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Updated: June 15, 2025
It seemed amusing, he had told himself repeatedly, for a young man of five-and-twenty to be guardian, as it were, to a young girl of sixteen that sweet, subtle, dangerous age "where childhood and womanhood meet." "Aren't you glad to see me, Mr. Varrick?" cried Jessie. "Glad?"
Varrick sank down upon a fallen log, and buried his face in his hands. For a moment he could scarcely realize Gerelda's untimely fate. He had not loved her, it was true; still, he would have given his life to have had her reason restored to her. For an hour or more Hubert Varrick forgot his own sorrow in alleviating the terrible distress of others.
"Where are we now?" he inquired of a deck-hand. "At Fisher's Landing, sir." The words had scarcely left his lips ere a radiant flood of electric light swept over the jutting bit of mainland. In that instantaneous white glare Varrick saw a sight that was indelibly engraved upon his memory while life lasted.
Hubert Varrick, standing behind the foliage, was fairly stricken dumb by what he heard and saw. He did not love his bride, but he believed in her implicitly. All the old doubt which had filled his heart and killed his love for Gerelda came surging back like a raging torrent, sweeping over his very soul.
"Forgive me pardon me, Jessie," he answered, brokenly. "For the moment I had forgotten, my love for you was so great!" Here Mrs. Varrick quickly interposed: "Jessie is quite right, my boy," she said. "You must not mention one word of love to her for many a day yet. Perhaps your troubles will be over before many months."
He noted that instead of being glad to get off so easily from a terrible affair that would cost her many a year behind grim prison walls, this girl's agonizing cry was that she should remain there and prove her innocence to Hubert Varrick. Surely, he thought, there must be some way of doing so. But Mrs. Varrick was inexorable. The girl's lovely head was bowed to the very earth.
If they had told my master, when he came here to buy, the story that a young and beautiful woman was supposed to have been murdered here many years ago, and that at nights her spirit haunts the place, he never would have bought it. Other people imagine that they seen it; but we, who live here, never have." The man told this with such apparent earnestness and truth, that Varrick was mystified.
He stopped short, and touched her on the shoulder, his eyes almost bulging from their sockets. "Miss Northrup I I mean Mrs. Varrick is this you? In the name of Heaven, speak to me!" She looked at him, her great dark eyes studying his face with a troubled expression. "Varrick!" she muttered below her breath. "Where have I heard that name before? And your face too! Where have I seen it?
Although every precaution was taken to keep the news of Jessie's disappearance from Hubert Varrick, the knowledge soon reached him. "My God! did I not have enough to bear before," he murmured, "that this new weight of woe has fallen upon me?" In his sorrow he was thankful that at least one person besides his mother seemed to believe so utterly in his innocence and that was the butler.
It recalls something out of my past life," she muttered. With a low cry he bent forward. "Then it is you, Gerelda Mrs. Varrick?" Rosamond Lee, whose face had grown from red to white, sprung excitedly to her feet. "What mystery is this?" she cried. "What do you mean by calling this girl Mrs. Varrick? There is a friend of mine a Mr. Hubert Varrick who is soon to be married to a Jessie Bain.
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