The dark, calm, dewy night closed down presently, and Sheila Kelly promptly finished her wicked work.
The reward was immediately paid into her hands, and she departed in haste from Ellsworth to spend it in riotous living.
The night was warm and sultry, and few people strayed abroad; so out in the road, on the grassy bank by a little purling creek, there lay for hours the motionless form of a seemingly dead girl, by her side a bottle of laudanum, and a pathetic little note detailing the reasons for her suicide.
For awhile all was very still. The bending branches of the trees stirred, and fanned the still, white face, the dew kissed it; the light, airy wings of the summer insects brushed it in flying; the winds caressed it with the sweet odors of clover and daisies, and the waters murmured by with a soothing song, all alike unheeded by the beautiful, silent sleeper.
"Softly!
She is lying with her lips apart;
Softly!
She is dying of a broken heart!
"Whisper!
She is going to her final rest;
Whisper!
Life is growing dim within her breast!"
Suddenly the sultry darkness was broken by a flash of lightning, followed by a low rumble of thunder. Swift rain-drops flashed down through the leaves upon that still, white face, and a summer storm broke in startling fury on the heated earth, drenching the motionless form with a steady downpour of water.
The wind howled through the trees, breaking and twisting branches, tossing leaves about like feathers, and swelling the little creek to a brawling stream.
All the while the blue sheets of lightning lighted up the sky with splendor, and gleamed through the tossing tree-branches down on the fair, quiet face seemingly locked in death's awful repose. For half an hour the war of the elements raged, then ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the last faint gleam of lightning showed a startling change.
The lips of Dainty Chase were parted in long, gasping breaths; the blue eyes were dilated in a blank and straining gaze. She rose slowly, staggeringly, to her feet, and as the black clouds parted overhead, and the full moon glimmered through, flooding the wet earth with splendor, as though diamonds strewed every blade of grass, she stepped, slowly, falteringly, down to the road, dragging her drenched body along aimlessly toward the open country that lay beyond.