“Have you ever done anything with that old muslin ’Lina gave you?”

“Never till to-day,” Adah replied; “when it occurred to me that if this hot weather lasted, I might find it comfortable, provided I could fix it, so I sent Mug for it, and she is ripping the waist.”

Mrs. Worthington was not a good dissembler, and her next question was: 

“Did you find anything in the pocket?”

“Yes, my letter, written weeks ago.  Your daughter must have forgotten it.  I intrusted it to her care the day Miss Tiffton called.”

Adah was just thinking of speaking freely to Alice Johnson concerning her future course, when Mrs. Worthington met her in the upper hall.

“I’ll go to her now,” she said, as Mrs. Worthington left her, and knocking timidly at Alice’s door, she asked permission to enter.

“Oh, certainly, I have something to tell you,” Alice said, motioning her to a chair, and sitting down beside her.  “Miss Worthington sent me a note in which she speaks of you.”

“Of me?” and Adah colored slightly.  “I did not know she ever thought of me.  Why did she not come with her mother?”

“She is enjoying herself so much is the reason she gives, though I fancy there is another more powerful one.  Perhaps the note will enlighten you,” and Alice passed it to Adah, not so much to show her how heartless ’Lina was, as to see if in what she had said of the Richards family there was not something which Adah would recognize.

That look in Willie’s face had almost grown to a certainty with Alice, who saw Anna, or Asenath, or Eudora, and sometimes John himself in every move of the little fellow.  Silently Adah read the note, her paled cheeks turning scarlet at what ’Lina had said of herself and Mrs. Ellsworth.  The Richards family were nothing to her.  She only seized upon and treasured up the words “with a child about whose father we know nothing.”  Slowly the tears gathered in her eyes and finally fell in torrents as Alice asked: 

“What made her cry?”

“Oh, Miss Johnson,” and Adah hid her face in Alice’s lap, “I’m thinking of George—­of Willie’s father.  Will he never come back, or the world know that I thought I was a lawful wife?  Yes, and I sometimes believe so now, or I should surely go wild, Miss Johnson,” and Adah lifted up her head, disclosing a face which Alice scarcely recognized, for the strange expression there.  “Miss Johnson, if I knew that George deliberately planned my ruin under the guise of a mock marriage, and then when it suited him deserted me as a toy of which he was tired, I should hate him!—­hate him!”

“I frighten you, Miss Johnson,” she said, as she saw how Alice shrank away from the dark eyes in which there was a fierce, resentful gleam, unlike sweet Adah Hastings.  “I used to frighten myself when I saw in my eyes the demon which whispered suicide.”

“Oh, Adah,” said Alice, “you could not have dreamed that!”