led at Doctors' Commons,
at once. I shall at once provide you with suitable women attendants.
I have already engaged a proper housekeeper, to whom you can state all
your wishes. With regard to money matters and your correspondence, you
must consult me! For the present, you will readily see that I deem it
imprudent for you to leave these spacious and splendid grounds! But,
ye'll find ways to busy yourself. Women always do!"

The old pedant marveled at the young woman's composure, for she simply
bowed and awaited a termination of the interview. Slightly disconcerted,
he abruptly demanded: "Have you anything to say?"

"Only this, Andrew Fraser," coldly replied the heiress. "Your sending
away the only woman whom I know in the world has marked you as a tyrant
and a jailer." Her spirit was as unyielding as his own, and he winced.

"Ye'll find I had your father's warrant. I'll go on to the end and obey
him! There are to be no old associations kept up, and when ye come to
your own ye can do all ye will! I'll go my way in my duty and do it
as it seems right!" When he finished he was alone, for the daughter of
Valerie Delavigne had passed him with a glance of unutterable contempt.

There was fire in the eye of the rebellious girl, and the elastic
firmness of youth in her tread, but above stairs, in her own lonely
rooms, her courage faded away quickly. But she wrapped her sorrows in
her own proud young heart and turned her eyes to the far East. "Will he
come?" she murmured.

When the clumsy island serving girl had trimmed the fire and drawn the
heavy curtains, Nadine Johnstone locked her doors. She sat spellbound,
with a wildly beating heart, until she had read the last of the sixteen
provisions of her father's vindictive will. Though the whole fortune
was left absolutely to her, with the exception of twenty-five
thousand pounds each to Andrew Fraser and his son, she was tied up by
restrictions so infamously brutal, that her three years of minority
stretched out before her as a death in life. Five hundred pounds a year
of pin money were allowed to her until her majority, "to be expended
with the approval of her guardian."

In an agony of lonely sorrow she threw herself, dressed, upon her bed
and sobbed herself into forgetfulness, her last cry for help mingling
the names of Berthe Louison and Harry Hardwicke. "Will Justine be true
to her oath?" she faltered, as she drifted into the blessed release of
dreamland.

As the nigh