She nodded, smiled pleasantly, and glided away as noiselessly as she came, leaving Regina perplexed, and nowise encouraged with reference to the stern cold character of her guardian.

She had eaten nothing since the previous day, had been unable to close her eyes after bidding Mrs. Lindsay farewell; and now, quite overcome with the reaction from the painful excitement of yesterday’s incidents, she threw herself across the foot of the bed, and clasped her hands over her throbbing temples.  No sound disturbed tier, save the occasional roll of wheels on the street below, and very soon the long lashes drooped, and she slept the heavy deep sleep of mental and physical exhaustion.

CHAPTER XIV.

Led by poppy-wreathed wands, through those fabled ivory gates that open into the enchanted realm of dreams, the weary girl forgot her woes, and found blessed reunion with the absent dear ones, whose loss had so beclouded the morning of her life.

Under the burning sun of India, through the tangled jungles of Oude, she wandered in quest of the young missionary and his mother, now springing away from the crouching tigers that glared at her as she passed; now darting into some Himalayan cavern to escape the wild ferocious eyes of Nana Sahib, who offered her that wonderful lost ruby that he carried off in his flight, and when she seized it, hoping its sale would build a church for mission worship, it dissolved into blood that stained her fingers.  With a fiendish laugh Nana Sahib told her it was a part of the heart of a beautiful woman butchered in the “House of Massacre” at Cawnpore.  On and on she pressed, footsore and weary but undaunted, through those awful mountain solitudes, and finally hearing in the distance the bark of Hero, she followed the sound, reached the banks of Jumna, and there amid the ripple of fountains, and the sighing of the cypress, in the cool shadow cast by the marble minarets and domes of Shah Jehan’s Moomtaj mausoleum, Mr. and Mrs. Lindsay joyfully welcomed her; while upon the fragrant air floated divine melodies that Douglass told her were chanted by angels in her mother’s grave, beneath the clustering white columns.

When after many hours she awoke, it was night.  A faint light trembled in one of the globes of the gas chandelier, and a blanket had been laid over her.  Starting up she saw a figure sitting at the window, apparently watching what passed in the street below.

“I hope you feel refreshed.  I can testify you have slept as soundly as the youths whom Decius put to bed some time since near Ephesus.”

Olga rose, turned on the gas that flamed up instantly, and showed her elaborately dressed in evening toilette.  Her shoulders and arms, round and pearly white, were bare save the shining tracery of jewels in necklace and bracelets; and in the long train of blue silk that flowed over the carpet, she looked even taller than in the morning walking suit.  Her ruddy hair, heaped nigh on her head, was surmounted by a jewelled comb, whence fell a cataract of curls of various lengths and sizes, that touched the filmy lace which bordered her shoulders like a line of foam where blue silk broke on dimpled flesh.