With a startled cry he stooped down and dragged her up in his arms, bearing her to a little distance, where a light gleamed through a window. By its aid he saw that it was she whom he sought.
“But, poor little girl, she seems as dead as a door-nail! Howsomever, I’ll carry her back to my mistress, dead or alive!” he muttered, struggling on with his inert burden against the raging storm till he gained the shelter of the mansion.
Mrs. Dalrymple was waiting in the wildest anxiety, the physician having already arrived, and been told the meager story that a poor young girl had attempted suicide and rushed out into the storm to die.
“I should like to see the vial and determine the nature of the poison,” said Doctor Julian gravely, and he was keenly disappointed when Cora Ellyson confessed that she had inadvertently trod on it and crushed it, so that she had to call a servant to remove the fragments.
“That is very unfortunate, as a knowledge of the poison taken would have materially assisted in finding the antidote,” he said, and the servant was quickly summoned by his mistress to bring back the fragments.
The answer was that they had been consumed in the kitchen range.
Directly afterward the girl’s stiffening body was brought in and laid down upon the floor before their eyes—a hapless sight that wrung anguished groans from Frank Laurier’s lips, though his proud sweetheart looked on coldly and unmoved, perhaps secretly glad in her heart of this calamity.
One glance at the pale, cold face in its frame of wet, disheveled gold, and the physician said sadly:
“Poor child, I can do nothing. She is already dead!”
“Oh, no, no, no, do not say such dreadful words! She must not die!” sobbed Mrs. Dalrymple, giving way to wild emotion as she knelt by Jessie, tore open her gown, and felt eagerly for the heart.