underhanded, crazy lover!"

"Oh, has she?" said the young man, fiercely, yet secretly pleased at
this promising evidence of his sister's human weakness. "Where is she?
I'll go to her. She's in her room, I suppose," and before they could
restrain him, he had thrown off their impeding embraces and darted
across the hall.

The two old people stared doubtfully at each other. For even this
powerful ally, whose strength, however, they were by no means sure
of, might succumb before the determined Josephine! Prudence demanded a
middle course. "Ain't they brother and sister?" said the old man, with
an air of virtuous toleration. "Let 'em fight it out."

The young man impatiently entered the room he remembered to have been
his sister's. By the light of the moon that streamed upon the window
he could see she was not there. He passed hurriedly to the door of her
bedroom; it was open; the room was empty, the bed unturned. She was not
in the house--she had gone to the mill. Ah! What was that they had said?
An infamous thought passed through the scoundrel's mind. Then, in what
he half believed was an access of virtuous fury, he began by the dim
light to rummage in the drawers of the desk for such loose coin or
valuables as, in the perfect security of the ranch, were often left
unguarded. Suddenly he heard a heavy footstep on the threshold, and
turned.

An awful vision--a recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that
weird light that he thought he was losing his senses--stood before him.
It moved forwards with staring eyeballs and white and open lips from
which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no