doctors stood on the threshold.

"Well, doctor," she cried, looking from one to the other, "what tidings do you bring me? Am I a wife or a widow?"

"Five minutes' time will decide that question, madame," said one, impressively. "We have performed the operation. It rests with a Higher Power whether it will be life or death."

And the doctor who had spoken took out his watch, and stood motionless as a statue while it ticked off the fatal minutes.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Sally Pendleton and her mother watched their faces keenly.

The time is up. They open the inner door reluctantly. The two doctors, bending over their patient, look up with a smile.

"The heart still beats," they whisper. "He will live."

And this is the intelligence that is carried out to the young bride, the words breaking in upon her in the midst of her selfish calculations.

She did not love Jay Gardiner. Any genuine passion in her breast had been coolly nipped in the bud by his indifference, which had stung her to the quick.

She could not make him jealous. She knew that he would have been only too relieved if she had fallen in love with some one else, and had been taken off his hands.

He always treated her in a cool, lordly manner--a manner that always impressed her with his superiority. She was obliged to acknowledge him her master; she could never make him her slave.

And now he was to live, and she was his wife. She would share his magnificent home, all the grandeur that his position would bring to her. She had been brought up to regard money as the one aim of existence. Money she must have. She coveted power, and she was girl of the world enough to know that money meant power.

"Yes, he will live; but whether he will gain his full reasoning powers is a matter the future alone can decide," the doctors declare.

Two long months, and Doctor Gardiner is slowly convalescing. His young wife flits about the room, a veritable dream in her dainty lace-trimmed house-gowns, baby pink ribbons tying back her yellow curls. But he looks away from her toward the window with a weary sigh.

He has married her, 

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