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222 happy. I am now in hell; but were she not here, were I alone, and she elsewhere, it would be hell unendurable in its agonies, I should go mad like my brother. She must be mine, or my fate is the same as his." "Are you going to marry her?"

"She will not marry me. Believe what I say. That girl. Glory, is the curse and ruin of me and of this house. I know it, and yet I cannot help it. She might have made me happy and built up my prosperity and family. Then I should have been a good and a glad man, a man altogether other from what I am now. But your son came in the way. He marred everything. Glory still thinks of him, it does not matter that he be gone. She will cling to him and keep from me. Yet she is destined for me. She never was for George. If he were to turn up—I don't say that it is possible or even probable, but suppose he were—she would fly to him. I might chain her up, but she'd break away. There is nothing for it," he pursued, dropping into a sullen mood. "We must battle it out between us. None can or must intervene; whoever attempts it shall be trampled under our feet. We must work out our own fate together; there is no help for it. I tell you, if I were born again, and I knew that this were before me, I'd fly to the Indies, to Africa, anywhere to be from her, so as never to see her, never to know of her, and then I might jog on through life in quiet, and some sort of happiness. But that is not possible. I have seen her. I have her here under my roof, but we are still apart as the poles. Go away, aunt, it is of no good your interfering. No one comes here, she and I must work the sum out between us. There's a fate over all and we cannot fight against it, but it falls on us and crushes us." Mrs. De Witt was awed. She rose. She knew that her mission was fruitless, that there was no possibility of her gaining her point. She opened the door, and started back before an apparition in carnation and white. " Whom have we here?"

"Mrs. Charles Pettican, madam," said the apparition with a stately curtsey.