She started at the cold, crisp word; for an instant she shrunk, then springing up, still clinging to her lover's hand, she said, softly, but with a firmness borrowed from her father's blood:
"This is Nat Wolfe, dear father. He has come back to life and me. You must take both or neither of us!"
"Must!"—humph! it had come to that, had it? That was too bitter a pill for Dr. Carollyn to swallow, albeit it was a favorite prescription of his.
A moment his dark eyes blazed at the young couple standing before him, neither of whose faces flashed less resolute than his own; then turning abruptly upon his heel, without the courtesy of a word to the unwelcome visitor, he retreated to his chamber, and Elizabeth saw no more of him that evening.
Plainly the evil spirit had not been so finally driven out of him as he had hoped. That night he wrestled with it again, in the solitude of his room, knowing well that while he struggled, the child, dearer to him than his own life, must be wetting her pillow with tears which himself alone was causing to flow.
CHAPTER XI.
THE BIRTHDAY AND THE LETTER.
I took the scroll; I could not brook
An eye to gaze on it save mine.
But oh, to-night, those words of thine
Have brought the past before me;
The shadows of long-vanished years
Are passing sadly o'er me.—Miss Landon.
Dr. Carollyn arose late the next morning; a night of unrest had hardly decided him to obey his better nature. With the breakfast which he ordered in his chamber came two or three packages left at the door that morning from the princely establishments of merchants and jewelers which he had visited the previous day. They were presents for Elizabeth. This very day was her eighteenth birthday; and these were some of the costly gifts he had pleased himself selecting for his daughter.