On the night in which Judge Wetherel, with murder stealthily watching
him from outer darkness, sat up to rewrite his will for the benefit of Nestoria
Bernard, the girl herself sat up in her own room, unable to sleep.

She was thinking of Edward; of the warnings which she had received that
he was unworthy of her; of the vague, incomplete, and yet gladdening retractions
which had followed on those warnings; of his beauty and graciousness
and irresistible tendernesses and lovable lovingness; of the decision which
must come to her concerning him from her father; of the undecipherable obscurity
of life beyond that; then again of Edward, always of Edward.

Amid so many meditations, of a character so sweetly or sorrowfully potent
for disturbance, how could she sleep, or even prepare herself for sleep? Furthermore,
there was something in the air of the night, a breath of miasma perhaps
from the marshes that stretched away along the westering coast, which
filled her nerves with tremors of unrest. Still dressed, she kept vigil for an
hour or two (how long she could not afterward remember) in a state of mind
which she tried to order into thought, but which persisted in remaining revery.
All manner of spiritual wanderings, a nomadic host of recollections, plans,
hopes, and fancies, came to her in confused succession, pushing one another
aside with eager impatience, like the hasty, transitory phantasms of dreams.
Things that belonged to the past and things that urgently claimed the future
plucked at her for a moment's consideration and vanished. It was one of those
hours in which the soul resembles a sea of little waves, devoid of drift or power,
tossing with wearisome monotony and breaking without result.

Of a sudden she perceived that her purse, containing all her little wealth
a hundred dollars or thereabouts, was not in her pocket. Poor as she was

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

and far away from the father who was her only source of supply, this disappearance
was a matter of rousing importance. Wondering at her own carelessness,
she started up with a beating heart and commenced a search for the
lost valuable. It was nowhere in the room; but presently it occurred to her
that during the early evening she had bought a cheap little painted basket from
a wandering Indian, who had made her think of Sassacus and King Philip;
and then she remembered that she had last seen her treasure in the parlor.
She trusted tremblingly that it was there yet, and, lighting a candle, she went
down stairs to look for it, treading softly so as not to disturb the slumbering
household. Under a cushion of the sofa, just where she had mechanically
placed it for temporary safety, she found the purse.

With a childlike sense of having escaped a great peril, and with a piteous
unconsciousness of the real and horrible jeopardy of life which lurked within
a few yards of her, she joyfully thrust the treasure into the waist of her dress,
and turned to leave the room. But the quick movement extinguished her candle;
she was obliged to halt where she was until her eyes could become accustomed
to the sudden imposition of darkness; and now she made a discovery
which only this obscurity could have enabled her to make. A single frail
beam of light came to her tenderly, like some delicate angel warning her of
danger. In her surprise she nearly uttered an exclamation; and had she done
so, she might have arrested the step of imminent homicide, as also she might
have brought its alarmed violence upon herself. Being a brave girl, with the
steady nerves of health, she remained silent, and calmly studied the apparition,
discovering almost immediately that it came from the keyhole of the study
door. So unfamiliar was she with the thought of crime, that, notwithstanding
the lateness of the hour, not a suspicion of murder or burglary crossed her.
She took it for granted that Judge Wetherel had been kept up by pressure of
urgent business; and, saying to herself that she would surprise him with a second
“good-night,” she glided toward the study. On reaching the door, however,
the idea came to her that her venerable friend might not like to be disturbed
in his work, and she paused.

Her hand was still upon the knob, when she heard within an indistinct utterance
in a tone which she did not fully recognize; her first instantaneous
idea being that it could not be the voice of the Judge, and her next that he was
suffering with illness. We may suppose that the sound was the old man's instinctive
and inarticulate exclamation of surprise and alarm on awakening
from his nap in his chair to find an intruder at his elbow. Next, and almost
in the same breath, came the noise of a scuffle. Frightened at once, and yet
eager to know what was passing, Nestoria gently turned the knob, pushed the
door ajar, and looked into the room.

