They came together, the mother and daughter, in their travesty of mistress and maid—­enough of itself to excite suspicion of foul play—­and climbed up the rickety steps of the hackney-coach, rejoicing over their victim.  It mattered not; the captain would make the fourth passenger, and in his shadow I felt there were strength and security.

“What are you waiting for, Captain Van Dorne?” I had just feebly asked, as the door snapped-to, and the driver mounted his box.  A hand was thrust through the window for all reply, and a card dropped upon my lap, which I hastened to secure in the depths of my pocket.  By the merest chance, I found it there on the morrow, and later I comprehended its import, so mysterious to me at the moment of perusal.

“My poor young lady, you must forgive me for disappointing you, and hidin’ the truth, for your own sake.  May God bless and restore you, and bring you to a proper sense of his mercies, is the prayer of your servant to command,

    “JOSEPH VAN DORNE.”

My frame of mind was a very different one when I read this scrawl, from that which bewildered and oppressed me on that never-to-be-forgotten night of suffering and distress, both mental and physical.  Formed of those elements which readily react, courage and calmness had returned to me before I read the oracle of our worthy shipmaster; for, in spite of his disastrous dealing with me on that occasion, misguided as he was by others, I have reason to so consider him.

But now the influence of the drug that had been given me so recently, doubtless through want of judgment, by the ship’s doctor, was felt in every nerve; and, as the carriage rolled up the stony quay, I clung convulsively to Mrs. Raymond, and buried my face and aching forehead in her shoulder, with a strange revulsion of feeling.

“You dread the darkness,” she said, kindly, putting her arm around me as she spoke; “but it is only for a time; we shall soon come out into the open lamplight of—­”

“Broadway, New York,” interrupted Clayton, sententiously; “a very poor sight to see, to one who has lived abroad.  Have you ever crossed the waters, Miss Miriam?  But I see you are quite faint and overcome.  Here, smell this ether, that the ship’s doctor put up expressly for your use, and recommended highly as a new restorative much in fashion in Paris.”

Had the ship’s doctor no name, then, that they never mentioned it, and that he spoke in a demon’s voice?  His doses I had proved, and was resolved to take no more of them, and I pushed away the phial, whose cold glass nose was thrust obtrusively against my own—­pushed it away with all my strength, fast ebbing away as this was, even as I made the effort.

The cruel potion had possession of me, and entered into every fibre of my brain through the avenues prepared for it by the treacherous anodyne; so that, enervated and intoxicated, I yielded passively, after a brief struggle, to the power of the then newly-invented sedative, called chloroform.