“This, now, is the very handsomest part of the whole house,” Mrs. Dobson said, throwing open a door which led from Richard’s room into a suite of apartments which, to Ethie’s bewildered gaze, seemed more like fairyland than anything real she had ever seen.  “This the governor fitted up expressly for his wife and I’m told he spent more money here than in all the upper rooms.  Did you ever see handsomer lace?  He sent to New York for them,” she said, lifting up one of the exquisitely wrought curtains festooned across the arch which divided the boudoir from the large sleeping room beyond.  “This I call the bridal chamber,” she continued, stepping into the room where everything was so pure and white.  “But, bless me, I forgot that I put on a lot of bottles to heat:  I’ll venture they are every one of them shivered to atoms.  Hannah is so careless.  Excuse me, will you, and entertain yourself a while.  I reckon you can find your way back to the parlor.”

Ethelyn wanted nothing so much as to be left alone and free to indulge in the emotions which were fast getting the mastery of her.  Covering her face with her hands, as the door closed after Mrs. Dobson, she sat for a moment bereft of the power to think or feel.  Then, as things became more real, as great throbs of heat and pain went tearing through her temples, she remembered that she was in Richard’s house, up in the room which Mrs. Dobson had termed the bridal chamber, the apartments which had been fitted up for Richard’s bride, whoever she might be.

“I never counted on this,” she whispered, as she paced up and down the range of rooms, from the little parlor or boudoir to the dressing room beyond the bedroom, and the little conservatory at the side, where the choicest of plants were in blossom, and where the dampness was so cool to her burning brow.

It did not strike her as strange that Richard should have thought of all this, nor did she wonder whose taste had aided him in making such a home.  She did not wonder at anything except at herself, who had missed so much and fallen into such depths of woe.

“Oh, Richard!” she sighed, as she went back to the bridal chamber.  “You would pity me now, and forgive me, too, if you knew what I am suffering here in your home, which can never, never be mine!”

She was standing now near the low window, taking in the effect of her surroundings, from the white ground carpet covered with brilliant bouquets, to the unrumpled, snowy bed which looked so deliciously cool and inviting and seemed beckoning the poor, tired woman to its embrace.  And Ethie yielded at last to the silent invitation, forgetting everything save how tired, and sorry, and fever-smitten she was, and how heavy her swollen eyelids were with tears unshed, and the many nights she had not slept.  Ethie’s cheeks were turning crimson, and her pulse throbbing rapidly as, loosing her long, beautiful hair, which of all her girlish beauty remained unimpaired, and putting off her little gaiters, she lay down upon the snowy bed, and pressing her aching head upon the pillows, whispered softly to her other self—­the Ethelyn Grant she used to know in Chicopee, when a little twelve-year-old girl she fled from the maddened cow and met the tall young man from the West.