What she saw was a blow, a gray head sinking under it, and a murderer
bending over his victim. In the next instant all was darkness, at least to this
horrified spectator. Either the study lamp was at that moment extinguished,
or Nestoria temporarily lost the use even of her physical senses. She believed
that she had screamed with all her strength, but the probability is that she did
not give forth a sound, for it is certain that no one in the house heard a cry,
and that the assassin quietly finished his purloinings. Although the girl could
not afterward remember that she had fainted, there must have been a brief
period of unconsciousness, or of stupor approaching to it. We know that under
overwhelming oppression of fright or horror, conditions of spirit occur
which may fairly be called waking nightmares. Men suddenly attacked by

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

wild beasts or by Indians have been seen to stand paralyzed, staring at the
approaching death without striving to repel it or even uttering an exclamation,
as if in a state of catalepsy or bereft of reason.

But it was not merely the sight of a shocking crime and the proximity of a
mortal peril which had thus stunned Nestoria. Dreadful as these things were
to innocence and defencelessness, they were surpassed in outrage by a grisly
revelation. She had recognized, beyond the possibility of questioning, the face
of the assassin; she had seen it as the countenance of the man who but a moment
before had possessed her heart; she had not a doubt that the deathblow
had been dealt by the hand of Edward Wetherel. No wonder that she stood,
or it may be lay, beside this tragedy, palsied, speechless, and taking no more
part in the scene than if she had been a ghost; no wonder that for a few seconds,
or perhaps for several minutes, she was as powerless as the very spirit
of the murdered man, as inaudible and unprotesting.

But presently an instinct came to life in her. It was a sentiment of shuddering,
of aversion, of recoil. She became aware that she was in darkness,
and that through that darkness the murderer was approaching. It was not
fear of death which led her to retreat before him, but a sense that she could
not bear to be near him, and that it would kill her to have him speak to her.
In her stupefied horror, or, as we might fairly call it, her insanity, she was
only conscious of a desire to avoid recognition. This man, whom she had
lately loved, and whom she had just seen performing the work of a demon,
how could she possibly address a word to him, or hear him call her by name?
Dazed, almost senseless, and conscious mainly of loathing, she retreated mechanically
before the steps which stealthily picked their way through the obscurity,
as Christiana, if left alone in the Dark Valley, might have shrunk
back before the audible oncoming of Apollyon.

Presently she reached a door, and felt that it was open. She opened it
wider, passed noiselessly through it, and found herself in the outer air. A few
stars glimmered faintly between driving clouds, and a wild, sultry wind shook
all the ghostly branches of the trees. Of a sudden her physical strength returned
to her, and she fled at full speed, without reflecting whither, her only
thought being to avoid the fallen angel who haunted her steps, and to escape
the task of saying to him, I know you for a devil! With just the intelligence
of a scared animal, she followed a path which she had often traversed both by
daylight and moonlight, descended a steep slope of the little bluff on which the
house stood, and reached the shore. The sombre, indistinct, limitless sea was
at her feet; its enormous mystery attracted her as it has attracted many other
wretched hearts; it seemed to her as if it offered a refuge. On the land she
had met shipwreck, and she looked for mercy to the waters. A boat was at
hand; she must wade knee-deep in order to reach it; but in another minute
she had climbed or fallen into it; then the moorings were unlashed, and she
was adrift.

Nestoria had now evaded the awful interview, the fear of which had driven
her abroad; and, no longer upheld and impelled by the strength of terror, she
lost her consciousness; this time, there can be no doubt, she really fainted.
No pursuer came; no one was at hand either to destroy or save; and in a few
minutes the senseless girl was far from shore. The gale, it must be said, did
not threaten her safety immediately, for it blew off the land, and where she
now was raised no sea. The boat in which she lay was one of those large
skiffs which are known in the neighborhood of New Haven as “sharpies,” and

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

which are navigated by means of one or two slender triangular sails, and
guided either by an oar in the stern or by a rudder. As the “sharpy” is flatbottomed,
and only draws a few inches of water, it is a fast craft in a light
breeze, but risky in a heavy one.

