She pressed the cold, damp hand fervently, and hurried away, little dreaming that it was a dying woman she left, and that her fervent "God keep you till we meet again," meant for all eternity.
With the thick veil over her face, she darted unobserved out of the noisome alley, gained the street, and turned the very first corner into a side street. Ten minutes of rapid walking brought her back to Madame La Mode's, where the carriage still waited, although she had been gone almost two hours. The obsequious footman helped her in, and she sank half-fainting among the cushions.
"Saved! Saved!" she thought, with silent gratitude to Heaven as the carriage rolled homeward, and she wondered bitterly what Ethel would say on her return and escape from the fate at which she had connived.
"Ah! my sister, to whose happiness I sacrificed my own, how could you be so cruel?" she wept convulsively.
Meanwhile the dying Hetty, too weak to walk, crawled through the narrow alleyway out to the street, a most pitiable object with her wasted form, ghastly face, and glassy eyes already dim with approaching death. Very soon a crowd collected about her, to whom she told an incoherent story that her husband and his mother, while struggling over a revolver, had both come to their deaths. Then having exhausted her feeble strength in explaining the tragedy, the poor creature's head drooped heavily, and with one or two convulsive gasps her spirit fled from its earthly tenement.
The evening papers, in glaring head-lines, told the story of the tragedy enacted in the humble tobacco shop, and did not fail to add that the man had been discovered to be the notorious Lindsey Warwick, who had abducted Senator Winans' youngest daughter from the Inauguration Ball, and for whose apprehension the statesman had offered ten thousand dollars. It was added that he had afterward married a girl in his own rank, and had beaten her so cruelly that she had never been able to leave her bed since, and had now died of her injuries.
Some relatives of poor unfortunate Hetty came forward, claimed her body, and buried her decently. Lindsey Warwick and his mother were interred at public expense, and when those three died there was but one living soul that held the secret that lay so darkly on Ethel's conscience—the secret that twice she had betrayed her innocent sister to a terrible fate from which the mercy of Heaven had delivered her safely. At last Precious knew all her sister's guilt. Would she take revenge for her wrongs by denouncing Ethel?
She reached home with a prayer of thanksgiving on her lips, so glad of its peace and security again after the perils of the last few hours; but as soon as she crossed the threshold she saw that there was an unwonted commotion and excitement about the house.
"Have they missed me already? Have they found out anything?" she thought in alarm; but directly she heard the servants confiding to each other that Miss Winans had been taken dangerously ill, and that the wedding now so very near at hand would have to be postponed, they feared.
Then Norah came to meet her pet.