Sobs shook her and she stopped from lack of power to utter either her terror or her grief.  But she looked the questions she could no longer put, and compassionating her misery, I gently said: 

“Your love has been fixed upon a very unstable heart; but you have rights which must yet insure you his support.  There is some one who will protect these rights and protect you in your efforts to substantiate them.”

“His aunt,” she put in, shaking her head.  “She can do nothing, unless—­” Her excitement became abnormal.  “Have they found the money?” she shrieked; “have they—­have they found the money?”

I could not deceive her; she had seen it in my eye.

“And they will—­”

“Hardly,” I whispered.  “He has displeased them; they can not be generous to him now.”

Her hopes sank as if the very basis of her life had been taken away.

“It was my only hope,” she murmured.  “With that money in my hand—­ some, any of it, I could have dared his frown and won in a little while his good will, but now—­I can only anticipate rebuff.  There is nothing for me to hope for now.  I must continue to be Bess, the thread and needle woman.”

“I did not say that the one to reinstate you was Miss Quinlan.”

“Who then? who then?”

“Mayor Packard.”

And then I had to tell her.

We all know the results of the election by which Governor Packard holds his seat, but few persons outside of those mentioned in this history know why the event of his homecoming from a trip he made to Minnesota brought a brighter and more lasting light into his wife’s eyes than the news of his astonishing political triumph.

He had substantiated facts by which Mr. Steele’s claims upon Mrs. Packard were annulled and Bess restored to her rights, if not to her false husband’s heart and affections.  There are times, though, when I do not even despair of the latter; constant illness is producing a perceptible change in the man, and it seemed to me, from what Mrs. John Brainard told me one day after she had been able, through the kindness of the Misses Quinlan, to place the amount of one of the bonds in his hands, that his eyes were beginning to learn their true lesson and that he would yet find charm in his long neglected wife.  It was not to be wondered at, for with hope and the advantages of dress with which the Misses Quinlan now took pleasure in supplying her, she was gradually becoming an unusually fine woman.

I remained with Mrs. Packard till they left town for the capital; remained to enjoy to the full the joy of these reunited hearts, and to receive the substantial reward which they insisted on bestowing upon me.  One of the tasks with which I whiled away the many hours in which I found myself alone was the understanding and proper mastery of the cipher which had played such a part in the evolution of the life-drama enacted before my eyes.