Nestoria's boat carried her out into the harbor and toward the meaning
expanse of Long Island Sound. It kept head on, for the single mast was set
well forward, and the imperfectly lashed sail, blowing out in a bellying pocket,
afforded a sufficient hold to the wind. There was a false, transitory prosperity
in the opening of this strange voyage, as there often is in the outset of
flights which seek destruction. With just such fatal smoothness are captives
in old poesy borne away by malignant magicians to imprisonment on undiscoverable
islands or in the caves of ocean. The home which murder had polluted,
the darkened room where a dear friend's reverend hair drooped into his
own blood, the clandestine face of that flying Cain from whom this unconscious
wanderer was escaping, the loved ones who would have sought to succor had
they known how succor was needed, were easily and speedily left behind. The
boat and its burden fluttered out afar from rescue upon a stormy sea.

At last there was an awakening. Life, which sometimes seems a monster
far more pitiless than death, dragged the girl back to suffering. At first she
did not know where she was, nor remember what had happened to her. She
was aware only of darkness, of solitude and abandonment, of an uneasy and
alarming movement, of a sense of utter helplessness. Of a sudden the past
struck her like a blow, and for a few moments she covered her face from it
with her hands, unobservant or careless of the frightful present. Then the increasing
and rapidly recurring roar of the surges, and the jerking, plunging
action of the boat as it entered the wilder waters beyond the bar, called her to
a sense of her strange situation. The storm of shocking recollections in her
soul subsided a little as the storm of relentless nature around her became more
audible, agitating, and menacing. Still amazed, even in the midst of her affright,
she sat up and looked about her.

She could see little. The rare and feeble stars, which seemed to swim like
wrecked sailors amid billowy clouds, had scant power of revelation. Around
her was tempestuous blackness, stretching away on every hand into infinity.
Even the snowy crests of the waves were only visible in a dim, spectral way,
and for a brief distance. The boat she could perceive, and the white ghost
of the struggling sail flying before her like a lost spirit, a guide ominous of a
grave. Holding by the handle of the leaping rudder, which had struck her
arm with a sort of spasmodic monition, as if urging her to seize it and exert
its spell, she turned and gazed, half-blinded, into the face of the gale. On her
left, but far behind her, she distinguished the red gleam of the lighthouse, now
darkening and now brightening as if signalling her to return. She knew at
last where she was, and comprehended what had befallen.

In this uttermost strait of sorrow and peril, flying from a paradise because
she had seen it changed into a hell, shrinking from sudden death and yet
scarcely desiring rescue, Nestoria bowed her head to pray.

It was the prayer of the shipwrecked, a petition which the remorseless sea
has so often mocked, changing it into a shriek of despair. A tumult of fighting
waves reeled into the boat, and in another moment the girl was struggling
for life.

p546-099 CHAPTER XXV. A SALVATION FROM THE SEA.

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

THE love of life, that instinct which seems to strengthen just in proportion
as invading death cuts intelligence down to the bare root of sensation,
enabled and forced Nestoria to hold fast to the wreck of her shallop, and to
struggle to keep her head above the waters.

Whether dissolution were not more tolerable than existence, whether it
would not be well to drop out of a world which had suddenly been changed
for her into a place of torment, she did not for an instant consider. Amid
tossings, buffetings, whirlings, and suffocations, she labored with her whole
surviving strength to climb out of the abyss which howled and sucked beneath
her, slowly fighting her way to the uncertain asylum of the inverted hulk, and
clinging there with a sort of unintelligent tenacity, like a thing of inanimate
nature. The slit in the keel for the centre-board offered a hold to her fingers,
and by means of this she stayed herself against the pushings of the billows.
A long time she remained thus; far longer than she had thought possible.
After nature has done all it seemingly can, necessity endows it with force to
do more. The power of the dying to resist death exceeds every energy known
to ordinary life, and borders closely upon miracle.

Presently a light came over the sea; her first wild impression was that
help must be at hand; but it was only the distant, alien rising of the moon.
We can picture her now to our eyesight, as well as to our sensibilities. We
have a vision of one who, though beaten and worn and sorrowful and desperate,
was rarely and one might say shiningly beautiful. Her long golden
hair, flung loose by the wind and the waves, blew out in tremulous glistening
streamers, like quivering strands torn from the northern lights. Her face was
as white as marble, but its delicate finish of feature was all the more obvious
because of this Pentelican coloring, and its mute resignation was more touching
than the agitated despair of the daughters of Niobe. The moon took pity
on her, and lighted her up with exceeding tenderness, and showed her forth
as an unequalled sacrifice. In all the earth there was not perhaps at that moment
another victim of disaster so fair to look upon and so fashioned to command
compassion. Both in beauty and in pathos she may have been for a time
without a rival.

