“Oh, Doctor Julian, feel here! Is not there some slight pulsation?” hopefully.
“Not the faintest, my dear madam. The deadly potion did its work quickly. The lovely girl is dead! Ah, how remarkable!” bending with a start to examine a mark on the young girl’s breast where it was exposed by the open gown.
Doctor Julian was an old man, the family physician, and he added surprisedly:
“See that red cross on her breast! It is precisely similar to your family birthmark, and if I mistake not, you have one like it yourself!”
“Precisely similar, doctor, and on the same spot—oh, Heaven, how strange this seems! My lost child—so cruelly stolen from me ere I had given her any name but darling—had the same mark! What if—what if—— Oh, my brain reels with wild suspicion. Could it be——”
“Calm yourself, my dear madam. This may be but a coincidence! However, it ought to be investigated to-morrow.”
“It shall be,” she sobbed, then started as Cora Ellyson cried impatiently:
“Are you going to leave that dead girl lying there all night? I declare I shall faint if she is not removed!”
“Cora!” expostulated her lover; but she shrugged her shoulders haughtily.
Doctor Julian glanced at her in surprise, then said gently, to Mrs. Dalrymple: