He had found his wife, his Adah, but there was between them a gulf which his own act had built, and which he never more might pass.

He began to suspect it, and ere she had finished the story of her wanderings, which at his request she told, he knew there was no pulsation of her heart which beat for him.

He asked her where she had been since she fled from Terrace Hill, and how she came to be in Mrs.
Ellsworth's family.
There was a moment's hesitancy, as if she were deciding how much to tell him of the past, and then resolving to keep nothing back which he might know, she told him how, with a stunned heart and giddy brain, she had gone to Albany, and mingling with the crowd had mechanically followed them down to a boat just starting for New York.

That, by some means, she never knew how, she found herself in the saloon, and seated next to a feeble, deformed little girl, who lay upon the sofa, and whose sweet, childish voice said to her pityingly: "Does your head ache, lady, or what makes you so white ?" She had responded to that appeal, talking kindly to the little girl, between whom and herself the friendliest of relations were established and whose name she learned was Jenny Ellsworth.

The mother she did not then see, as, during the journey down the river she was suffering from a nervous headache, and kept her room.