Clouds began to gather in the southwest, and as the covered cart was brought to the gate, a distant mutter of thunder told that a storm was brewing.

Mrs. Wood and her two children accompanied the orphan, and as they drove through the woods, myriads of fireflies starred the gloom.  It was dark when they reached the station, and Willis brought the trunks from the hotel, and found seats for the party in the cars, which were rapidly filling with passengers.  Presently the down-train from Knoxville came thundering in, and the usual rush and bustle ensued.

Mrs. Wood gave the orphan a hearty kiss and warm embrace, and bidding her “Be sure to write soon, and say how you are getting along!” the kind-hearted woman left the cars, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron.

At last the locomotive signalled that all was ready; and as the train moved on, Edna caught a glimpse of a form standing under a lamp, leaning with folded arms against the post—­a form strangely like Mr. Murray’s.  She leaned out and watched it till the cars swept round a curve, and lamp and figure and village vanished.  How could he possibly be in Chattanooga?  The conjecture was absurd; she was the victim of some optical illusion.  With a long, heavily-drawn sigh, she leaned against the window-frame and looked at the dark mountain mass looming behind her; and after a time, when the storm drew nearer, she saw it only now and then, as

  “A vivid, vindictive, and serpentine flash
   Gored the darkness, and shore it across with a gash.”

CHAPTER XXV.

In one of those brown-stone, palatial houses on Fifth Avenue, which make the name of the street a synonym for almost royal luxury and magnificence, sat Mrs. Andrews’s “new governess,” a week after her arrival in New York.  Her reception, though cold and formal, had been punctiliously courteous; and a few days sufficed to give the stranger an accurate insight into the characters and customs of the family with whom she was now domesticated.

Though good-natured, intelligent, and charitable, Mrs. Andrews was devoted to society, and gave to the demands of fashion much of the time which had been better expended at home in training her children, and making her hearth-stone rival the attractions of the club, where Mr. Andrews generally spent his leisure hours.  She was much younger than her husband, was handsome, gay, and ambitious, and the polished hauteur of her bearing often reminded Edna of Mrs. Murray; while Mr. Andrews seemed immersed in business during the day, and was rarely at home except at his meals.

Felix, the eldest of the two children, was a peevish, spoiled, exacting boy of twelve years of age, endowed with a remarkably active intellect, but pitiably dwarfed in body and hopelessly lame in consequence of a deformed foot.  His sister Hattie was only eight years old, a bright, pretty, affectionate girl, over whom Felix tyrannized unmercifully, and whom from earliest recollection had been accustomed to yield both her rights and privileges to the fretful invalid.