“It is her ghost!—­her ghost!”

“Faynie Fairfax, why do I find you here, in the library, in the dead of the night, in the company of the man who is to wed my daughter Claire, and who parted from her scarcely two hours since, supposedly to leave the house?  Why are you two here together!  Explain this most extraordinary and most atrocious scene at once.  I command you!” she cried, her voice rising to a shrill scream in her rising anger.

Faynie turned a face toward her white as a marble statue, but no word broke from her lips.

The presence of the others seemed to bring Kendale back to his senses.

“It means,” spoke Faynie, after a full moment’s pause, “that the hour has come in which I must confess to all gathered here the pitiful story I have to tell, and which will explain what has long been an unsolved mystery to you—­where, how and with whom I spent the time from the hour in which I left this roof until I returned to it.

“You say that this is the man who is your daughter’s lover, Mrs. Fairfax—­the man who is soon to marry Claire.

“I declare that this marriage can never be, because this man has a living wife,” she cried, in a high, clear voice.

“It is false!” shrieked Kendale.  “The girl I married in the old church is dead—­dead, I tell you.  I—­I saw her buried with my own eyes!”

“She is not dead, for I am that unfortunate girl,” answered Faynie, in a voice that trembled with agonized emotion.

“Listen all, while I tell my story,” she sobbed.  “Surely the saddest, most pitiful story a young girl ever had to tell.”

Then, in a panting voice, she told her horrified listeners all, from the beginning to the very end, omitting not the slightest detail, dwelling with a pathos that brought tears to every eye, of how she had loved him up to the very hour he had come for her to elope with him; her horror and fear of him growing more intense because of the marriage he forced her into, with the concealed revolver pressed so close to her heart she dared not disobey his slightest command.

And how the conviction grew upon her that he was marrying her for wealth only, and the inspiration that came to her to test his so-called love by telling him that she had been disinherited, though she was confident that her father had made his will in her favor, leaving her his entire fortune.

Dwelling with piteous sobs on how he had then and there struck her down to death, as he supposed, and that he had made all haste to make away with her; and that she would at that moment have been lying in an unmarked grave, under the snowdrifts, if Heaven had not most miraculously interfered and saved her.

Faynie ended her thrilling recital by adding that she had not known, until that hour, that this man was Claire’s lover, because they had refrained from mentioning the name of the man in her presence.  How she had come to the library in search of a book and had encountered him stealing through the halls, a veritable thief in the dead of the night, bent upon securing a sum of money which he had learned in some way was in the safe, and that he now had it in his pocket, and that she had prevented him from securing her father’s will by snatching it from his grasp.