Her thoughts meanwhile were on far other things than her own merits and
admirableness. Half confounded as she was by the outrages of the sea and by
her weakness, she was striving to prepare herself for entrance into that other
world which seemed so near; she was groping in the dark gateway of illimitable
mysteries for unearthly hands which should guide her out of all tempests
into the great peace of eternal mercy. The past had fallen away from her;
even the calamity which had driven her out vagrant appeared unsubstantial
and long since bygone; she had almost forgotten that she had lived and loved
to her disappointment and her hurt. The future only was real and urgent to
her. Her lips moved, not in reminiscence nor in complaint, but in petition.
“O God of our salvation, who art the confidence of them that are upon the

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

sea, receive me!” she pleaded, as only the shipwrecked who are at their last
breath are gifted to plead. Other such words thronged mercifully to her;
they seemed to lift her like angels, in glorious, shining arms; they bore her
lovingly through the waters which run between two worlds. The faith of
her whole innocent life, the faith which had been taught her from infancy by
the lips of her father, was now a mighty reality to her, and the only reality.
All the rest of existence had become as a vision from which one awakens.

But mortality had not yet lost its hold upon this waif of disaster. We
have not ventured an absurdity in describing her as eye-witnesses, for human
vision did find her out and human help reached her. In her extremity, just
as her numbed fingers were losing their hold, and while the fantastic lights
and music and tintinnabulations of the strange city of the drowning were already
bewildering her senses, Nestoria became aware of the approach of
some dark rolling bulk, out of which presently issued voices and a plashing
of oars, all ending in rescue. She was lifted up the side of a vessel, and carried
into a dimly-lighted cabin, and wrapped closely in blankets, and laid away.
Next some stinging and heating liquid, the taste of which struck her as strange
and disagreeable, was given her to drink. After that she lay quiet, though
with a troublous sense of oscillation among billows, while her mind sank
through shoals of reveries which grew more and more like dreams, until presently
she was conscious of nothing.

It was not the insensibility of a swoon, but of hard, immovable, vice-like
sleep. She lay thus for hours, and when she awoke the sun was shining
through the stern windows of the cabin, showing that the horrible night, a
night which seemed years in duration, had at last ended. She was still wet,
but she had no feeling of chillness, for the blankets and the summer heat
made a warmth all about her, and slumber had revived the currents of youth
in her veins. Raising herself with difficulty on one elbow, she looked about
her with a dreamy, torpid gaze, like that of an awakening infant.

A short and squarely built negro, slouchingly clad in garments much too
big for him, and exhibiting that lowly and undeveloped physiognomy which
almost surely indicates a southern black, rolled out of some unperceived lair
and shambled toward her.

“How is you, miss?” he asked with a grin and chuckle which might have
been supposed to express unrestrainable hilarity, but which he simply meant
to be reassuring.

“I am well,” replied Nestoria, with that languor and vacancy which we
sometimes see in persons who have been very ill.

“Sorry we could'n keer fur you no better,” he continued, rolling his eyes
around the rudely furnished cabin in an apologetical way. “Ain't fixed up
for ladies. Did'n have no dry clos' fur you, 'cause the' ain't no women folks
aboard. Jes' done you up in them blankets, an' give you a horn o' whiskey,
an' sont you to sleep. Done the bes' we could fur you, miss.”

All this was said with such spasmodic wriggling and luminous grinning as
if the peril and escape had been the broadest joke possible.

“I am very much obliged to you,” murmured Nestoria.

“You's welkim, miss. Got blown off sho', did'n you? Was the res' of
'em drowned?”

The girl shook her head. She could not enter upon the story of the hideous
night. “Where are you taking me to?” she presently inquired, not without
a hope that it might be to distant eastern lands.

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

“To New Yawk,” said the negro. “We's done got thar now, I guess.
Don' ye hear 'em roundin' to? Capm is gwine ter drop you in New Yawk.
'cause this schooner is boun' souf, to—to some other place—don' know 'zactly
whar she's boun.”

