Then an awful fear seized upon her as she noticed the stern, defiant look that crept into his face at her words.
"Get up Lizzie" he answered, brutally. "You should have thought of this before. There," he exclaimed, throwing a paper at her feet, "there is your Marriage Certificate. It is false every word of it; our marriage was a mockery from beginning to end. Show the paper to your grandparents and clear yourself if you can,—I can do nothing for you."
White as death, Elizabeth staggered slowly to her feet, but no word escaped her lips.
For a moment man and woman looked into each other's eyes, then with a mocking smile Lawrence Maynard, her lover, her idol, her perjured husband, passed rapidly from the room.
Like one in a dream she bent and raised the paper from the ground, then with head erect and steady step she walked to her own small room and locking the door behind her, fell heavily upon the bed with the lying certificate clasped closely in her rigid hand. She awoke to the realization that he had wronged her, and before she could fairly endure that knowledge she realized that he had also deserted her, and from that time forth her misery was complete. Too proud to tell her weakness now in the hour of shame, she reasoned that death alone would erase the stain upon her character, and with this sole purpose forming in her half crazed brain she fled to the sluggish river and took the frightful plunge into its awful depths.
The fate of her supposed suicide had been chronicled, first by the descriptive reports of the bridge officers, at their respective stations, and secondly by the busy newspaper scribes who haunt police stations for the necessary matter to fill their allotted space in the columns of the various dailies.
Elizabeth, holding her babe on her arm, read the report of her supposed entrance to the great unknown world, on the very night of Mrs. Sinclair's visit to her grandparents and her own discharge from the Hospital, and smiling bitterly, she muttered to herself, "Yes, that is true. I am dead, dead and buried. Now nothing remains but the walking ghost of Lizzie Merril and"—here she looked sadly down upon the face of the sleeping child and added, "the mother of this innocent babe." Then she wrapped the shawl a nurse had given her, closer around the infant and hurried onward through the gloomy night:—whither she did not know.
Almost at that moment a young man turned the corner of the street and brushed past her, so near that his arm accidentally touched her shoulder. For a moment she stood perfectly still, then with a piercing cry, woman and child fell heavily forward and were caught in Maurice Sinclair's arms.