"Papa," said Sydney, in a trembling voice, "there is some dreadful mystery here. Queenie did not go to Europe with us. After you bade us good-bye that day on the steamer, she cried and wept, and almost went into hysterics, begging mamma to let her go back and stay with you, instead of going to Europe. She was so unmanageable that mamma consented at last, and she and her trunks were put on shore, and we went aboard without her. Did she not come home to you?"
"No, never," groaned the wretched father, like one demented. "I have never seen her since that day. Oh, Queenie, my lost darling, where are you?"
For a moment there came no answer to the question. They stood around spellbound with horror, while a peal of awful thunder reverberated outside and seemed to shake the house from its foundations. The next moment the door was burst violently open, and the dripping figure of a woman rushed into the room.
"Queenie!" burst from the quivering lips of the unhappy father.
Yes, it was Queenie, but oh, how terribly changed! Her streaming golden hair, matted with mold and dead leaves, hung wet and cold over her shoulders. Her dress of dark silk was stained with great patches and wisps of dead autumn leaves. The tight bodice, open at the top, exposed her throat, which—oh, Heaven!—was marked round and round with the purple and red print of finger-marks as though she had been strangled.
Her face was white as death, showing the plainer for its whiteness a mark upon her brow above her eyes—the horrible purple print of a man's boot heel on the tender flesh, from which a thin stream of blood trickled down on her ghastly face. A fearful—fearful apparition, strangely unlike little Queenie of other days. Yet it was Queenie, for she staggered blindly forward, and panting out: "Papa, papa, forgive!" fell in a lifeless heap at his feet.
[CHAPTER VI.]
At little Queenie's sudden and terrible appearance Mrs. Lyle and the two elder sisters screamed aloud in fright and horror, and even the agonized father recoiled a moment from the dreadful-looking creature that lay at his feet to all appearances dead.
Directly, however, with a strong revulsion of feeling from dismay and terror to pity and tenderness, he bent down and lifted the white face of his daughter on his arm.