“Yes, that’s what I mean. Well, Mr. Carleton got tired of that stilted kind of an attitude,—or, at least, she thought he did. I don’t know, I’m sure, but she was possessed with a notion that he cared for some other girl,—some one of the clinging rosebud sort.”

“Do you know this?” asked Mrs. Markham; “I mean, do you know that Maddy thought this?”

“Yes, I know it,” asserted Kitty, with a wag of her wise little head. “I tried to persuade her that no clinging rosebud could rival a tall, proud lily, but she thoroughly believed there was some one else.”

“But Mr. Carleton was to marry her,” said Mrs. Markham. “I can’t believe he would do that if he loved another.”

“That’s what bothered Maddy,” said Kitty; “she knew how honorable Mr. Carleton had always been, and she said that as he was engaged to her, he would think it his duty to marry her, even though his heart belonged to some one else.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said Molly. “If he was going to marry her, and didn’t love her, it was because of her fortune. Probably his rosebud girl hasn’t a cent.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said Kitty, shuddering. “Somehow it seems disloyal to both of them.”

“But it is all true,” said Mrs. Markham sadly. “Madeleine has never been of a confidential nature, but I know that she had the idea Kitty tells of, and I fear it was true. And I may be disloyal, or even unjust, but I can’t help thinking Schuyler was attracted by Maddy’s money. He is proud and ambitious, and he would be quite in his element as the head of a fine establishment, with plenty of money to spend on it.”

“Well, he’ll never have it now,” said Molly, and as this brought back the realization of the awful event that had happened, both girls burst into crying again.

Mrs. Markham, herself with overwrought nerves, found she could do nothing to comfort the girls, so left them and went to commune with her grief in her own room.

Meantime the two doctors alone in the library were still in discussion.

“Well, what do you want?” inquired Doctor Leonard angrily. “Do you want to imply, and with no evidence whatever, that the girl died by some hand other than her own? Do you want to involve the family in the expense and unpleasant publicity of a coroner’s inquest, when there is not only no reason for such a 

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