[CHAPTER XXIII.]
SERENA'S NEW SCHEME.
If ever a man lived in the world with a broken heart, Keith Kenyon was the man. He was utterly prostrated; life seemed at an end to him; he had no hope, no ambition. The woman he loved—his own dear wife—was gone from him forever, and with an awful curse resting upon her life, an inheritance of woe which was liable to descend upon her head at any moment. And she had gone from him, gone in all the bitterness of her awful anguish out into the cold world—where? He could not, dared not think. Suppose that she had taken her life into her own hands? That she was even now lying at the bottom of the Mississippi, that great and mighty stream which has borne away upon its ceaseless current so many of the heart-broken creatures of this world, who, weary of life, and tired of its heavy burdens, cast themselves into the murky waters of the river, and their souls are hurried before their Maker, there to account for the wrong-doing of their lives.
At first Keith was in a sort of lethargy of despair. He sat for hours in his room, never moving, never looking up—sitting with his head upon his hand, buried in deep thought, awful, anguish-stricken. To all appearances he was dead to the things of this world, and oblivious of all that was taking place.
In his own room old Bernard Dane lay upon a sick-bed; he had given up and taken to his bed when the news of Beatrix's disappearance was first announced, and he seemed likely never to arise. The days went by, and Mrs. Lynne and Serena still lingered at the Dane mansion, which was in reality a house of mourning now.
Poor Mrs. Graves was quite at her wits' end in all this trouble, and she had begged the Lynnes to remain. As this was just what Serena fully intended doing, it was, of course, easily arranged.
On the morning of the day after Beatrix's flight from the Dane mansion, Keith came into his uncle's room, and sat down beside the bed.
"Uncle Bernard," he began, "I must try to find her. The shock of her disappearance has been so great—so overwhelming—that I have been benumbed. I feel like one groping in the dark, but now I am awake, and I see that the child may be in great danger. I must search for her, and find her, if she is living; if not—if she is dead—I will go away—away from Louisiana forever."