‘Are you speaking of Mr. Hastings?’ Mrs. Crawford asked, as she stepped into the room.

‘Yes,’ was his crisp and haughty reply, as if he resented the question, and her presence there.

He could be very proud and stern when he felt like it, and one of these moods was on him now, but Mrs. Crawford did not heed it, and sinking into a chair, for she felt that she could not stand and face him, she began: 

’I came to tell you of Mr. Hastings and—­Amy.  She did not come to breakfast, and I found this note in her room.  She has gone to New York with him.  They took the eleven o’clock train last night.  They are to be married this morning, and sail in the Scotia for Europe.’

She had told her story, and paused for the result, which was worse than she had expected.

For a moment Arthur Tracy stood staring at her, while his face grew white as ashes, and into his dark eyes, usually so soft and mild, there came a fiery gleam like that of a madman, as he seemed for a time to be.

‘Amy gone with Harold, my friend!’ he said at last.  ’Gone to New York!  Gone to be married!  Traitors!  Vipers!  Both of them.  Curse them!  If he were here I’d shoot him like a dog; and she—­I believe I would kill her.’

He was walking the floor rapidly, and to Mrs. Crawford it seemed as if he really were unsettled in his mind, he talked so incoherently and acted so strangely.

‘What else did she say?’ he asked, suddenly, stopping and confronting her.  ’You have not told me all.  Did she speak of me?  Let me see the note,’ and he held his hand for it.

For a moment Mrs. Crawford hesitated, but as he grew more and more persistent she suffered him to take it, and then watched him as he read it, white the veins on his forehead began to swell until they stood out like a dark blue net-work against his otherwise pallid face.

‘Yes,’ he snapped between his white teeth.  ’I did ask her to be my wife, and she refused, and with her soft, kittenish ways made me more in love with her than ever, and more her dupe.  I never suspected Harold, and when I told him of my disappointment, for I never kept a thing from him—­traitor that he was—­he laughed at me for losing my heart to my housekeeper’s daughter!  I, who, he said, might marry the greatest lady in the land.  I could have knocked him down for his sneer at Amy, and I wish now I had, the wretch!  He will not marry your daughter, madam; and if he does not I will kill him!’

He was certainly mad, and Mrs. Crawford shrank away from him an from something dangerous, and going to her room took her bed in a fit of frightful hysterics.  This was followed by a state of nervous prostration, and for a few days she neither saw, nor heard of, nor inquired for Mr. Tracy.  At the end of the fourth day, however, she was told by the house-maid that he had that morning packed his valise and, without a word to any one, had taken the train for New York.  A week went by, and then there came a letter from him, which ran as follows: