“Did you question Mrs. Judson about her niece, my wife?” inquired George, still disturbed by a vague hope.
“Yes; but she denied all knowledge of her whatever.”
“It is a sad mystery,” sighed George, falling into deeper dejection from that one gleam of hope. “The fate of my poor wife seems to be certain, and it is impossible that yours could have been living without leaving some sure trace of her existence. She probably never came away from the wharf where that old man saw the darkness gathering around her. Deep water is a terrible temptation to persons driven to despair, as she was.”
Louis De Marke arose and began to walk the room. George took his hat and went into the street. Neither of the young men had the heart for any further conversation that day.
CHAPTER LX.
THE FEMALE MISER IN HER DEN.
“Peg—Peg, don’t you hear me, Peg! I am tired and so hungry, Peg. Will no one give me drink or a mouthful to eat?”
This oft-repeated complaint was answered by a hoarse croak from the small hen-coop that stood on the floor, and three lank chickens thrust forth their open bills and withered, thin necks, through the upright bars of their prison, casting side glances toward the old woman, whose face and hands drooped over the side of the bed.
The sound of this response, which came from the half famished creatures like the croak of so many hungry ravens, brought tears to the sick woman’s eyes, for these dumb sufferers had been her companions so long, that all the sympathies of which she was capable went out from her own forlorn state to theirs. But these humanizing feelings were all driven away when Peg, the ungrateful cat, stole out from under her bed with a fragment of food in her jaws, which she carried to the fireless and unswept hearth, and devoured under the fierce, hungry gaze of her mistress, with the sly look and crouching air of an ungrateful thief as she was.
The old woman was feeble from long illness, but nothing could quite overcome the bitter malice of her nature, and the sight of her prime favorite caring for her own wants with cool selfishness, as if she had been human, quenched her tears in anger.
She gathered herself up in the squalid bed, and shook her clenched hand fiercely at the feline reprobate, who, as if comprehending all the impotency of this rage, answered it with a greenish glare of the eyes, and a low, muffled growl over the food she was devouring.