On her pallid, hopeless face had come such a light of joy and grat.i.tude and boundless surprise as can only shine after long grief and pain when the grave seems to give up its dead and our beloved live again.

Her wistful, yearning eyes had been granted the most joyful sight that Heaven could have given--the sight of Lovelace Ellsworth sitting at the open window of his room, gazing with a strange, intent look at the setting sun as it sank below the mountain-tops and left the world in shadow.

"G.o.d in Heaven, I thank Thee! He lives; my beloved one, we shall be restored to each other!" repeated the girl in an ecstacy of gladness; and her dark-blue eyes clung rapturously to the handsome face, wondering at its pallor and strange, intent look.

"Dear Love, how pale and thin and sad he looks! He has been ill, perhaps, or it is grief for me that has changed him so! It is strange that he never found me when I was such a short distance away; but there are many mysteries to be unraveled yet," she murmured, rising to her feet, and going in haste to a side entrance, where she could easily gain the upper portion of the house without being detected.

As she mounted the stairs, she was thinking so gladly of the joyful reunion with Love, that she did not observe, until they were face to face, a lady coming out of his room. It was Mrs. Ellsworth; and as she met the pale, trembling girl gliding like a shadow in the semi-darkness of the corridor, a long, loud, wailing cry burst from her startled lips, and making an effort to fly from what she took for a veritable ghost, she tripped, and fell prostrate to the floor.

Dainty saw her cruel aunt distinctly, heard the startled cry and the fall; but she never looked back, but ran eagerly to her darling's room.

She tore open the door, and rushed over the threshold, across the room, with outstretched arms.

"Oh, my love, my darling!"

Her young husband was sitting at the window in an easy-chair, with a velvet dressing-gown wrapped about him, and at the sound of her entrance, he turned his face around, and looked at the intruder blankly.

Blankly!--that was the only word that described it.

If Dainty had been the greatest stranger in the world, her young husband could not have turned upon her lovely, agitated face a more calm, unrecognizing stare.

For a moment she stopped, and regarded him pitifully, sobbing:

"Oh, Love! am I so changed you do not know your own little Dainty, your wife? Oh, look at me closely! I have been ill, and lost my beauty for a little while. They had to cut my hair, but, dearest, it will soon grow again as pretty as ever!"

She moved closer, and timidly clasped her arms about his neck.

"Oh, my darling! do not look at me as if I were a stranger! Oh, do not!

That cold, stony stare almost breaks my heart! Oh, Love! it is your own little Dainty! I was stolen away from you, and oh! I have pa.s.sed through such a terrible experience! You have been ill, too, have you not, my dearest one? Oh, how thin and pale you are, but just as handsome as ever!" and she clasped him close in a warm embrace, and showered fond, wifely kisses on his cold, unresponsive lips.

The door opened suddenly, and an intelligent-looking mulatto man came in very softly, as if into a sick room.

Dainty knew him at once as Love's valued personal attendant Franklin.

Her arms dropped from Love's neck, and she blushed as he exclaimed:

"So it's really you, Miss Chase?"

"Why, Franklin, you knew me at once, but your master looks on me as a stranger!" she answered, in surprise that grew boundless as the man returned, sadly:

"Alas! Miss Chase, you and all the world must ever remain strangers to my poor master now!"

The mulatto was a clever, well-educated person, and his words, strange as they sounded, carried the ring of truth.

"What can you mean?" she faltered.

"Miss Chase, where have you been? Have you heard nothing of Mr.

Ellsworth's sad condition?" he asked, respectfully.

Still keeping her arm around Love's neck, the young girl answered, gently:

"I was kidnapped the night before my wedding, Franklin, and the next day I was told Mr. Ellsworth had been shot and was dying. Then I was taken very ill, and knew nothing more till I returned here to-day, when I was overjoyed to learn that he was still alive!"

The man looked at her with genuine sadness.

"Ah, Miss Chase! I do not know whether you should be glad or not. Is not this more cruel than death?"

"I do not understand," she faltered, uncomprehendingly; and he answered, with intense sympathy:

"You have spoken to him, and he does not know you--you, the dearest creature on earth to him, Miss Chase! Neither does he recognize any one else, nor remember anything. There is a bullet in his head that the doctors can not extricate, and it has destroyed his mental faculties completely. His health is good, but he has forgotten the past, and lost even the power of speech. He will never be anything, they say, but a harmless idiot."

She cried out with a terrible anger that it was not true, that she could not believe it; he was trying to deceive her and break her heart.

He was usually a quiet, stolid man, but the tears came to his eyes as she knelt on the floor and wound her arms about Love in pa.s.sionate embraces, and, with tears that might have moved a heart made of stone, called on him to pity her and speak to her, his love, his Dainty, his true wife, whose heart was breaking for one tender word from his dear lips!

CHAPTER XXIX.

AS WE KISS THE DEAD.

Alas! nor words, nor tears, nor embraces, nor reproaches could move Love Ellsworth from his statue-like repose.

He suffered Dainty's caresses pa.s.sively, but he did not return them, and his large, beautiful dark eyes dwelt on her face with the gentle calm of an infant whose intellect is not yet awakened.

"You see how it is, Miss Chase, and G.o.d knows how sorry I am to see my dear master so," Franklin said, sorrowfully, as she desisted at last, and gazed in silent anguish at the mental wreck in the chair.

A new thought came to her, and she exclaimed:

"Where is my mother?"

"She returned to Richmond almost a month ago, Miss Chase."

"Why did she not remain and nurse poor Love?" she groaned.

Franklin hesitated a moment, then returned in a respectful undertone:

"I can not say for a certainty, miss, but it is whispered among the servants that Mrs. Ellsworth sent her away because the young ladies wished it."

"The young ladies?" inquiringly.

"Miss Peyton and Miss Craye, your cousins. Mrs. Ellsworth has adopted them as her joint heiresses since she came into the fortune that my master lost by his failure to marry on his twenty-sixth birthday."

He gave a great start of surprise when the lovely, sad-eyed girl answered quickly:

"He did not lose it, for in the fear of some such treachery as afterward really happened, your master persuaded me to consent to a secret marriage in the middle of July, so that I have really been his wife going on three months."