“In grateful trust,

“Beryl Brentano.

“P.S.—­If you approve, deliver the enclosed note.”

On a separate sheet she wrote: 

“My darling mother: 

“Finding it necessary to return to X—–­, I have requested Dr. Grantlin to take particularly good care of you for a few days.  Your father will never forgive, never receive you, but he kindly complied with your request and gave me one hundred dollars.  Try to be patient until I can come and tell you everything, and believe that God will not forsake us.  With these hurried lines, I send you a few chrysanthemums—­your favorite flowers—­which I gathered in the rose garden of your old home.  When you smell them, think of your little girl who loves you better than her own life, and who will hasten home at the earliest possible moment, to take you in her arms.  Mother, pray for me, and may God be very merciful to you, my dearest, and to—­

“Your devoted child,

“Beryl.”

She had bound the withered flowers together with a strip of fringe from her shawl, and now, with dry eyes and firm white lips, she kissed them twice, pinned the last note around them and laid the whole in Mrs. Foster’s hand.

“I trust you to deliver them in person to Dr. Grantlin before you sleep to-night; and if I survive this awful outrage, perpetrated under the name of law, I will find you some day, and thank you.”

Looking at the lovely face, pure in its frozen calm, as some marble lily in the fingers of a monumental effigy, Mrs. Foster felt the tears dimming her own vision and said earnestly: 

“Keep as silent as possible.  The less you say, the safer you will be; and run no risk of contradicting your own statements.”

“I appreciate your motive, but I have nothing to conceal.”

Beryl laid her hand on her shawl, then drew back.

“Am I allowed the use of my shawl?”

“Oh, certainly, madam.”

The officer would have opened and put it around her, but with an indescribable movement of proud repulsion, she shook it out, then wrapped it closely about her, and sat down, keeping her eyes fixed on the face of the clock ticking over the fireplace.  After a long and profound silence, the man who had arrested her, said gravely and gently: 

“Time is up.  I must deliver you to Officer Gibson at the train.  Come with me.”

She rose, gave her hand to Mrs. Foster, and stooping suddenly touched with her lips the withered flowers, then followed silently.

In subsequent years, when she attempted to recall consecutively the incidents of the ensuing forty-eight hours, they eluded her, like the flitting phantasmagoria that throng delirium; yet subtle links fastened the details upon her brain, and sometimes most unexpectedly, that psychic necromancer—­association of ideas—­ selected some episode from the sombre kaleidoscope of this dismal journey, and set it in lurid light before her, as startling and unwelcome as the face of an enemy long dead.  Life and personality partook in some degree of duality; all that she had been before she saw Elm Bluff, seemed a hopelessly distinct existence, yet irrevocably chained to the mutilated and blackened Afterward, like the grim and loathsome unions enforced by the Noyades of Nantes.