What if that villain had laid a deadly trap to decoy Kathleen to this place and murder her to save himself the payment of that pitiful sum! This affair looked like it. Perhaps she was already murdered—his beautiful Kathleen, that he loved so dearly, and whom he had brought here in his mistaken eagerness to get her away from Boston.
Searching frantically about, he perceived with joy an old rusty poker beneath the iron fender of the fire-place. He seized it, and with the strength of a madman wrenched the lock from the door. It flew open. He was free.
Then ensued the most piteous search the world ever knew—the old man's frantic search for missing Kathleen.
It was all in vain. The old house was empty, the girl was gone, the old woman was gone, and the night-wind, as it sighed around the gables of the lonely old house, did not whisper to him of the awful secret the river hid.
[CHAPTER XLVIII.]
"KATHLEEN HAS MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED."
'Tis strange to think if we could fling aside
The mask and mantle that love wears from pride,
How much would be we now so little guess,
Deep in each heart's undreamed, unsought recess.
L. E. L.
Ralph Chainey waited in cruel suspense for an answer to the appealing letter he had sent to Kathleen.