Would he come again?  Would he try to see her any more?  Would this be the end of everything between them?  Gertrude asked herself these questions a thousand times a day; but a week flew by and he had not come.  She had not seen a sign of him, nor had any word concerning him reached her from without.  There was nothing very unusual in this, certainly; and yet as day after day passed by without bringing him, the girl felt her heart sinking within her, and would have given worlds for the chance of reconsidering her well-considered judgment.

How the days went by she scarcely knew, but the next event in her dream-like life was the sudden bursting into the room of Dorcas, her face flushed, and her eyelids swollen and red with weeping.

Dorcas was a member of Lady Scrope’s household, but paid visits from time to time to the other house.  Also, as Lady Scrope’s house was not shut up, she could go thence to pay a visit home at any time, and she had just come from one such visit now.

Gertrude sprang up at sight of her, asking anxiously: 

“Dorcas!  Dorcas! what is wrong?”

“Reuben!” cried Dorcas, with a great catch in her breath, and then she fell sobbing again as though her heart would break.

Gertrude stood like one turned to stone, her face growing as white as her kerchief.

“What of Reuben?” she asked, in a voice that she hardly knew for her own.  “He is not—­dead?”

“Pray Heaven he be not,” cried Dorcas through her sobs; and then, with a great effort controlling herself, she told her brief tale.

“I went home at noon today and found them all in sore trouble.  Reuben has not been seen or heard of for three days.  Mother says she had a fear for several days before that that something was amiss; he looked so wan, and ate so little, and seemed like one out of whom all heart is gone.  He would go forth daily to his work, but he came home harassed and tired, and on the last morning she thought him sick; but he said he was well, and promised to come home early.  Then she let him go, and no one has seen him since.

“Oh, what can have befallen him?  There seems but one thing to believe.  They say the sickness is worse now than ever it was.  People drop down dead in street and market, and soon there will be none left to bury them.  That must have been Reuben’s fate.  He has dropped down with the infection upon him, and if he be not lying in some pest house—­which they say it is death now to enter—­he must be lying in one of those awful graves.

“O Reuben!  Reuben! we shall never see you again!”

CHAPTER XII.  EXCITING DISCOVERIES.