“Can I—pay you for saving me?” Nestoria timidly queried.

The man hesitated; he quaked and wriggled from head to foot; in his physical
way he was resisting temptation.

“No, I reckon not,” he at last responded, chuckling with unusual vehemence.
“We may want savin' ourselves some stormy night. You keep your
money to git back whar you b'longs.”

“God reward you!” she whispered; and he reverently answered, “Amen!”

By this time the schooner had lain to; and in a few minutes more Nestoria
was placed in a small boat and landed on a gray, dingy, deserted dock; having
actually seen but the steward and three sailors of the somewhat mysterious
craft to which she owned her life. One is tempted to suppose a smuggler; and
indeed there was a story current about that time of casks of merchandise being
discovered in the Sound by traders who were singularly prepared for such
a speculation in salvage; but, remembering what a moderate and rational
tariff we are blessed with, the smuggling hypothesis is obviously untenable.
Let us abandon useless suppositions and return to Nestoria.

She remained for some minutes upon the dock, not knowing where in the
wide world to go. To her the great city which lay beside her was as
much a trackless wilderness as her native mountains of Kurdistan would have
been to a New Yorker. Upon only one thing had she come to a resolution,
and that was that she would never return to Sea Lodge. Sitting down where
the sun could shine upon her still damp clothing, she buried her face in her
hands, and pondered long upon her horrible past and perplexing future. It
was still very early; business had not awakened, and the wharves and streets
were silent; there was no one at hand to watch or disturb her.

Would her situation overwhelm her, or would her character master the
situation? The result proved that she had individuality enough to order
events, instead of weakly submitting to them. She meditated with that seemingly
unnatural calmness and that lucidity which fundamentally strong spirits
discover in themselves under the pressure of disaster and despair. With an
ease which at any other time would have surprised and alarmed her, she disposed
of some mighty moral questions and decided upon her future course.
When she at last rose to her feet and set forward alone into the unfamiliar
mazes of New York, her steps might be uncertain, but not her mind. She had
resolved to find a hiding-place, and to remain concealed in it until she could
return to her father. She had said to herself that she would not bear witness
against Edward Wetherel; that it might be the duty of others so to do, but
that it could not be her duty; that she would never tell what she had seen,
never, never!

She wondered at herself for coming to such a determination, and once or
twice the thought struck her that she must be insane, but for all that she did
not waver. We will not pause to offer an apology for her which she did not
offer for herself, nor enter upon the difficult query as to whether her decision
were right or wrong. We propose simply to tell her story as it happened.
She could not bear witness against the man whom she had loved; she could
not aid in bringing him to death; she could not, and there was an end of it.
The resolution was little more than instinctive, or at the highest it sprang from

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

a root of pure emotion, but it was none the less inexorable. For once all her
education of conscience, all her innate and acquired sense of duty, fell prostrate
before a sentiment.

Her life henceforward was to be a woful and perhaps a criminal problem.
She did not think of that, but, drawing her thick green veil over her face,
walked on in a quiet, business-like way, looking on every side for her desired
hiding-place. It is stupefying to ponder upon such single-mindedness and simplicity.
It is much as if one were asked in good earnest to watch the adventures
of Jack the Giant Killer, or some other minute defier of monstrous potencies.
Here was a child of nineteen, ignorant of the world in almost every
manner of ignorance, and so topographically uninformed as to be at this very
moment losing her way in Fulton Market, who yet proposed to baffle the New
York police, the vast inquisition of public sentiment, and the Nemesis of ideal
justice. It would not be easy to imagine a greater disproportion in contending
forces. One is reminded of a water insect setting out to tread the rushings
of Niagara. And yet it may be that water insects do skip over the thunderous
cataract in safety.

