CHAPTER XXIV.

IN THE POWER OF A FIEND.

"The bard has sung: God never formed a soul Without its own peculiar mate, to meet Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most complete.

"But thousand evil things there are that hate To look on happiness. These hurt, impede, And, leagued with time, space, circumstance, and fate, Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine and bleed."

Cissy went back to her lonely rooms, stirred up the fire to a brighter blaze in the tiny stove, then sat down to a dreary retrospection of past days, her small hands folded idly in her lap, her dark head bowed in sadness.

The sight of the handsome actor-manager, Cameron Clemens, had brought her memories from the past sweet and bitter in a breath, kindling old love and renewing old pain.

"How dared he come? He must have known that Geraldine was with me! Did he think I would ever willingly meet him again?" she murmured, bitterly; then started to her feet, for there was another masculine rap upon the door.

"Who is it this time?" she wondered, as she opened the door.

A cry of surprise came from her lips for there stood Harry Hawthorne, handsome as a picture, in citizen's dress, his fireman's uniform laid aside, his stately figure looking its best in a long fur-lined overcoat.

"Good-evening, Miss Carroll. May I come in?" he asked, gayly, with that ring of happiness in his musical voice one hears from a recently accepted lover.

"Come in," Cissy answered, mechanically, in her amazement, letting him enter and close the door ere she asked, uneasily:

"Where's Geraldine? Didn't she come back with you?"

"With me? I don't understand you. I've just got away from my duties at the engine-house, and I thought if you and Geraldine didn't mind going out at night, we could have our sleigh-ride yet. There will be moonlight after a while."

Cissy grasped the back of a chair to steady herself. Her face was pale, her dove-eyes dilated.

"But--didn't you send a sleigh here just now for Geraldine?" she gasped.

It was his turn now to look startled, and his eyes went from her face to the next room as he exclaimed:

"Isn't Geraldine here now?"

"No, no--of course not. Didn't I just tell you that she went away just now in a sleigh that you sent to bring her to the engine-house?" answered Cissy, turning up the light in a mechanical way, as women will attend to trifles even in trouble.

She saw that he was deadly pale and excited, and he said, in a strained voice:

"But I did not send any sleigh. There must be some mistake."

"There is treachery somewhere. Oh, why did I let her go, poor child?" cried Cissy, with a sudden awful presentiment of evil.

He sank into a chair, trembling with dread.

"Tell me quickly what you mean--give me every clew you can--for I must go in search of her," he exclaimed, anxiously.

And Cissy told him about the man, Jem Rhodes, and the note, and the elegant sleigh in which Geraldine had gone away so blithely, her rosy face radiant with joy, thinking to meet her lover.

"Why, there is the note now," she said, taking it up from the table where Geraldine had left it, and handing it to Hawthorne.

He ran over it hastily, his blue eyes flashing with anger and apprehension.

"I never wrote this note--it is not in my writing! How did Geraldine ever make such a mistake?" he cried, hoarsely.

"She read it hastily by a dim light," said Cissy.

"And there is just enough likeness to my hand to have deceived her that way," he cried, in anguish, for the conviction of something dreadful had come to him. "Oh, my darling, you are the victim of some cruel plot," he groaned, his handsome face blanching to a deathly hue.

Poor Cissy breathed, faintly:

"Oh, who could have planned this outrage? Clifford Standish is the only man I know likely to be guilty of it. But he is in prison."

"Have you not heard? The villain escaped from the officers at the door of the Chambers street court-house this morning, and is still at large. No doubt he wrote this fraudulent note; no doubt it was he who carried Geraldine off. Tell me what the wretch looked like."

Then Cissy remembered that the man Rhodes had refused to enter the lighted room, and had been strangely taciturn, speaking only when necessity required, and then in a low, muffled voice.

"Oh, I ought to have suspected him then. I was culpably careless and thoughtless, letting that poor child go with him," she thought, in an agony of distress.

When she had described the man to Hawthorne, he declared his belief that Standish himself, with but slight disguise, had personated the mythical Jem Rhodes.

"She is in the power of that fiend at this moment!" he exclaimed, starting up in a passion of grief and anguish that made poor Cissy burst out into hysterical weeping.

He was rushing to the door, and he looked back at the sound of her sobs, and said, gently:

"Don't take it so hard, Miss Carroll, for Heaven's sake. You are not to blame, neither was she, for that note was plausible enough to deceive any one. But I'll find her and bring her back to you, or I'll have that villain's cursed life!"