“Dead!” Faynie repeated the words in an awful whisper.

It seemed to her that every drop of blood in her veins seemed suddenly turned to ice.  A mist swam before her eyes and she put out her hand gropingly, grasping the back of the nearest chair for support.

She did not even hear the last of the sentence.  Her thoughts and hearing seemed to end with that one awful word.

“That is what I said,” replied her stepmother, nonchalantly, “and you are his murderess, girl, quite as much as though you had plunged a dagger in his heart.  Your elopement caused him to have a terrible hemorrhage.  He knew all the details about it in less than an hour’s time, learning from one of the servants how you stole out of the house and met the tall man at the gate, who took you off in a closed carriage, and just as he made this discovery one of the maids handed him your note, which you left pinned to the pillow, addressed to him.  He had no sooner read it than he fell into a rage so horrible that it ended as I have said, in a hemorrhage.  Within ten minutes’ time your name, which he cursed, was stricken from his will, and he left everything to me, disinheriting you.  Do you comprehend the force of my remark?”

The steady, awful look in the young girl’s eyes made the woman quail in spite of her bravado.  “I—­I do not care for my father’s wealth, but that he should curse me—­oh, that is too much—­too much.  Oh, God, let me die here and now, that I may follow him to the Great White Throne and there kneel before him and tell him all my pitiful story!”

“That is a pretty theory, but people cannot go to and come at will from the Great White Throne, as you call it.  You had better get back to the realities of life on this mundane sphere, where you find yourself just at present.  I repeat for the third time that you are disinherited.  I cannot seem to make you grasp that fact.  This home and everything in it belongs absolutely to me.”

Faynie heard and realized, and without a word, turned and staggered like one dying toward the door, but her stepmother put herself quickly before her.

“Sit down there.  I have something else to say to you,” she added in a shrill whisper, pushing the girl into the nearest seat.

“I must go.  I will not listen,” cried Faynie, struggling to her feet.

“Yes, you shall listen and comply with my proposition,” exclaimed her stepmother, her glittering eyes fastened on the beautiful face of the girl she hated so intensely.

CHAPTER XII.

Impending evil.

We must return for one brief instant, dear reader, to our hero, Lester Armstrong, whom we left as he was being hurried off to the hospital on the night which proved so thrillingly eventful.

At the first rapid glance, the surgeon had believed his patient dying, but upon examination after he had reached the hospital, it was discovered that his injury was by no means as serious as had been apprehended; but a trouble quite as grave confronted the patient.