Slowly and painfully, day after day, the little company of stragglers toiled on toward their distant homes, the redoubtable doctor, with his unwilling beast and his willing bond-woman, ever bringing up the rear.  No one but Dora herself could know how grievously she suffered in her chains—­how her very heart’s blood was gradually consumed by the vampire whom she chose to cherish and obey because it was her misfortune to be his daughter.

The old home was reached at last.  On the whole, the doctor had rather enjoyed the journey, and brought to the family board, as of yore, a tremendous appetite.  He “resumed practice at the old stand” without delay, publishing a card to that effect in the village newspaper.  He seemed scarcely to note the absence of his wife, who for a quarter of a century had been wearing her life out in a vain endeavor to justify his existence on this globe.  In short, he speedily settled back into his old habit of life, and appeared to have totally forgotten that he had come home to die.  And Dora, too, soon lapsed into her old routine of schoolkeeping, and so once more the pot boiled merrily.  Once a week, with scrupulous regularity, she wrote her promised letter to Posey, and she waited long and anxiously for some word from him, but in vain.  Weary weeks lost themselves in months, and month after month crept slowly away till almost a year had passed, and still the faithful soul famished for some token that she was not forgotten.  Then one evening she went home from her school to find that the heavens had fallen.  Her father, whom she had left four hours before apparently in the highest health and spirits, was dead.  The village physician attributed his sudden death to apoplexy, which seems illogical.  But he was dead, whatever the cause, and his orphaned daughter mourned him with as genuine a grief as ever wrung a human heart.

When in process of time the first transports of grief had subsided there seemed to be nothing left for Dora to do but to concentrate all the overflowing tenderness and devotion of her heart upon her lover, and to brood and pine over his long-continued silence.  She never doubted that he had written to her, for the mail-service to and from the gold regions was notoriously unreliable in those days, and she was by no means the only one who looked in vain for letters thence.  At last she could bear the suspense no longer.  The spring had opened early, and a party in a neighboring town was to start for the diggings by the middle of April.  This party, in which were already included two women, Dora resolved to join.  Once let her reach that indefinite region denominated “the mines,” and she felt the most unquestioning faith in her ability to find her lover.

And so once more the dauntless girl set out upon that long and tedious journey of three thousand miles.  Not many weeks passed before the inevitable homeward-bound stragglers began to be encountered, and of these Dora eagerly sought information concerning the object of her quest.