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Rh of the lot, and over this, dark, mournful-looking trails of ivy hung downward, rubbing back and forth in the passing breaths of wind. It was a prospect and an hour conducive to melancholy. But Viola felt none. For the moment a sense of hunted terror had shut out all other feelings.

He had searched for her, employed detectives to try and find a clue to her hiding-place! And now, led by some horrible caprice of destiny, she had walked into the very house where he would soonest find her. She must go to-morrow. Mrs. Cassidy could not be trusted. The expression of her face, with its ugly, half-concealed triumph and its coarsely prying interest, warned the girl that the secret of her whereabouts would not long remain with the widow. In a fever of anxiety she paced up and down the room. Her nerves, broken by the shock and strain of the past two weeks, exaggerated the importance of the situation, till she felt as if Mrs. Cassidy and Gault had spread a net around her, from which, in her weakness, she would never be able to break away.

She fell asleep, only to wake in the dead of the night, shaken into throbbing consciousness by the thought that the widow had already communicated with Gault, and that the conversation of that evening was for the purpose