imagined that you had just arrived in New
York, and had come here to take away your things, and were perhaps
searching my room for proofs of your identity. So on the impulse of the
moment I locked you in, intending to make my own terms with you before
I let you go."

"Did you suppose, after my experience in New Orleans, that I would trust
myself with you without letting some one know where I could be found?"
Mona quietly asked.

"If I had stopped to think I might have known that you would not," the
woman said, sullenly. "But how did you get out of that hotel in Havana?"

"Mr. Justin Cutler assisted me."

Mrs. Montague flushed hotly at the mention of that name.

"Yes, I know, but how?" she said.

Mona briefly explained the manner of her escape, then inquired, in a
voice of grave reproach:

"How could you conspire against me in such a way? How could you aid your
nephew in so foul a wrong?"

"I have already told you--to make our fortunes secure," was the cool
retort.

Mona shuddered. It seemed such a heartless thing to do, to plan the ruin
of a homeless, unprotected girl for the sake of money.

Mrs. Montague noticed it, and smiled bitterly.

"You surely did not suppose I bore you any love, did you?" she sneered.
"I have told you how I hated your mother, and it is but natural that the
feeling should manifest itself against her child, especially as you both
had usurped the affections of my husband."

"Such a spirit is utterly beyond my comprehension," gravely said the
girl, "when your only possible reason for such hatred of a beautiful
girl was that my father loved and married her."

"Well, and wasn't that enough?" hotly exclaimed Mrs. Montague. "For years
Walter Dinsmore's aunt had intended that he should marry me--that was the
condition upon which he was to have her fortune--and I had been reared
with that expectation. Therefore, it was no light grief when I learned by
accident, three weeks after he sailed for Europe, that he had married a
girl who had come to New York to earn her living as a milliner. They went
abroad together and registered as Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Montague. I was
wild, frantic, desperate, when I discovered it; but I kept the matter to
myself. I did not wish Miss Dinsmore to learn the fact, for I had a plan
in my mind which I hop