She was almost paralyzed for a moment, in view of the fiendish plan which she now saw he was contemplating.
Then she nervously sank into her chair again, too weak to stand—too wretched to care much whether she lived or died.
“Oh, I believe it is all a plot of his own making!” she sighed. “I feel as if I had become entangled in some net, from which there is no hope of escape, and I am sure I do not know to whom I can look for help in this terrible emergency. Gerald has gone—how strange! I cannot understand why he should not have confided the fact to me.”
A bitter sob interrupted her at this point, for she was deeply wounded by her lover’s apparent neglect of her.
She was indeed in a trying position. She did not know what to do or to whom to turn. Her cousin, Mrs. Manning, was, as she supposed, still abroad; she could not tell her troubles to mere acquaintances, and she felt utterly alone.
“Can it be possible that I am no longer I—Allison Brewster? Am I indeed only a poor little waif who was deserted almost at my birth?” she sighed wearily, as she drew the box again toward her, and examined, once more, the little garments it contained and the golden key with the tiny diamond set in the heart of the pansy.
“What does it unlock I wonder?” she murmured thoughtfully; “or is it only an ornament? If so, it is a queer device, for it certainly is a perfect key.”
Then she reread the note supposed to have been penned by the hand of her real mother, and after that the letter written by Mrs. Brewster.
“Poor, dear mama! How she must have suffered to have had such a secret upon her mind! But both she and papa loved me as if I had been their very own,” she mused, as she touched the closely written pages to her lips.