“Her son?”
“Lord a mercy! No! Step-child—a first rate shaver by Mr. Lambert’s first wife; but she don’t seem to know the difference. He’ll get every cent she’s worth, and that’s a heap of money, I tell you. But there she goes down the back walk toward the green-house, you can see her white dress through the bushes.”
The stranger grasped the iron spikes with both hands now, and the face, which looked over them, was white as death.
“Let me in! Let me pass through!” he exclaimed, looking wildly around for a gate.
“Well, I should rather think not; no trespassers ever get in to tread down the madam’s flowers. She wouldn’t allow it. Halloo! what are you about?”
The stranger had discovered a gate upon the latch, and opening it, much to the old man’s surprise, passed into the garden.
“Stop there! Hold on, I say!”
The stranger did not even hear this quivering protest, but walked swiftly across the garden and entered a green-house, that rose in its midst like a mammoth bird-cage of rolling glass, choked up with leaves and blossoms. Beneath an acacia-tree, covered with soft, yellow blossoms, stood a lady, with her white arm uplifted, gathering a spray of the delicate plant, which she was about to group with a quantity of moss-roses and heliotrope, which she had plucked in the open air. She dropped her hand in amazement as a strange man entered the green-house, and the branch she had half broken rustled slowly back to its place.
“Elizabeth!”
The lady started. A cry that rose to her lips as her name was uttered, broke into something like a sob, and she seemed about to escape.