Long before the girl found the asylum of which she was in search she became
languid with fatigue and hunger. She had no desire to eat, but she felt
that she must take some food or drop in the streets, and it seemed to her that
she could sip a cup of coffee. She looked timidly into the doors of various
eating shops, but the masculine stares which saluted her drove her onward.
Nowhere could she find a refectory frequented by her own sex; it was as if
the world had decided that women must not eat in public; as if even in America
the idea of the harem were dominant. The terrible isolation of the woman
who has no home attended her feet and oppressed her soul. Lonely, sad,
and weary, she wandered for two hours, slipping on the damp and foul pavements,
winding through masses of merchandise which lumbered the sidewalks,
and jostled by an ever-increasing crowd of hurrying men. All this time she
was endeavoring to get into some other quarter of the city. Wherever she
was, it appeared to her as if any place would be more friendly and more suitable
for her purposes than the one in which she happened to be.

At last she came to a great, rambling, sombre, sloppy market, encumbered
with a monstrous traffic in edibles, and overrunning with purchasers
and wayfarers. To her utter dismay she presently discovered that this was
the same market which had perplexed her footsteps in the very beginning of
her pilgrimage. For two hours she had feebly toiled away from it, and here
she was once more in its undesired medley and uproar. But at least it offered
her food; various stalls and shops sent forth an aroma of oysters and coffee; and
in some of them there were women satisfying their morning hunger. She
stole into one of these homely lairs, seated herself on a wooden stool without
a back, and leaned her aching head against the grimy wall.

“Stew?” asked a sweaty attendant in a foul apron and rumpled paper
cap.

Nestoria nodded, and added in a whisper, “Coffee.”

The food came, and she was making an attempt to eat, when a showy,
well-dressed young woman, bearing in her hand a copy of the “New York
Spasmodic,” entered with a peculiarly brisk and assured air, and seated herself
at the same table with the salutation, “I am so glad to see you here!”

Fancying that she was recognized, Nestoria stared in terror at the intruder,
ready to spring up and run away.

p546-103 CHAPTER XXVI. ROMANCE IN FACE OF REALITY.

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

One glance at the young woman who had so abruptly and cheerfully addressed
her convinced Nestoria that she was an entire stranger.

The new arrival was stylish, and even rather boldly showy; and yet she
was not unpleasing in either person or demeanor. She was slightly above the
middle height of her sex, and seemed all the taller because she was slender
almost to leanness; but she was noticeably easy and willowy in her movements,
and, one might concede, graceful. Her dark-red hair was abundant and tastefully
arranged; her tawny-hazel eyes were bright, and her complexion dazzlingly
fair; her features were regular enough, and her teeth were of sparkling
whiteness. Notwithstanding her brusque, confident address, and a certain
twinkle of affectation and sentimentality which perked about the corners
of her flexible mouth, her appearance was on the whole so much in her favor
that it would have been difficult to decide at first glance whether she were or
were not a person of good society and of culture. In age she might have been
anywhere from twenty to twenty-three.

“I never was here before,” said Nestoria, after one startled glance at this
sociable apparition.

“You needn't be ashamed of being here,” replied the other with a prompt
tartness, which, slight as it was, militated against her claims to high breeding.
She had noticed the girl's involuntary recoil as if to fly, and had attributed it
to mortified vanity at being caught in a Fulton Market oyster-shop, and had
felt offended thereby. “I often take my morning refreshment in this place,”
she continued, in a curiously stilted tone which was intended to be dignified and
impressive. “The people who eat here are just as nobly-natured as the minions
of wealth who tread the high-piled velvety carpets of Delmonico's. Patrick,
bring me a stew and coffee.”

“I am not ashamed to eat here,” replied Nestoria, coloring under a reproof
which seemed to her harshly hostile. Then, feeling keenly that she was
hopelessly wretched and doubting whether she were not darkly criminal, she
added in a mournful whisper, speaking to herself rather than to this stranger.
“Any place on earth is good enough for me.”

The other had already opened her copy of the “Spasmodic” and settled
herself to read the harrowing tale of “Angela's Revenge;” but on hearing
this utterance of an undisguisable despair, she looked up in wonder and with
an expression of honest though sentimental interest.

“And have you seen better days?” she asked in her affected, melodramatic
monotone, whimsical enough surely, but not devoid of sincerity.

Nestoria made no answer, but she thought of a lost home and a lost love,
and the tears brimmed her eyes.

“Poo-o-or cheild!” murmured the subscriber to the “Spasmodic.” “Has
the da-a-ark hand of misfortune been so insupportably heavy on thee?”

