CHAPTER XXVI. “I WILL SELL MY LIFE AND HONOR DEARLY!” CRIED THE

MADDENED GIRL.

The room where Floy sat had been her mother’s bedchamber. It was a large, handsome apartment, with stenciled walls and deep mahogany wainscoting after the old style, and the dark, massive furniture was of the richest mahogany. The dark polished floor was covered with rich rugs from Persia, and a magnificent full-length mirror between the two windows had reflected many a beautiful face and form of Floy’s ancestors.

They had been handsome people, the Nellests, but Floy’s beauty was of quite a different type.

Her mother had been dark and stately, like all the Nellests, but Floy was fair as Venus fresh risen from the foam. She had inherited her blonde beauty from her English father, as also her sunny, happy nature. The Nellests had been cold, grave, severe people, given to moroseness on account of their loss of fortune sixty years ago.

They had been rich and grand in their day, and the first suicide in the family dated from the time when the death of the head of the house revealed the appalling fact that the family was beggared, nothing remaining of vast wealth but the fine farm--their summer residence.

It was incredible, for old Jasper Nellest had been miserly in his way, and it was supposed that under his management the property must have increased instead of dwindling.

His two sons, both married and fathers of families, investigated matters, and found that their father had turned everything he possessed--bonds, houses, land, and ships upon the sea--into hard, yellow, shining gold.

What had become of this great treasure?

They found out that he had also been a heavy and reckless stock gambler, and this seemed to account for everything.

The mad thirst for speculation had swallowed up everything. Having staked all and lost, he died without confessing that he had beggared his family.

But, as his death had been a swift and sudden one, from apoplexy, there had been no time for death-bed disclosures.

But neither did Jasper Nellest leave any papers bearing on the subject of his lost wealth.

He had simply possessed it, and made “ducks and drakes” of it. That was the situation that stared his descendants in the face.

The brothers began an unequal struggle with the world as poor men with dependent families.

The elder one suicided within a decade, and the younger dragged the weary chain of life until he was sixty; then death released him.

But along the path of their descendants each decade was marked by a suicide in the morose family, and they decreased in numbers until the unfortunate line had almost died out. Only Floy was left now--fairest and most unfortunate of her race.

The shadows of fate had indeed fallen most heavily on that little golden head.

Bereaved of all who loved her, bound in the cruel toils of poverty, sundered from her lover, in hiding from relentless foes--alas, poor little Floy!

“In sorrow did your life begin, Dark lines of fate have hedged it in; Yet is your face as bright and fair As if the shadow of black care Threw over it no dismal gloom-- A cloud between you and earth’s bloom.

“The blue of heaven is in your eyes, The heavens’ o’erarching paradise; The sunshine’s gold doth crown your head Your pouting lips are cherry-red; The lily’s whiteness doth bedeck The soft curves of your dimpled neck, And on your cheek in beauty glows And faint blush of the opening rose.”

Floy paced up and down the room awhile, yawned and threw herself down again in a chair at the window.

“How slowly the time goes!” she sighed. “I wish I _did_ have a lock to that door! But I don’t suppose anything human will annoy me here. Otho Maury _would_, I know, if he dreamed that I was here; but, of course, he is searching for me in New York, hoping all the while that I’m dead and out of Maybelle’s way. Oh-h-h! what was _that_?”

She shuddered and groaned, for a sound had reached her ears in the awfully still old house--an eerie sound!

It came up from the parlor below, and sounded like a discord played by unskilled hands upon the piano keys.

It had been caused, in fact, by Otho Maury, stumbling against the piano, in his furtive search for Floy.

Floy’s heart thumped terrifically against her side for a moment, then she recovered herself as memory recalled her first night at Suicide Place.

“It’s just the mice running over the piano keys,” she laughed.

A full half an hour passed, and she grew nervous and restless, startled by muffled sounds of footsteps in the house.

“What can it be?--the wind or the rats?” she muttered, in alarm. “I have never heard such strange noises in the house before. Can any one have dared enter?”

Instinctively she caught up a dagger that she had found in a drawer of the old-fashioned bureau and laid on the table for self-protection.

Drawing the keen, shining blade from its sheath, she held it in her hand, her flashing eyes turned toward the door.

“Let any intruder dare enter here, and I will sell my life and honor dearly!” she cried.