She mouthed her words like an actress in a fourth-rate theatre. She was
little less than ludicrous, and yet she meant to be truly sympathetic, and was
doing her best to console.

The homeless one still made no reply; her whole soul was busied in striving
to quell her emotion; she was obliged to fight hard to repress sobs and
convulsive twitchings.

“Poo-o-or, poo-o-or distressed spirit!” continued the stranger, stretching a

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

hand across the table and laying it on a quivering shoulder. “Canst thou
not tell me thy sorrow?'

“I have nothing to tell,” replied Nestoria, crushing more emotions in one
breath than the other had known in her whole life.

“Let us swear to respect each other's secrets,” exclaimed the sympathizer,
with an enthusiasm which was strongly tinctured with romantic joy. “You
have a secret of deep and dark misfortune, and you shall not divulge it even
to me, nor will I ask it. I also have my burden of woe. But let silence enfold
it. Why don't you eat your stew?”

“I will,” said Nestoria, and made a resolute attempt so to do, not from
hunger, but to beat off faintness.

The stranger meanwhile devoured crackers, oysters, and chopped cabbage
with appetite, having no doubt found them by experience to be very supporting
under burdens of woe.

“Shall I meet you here again?” she presently inquired.

“I don't know,” replied Nestoria. “I don't know where I shall live.”

“No home, no labor, no object in life, no anchor of duty, no star of hope
in the future?” sighingly queried the other.

“I want a home,” said the friendless girl, looking up with a glimmer of
hope in her piteous eyes. “Can you show me a place where I can live and
work by myself? A cheap place?”

“Let us be frank with each other,” exclaimed the tawny-eyed one, throwing
out her hand in a manner which she conceived to be gracefully expressive
or noble and generous emotion. “My name is Imogen Eleonore Jones. What
is yours?”

“I wish you would be satisfied with calling me Nettie,” answered Nestoria,
after hunting through her mind for a false name, and deciding that she could
not assume one.

“I will,” promised Miss Jones with delight. “Then you really, really
have a secret! How fascinating and how pathetic! You shall never lack a
friend while I live, and never, never will I ask your family name, nor interrogate
you of your sorrow. You want to abide and labor alone. What can
you do? Can you teach school? Oh, no, never! Then you would be seen
and known; you would be the cynosure of the insolent, prying public eye;
you can't teach.”

“I can paint fans,” suggested Nestoria despairingly, for just then that industry
seemed a feeble resource.

“Paint fans,” repeated Miss Jones. “But can you sell them after you
have painted them?” she added with a practical sense which did not seem to
be foreign to her real character, notwithstanding her melodramatic tones and
phrases. “Well, if you can't, I can, or at least I will. I will hawk them from
mart to mart, and bring you the proceeds of your æsthetic travail. Come
with me. There is a chamber vacant next to mine. You shall abide in it,
and I will be your lone sentinel. Have you any money?”

“I have eighty dollars,” replied the confiding Nestoria.

“It will last a while,” said Miss Jones after a moment of business-like reflection,
during which she cast up some small computation in her head. “And
meantime we will beat the airs of fortune with your exquisite painted fans.
What are you doing?”

“I am going to pay for my breakfast,” explained Nestoria, fumbling for
her purse.

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

“I thought perhaps you were drawing a poniard,” observed Imogen Eleonore
Jones, with a slight air of disappointment. “I was about to hold your
hand, and exhort you to hope on, hope ever. But don't pay. Put up your little
treasure. Let me defray the expenses of this fortunate interview. I have
a salary of nine hundred dollars for teaching, and I have five hundred or so
in bank, the savings of three long years. I insist upon paying for both.”

Nestoria submitted; a salary of nine hundred dollars seemed immense to
her; if she had possessed it, she would have undertaken to relieve the poor of
an entire city.

“Now let us buy some fruit,” continued Miss Jones, when she had wiped
out the two modest accounts. “This is my matutinal marketing, as well as
my matutinal walk. I come hither to purchase peaches for my noon collation,
because they are cheaper here than on the stalls up town. I take a light
breakfast; then I take a light lunch of fruit and rolls; then I try every day to
afford one good meal, my dinner. One has to economize, you know, on the
salary of an instructor,” she explained with a courage for which we must
honor her, so humiliating is that word “economy” to many people of narrow
incomes. “Now don't you buy anything for yourself,” she insisted. “I will
market for two to-day. All I want is that you should carry your own paper
of peaches, like a true, high-minded woman, who is conscious of her own
dignity.”

“I will carry both the parcels,” offered Nestoria, putting out her little
hands.

“No, you shan't carry mine,” declared Miss Jones. “And you shan't
carry yours either,” she added, while the tears of sympathy sprang into her
eyes. “You look so pale and weak I won't let you. Have you any baggage?”

“I have lost everything,” replied Nestoria.

“Lost everything! And your dress is damp too!” exclaimed Imogen
Eleonore. “Why, you are wet clean through!” Then in a really awe-stricken
whisper, “Did you try to drown yourself?”

Nestoria pressed her veil over her mouth with a shaking hand, and made
no reply.

“I wish I could kiss you,” whispered Miss Jones, imperfectly suppressing
a sob. “I wish all these people were not here staring. I want to kiss you.”

After wavering to and fro a moment in her willowy way, she suddenly
bent forward and placed a kiss on the green barege which covered Nestoria's
forehead. In response a low, suffocated murmur came through the veil,
“Thank you.”

“Now let us go,” said Imogen Eleonore, taking her protégée gently by
the arm. “We will take the street-cars. I generally walk up, for the exercise;
but we will ride to-day.”

By the time they were seated in a car this odd young woman had recovered
her composure, and with it some of her stilted fashions of thought and
utterance.

“Do you know why I thought you were drawing a poniard from your
bosom?” she asked in a sepulchral murmur. “See here. I was perusing it
as I came down to the market.”

Unfolding her copy of the “Spasmodic,” she took out of it another fearfully
and wonderfully illustrated production, a specimen half-sheet of the
“Weekly Turtle Dove,” and read in her melodramatic fashion the following

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elegant extract: “ `Allyne Castleton left the room, but returned again to look
upon the sleeping object of his dreams, who had been that night so strangely
restored to him, when he mourned her as sleeping beneath the fragrant roses
of a hillside burial-place in sunny Naples. The soft, rich, velvet-piled carpets
gave back no sound of his footsteps as he returned to his chamber-door, and
he saw with horror his beautiful cousin Isabel, bending over his loved Angela,
draw a gleaming dagger of exquisite workmanship from her bosom and lift
her hand as if she would bury it to the hilt in the slumber-soothed bosom.
The rest of this story will be found in'—well, that's all,” said Imogen Eleonore.
“But that was the passage which filled my mind when I started so at beholding
you put your hand into your neck. I expected as much as could be to see
you produce a two-edged dagger with a handle of wrought and jewelled
ivory.”

Nestoria's only response to this talk was a slight recoil from the “Weekly
Turtle Dove.” The story of an attempt to “murder sleep” brought back to
her the horrible tragedy of the previous night. In spite of her efforts at self-control,
she trembled as if she were in the chill fit of a fever.

Imogen Jones drew a sigh of mingled compassion and satisfaction. She
had not a doubt that her companion carried hid in her bosom a “gleaming
dagger of exquisite workmanship,” wherewith to cut short surcease of sorrow,
should it prove too burdensome. Such wretchedness enchanted her melodramatic
imagination, and she actually envied Nestoria the distinction of possessing
it.

“Poo-o-or thing!” she whispered. “Thou art indeed heavy laden. But
fear not and fail not. I will guard thy secret and companion thee. None
shall find thee out, nor harm thee. We will walk the ways of life unseen together.
But, oh, what a light the works of genius cast upon this mystery of
existence! Had it not been for my familiarity with the chefdoeevers of fiction,
I should not have been able to at once divine your woes and put forth toward
them the tendrils of my sympathy. I read every story I can find. I have
piles and piles of the `Spasmodic' and the `Turtle Dove.' They will help
you while away the long, long hours of your mysterious seclusion.”

After what seemed to Nestoria a prodigious journey through a labyrinth of
streets and turnings, Miss Jones imperiously shook her parasol at the conductor,
and stopped the car.

“We are now near my abode,” she whispered mysteriously. “Let us
alight.”