She sobbed aloud in fervent thanksgiving for her escape. "Oh, Lyman, Lyman, my tears are now of joy, rather than of sorrow! I feel regenerated and purified. Your mercy means more than you know." Her countenance grew strangely fair. A halo of light seemed to envelop her. A tear trembled on the cheek of the old veteran as he said, "Good night."
At an early hour of the following morning the muffled stroke of church bells sounded thirty-six times.
Lucy Osborn was dead. A council of physicians said that death had come to her through heart failure, caused by some great mental strain.
The clods that fell upon ner coffin sounded a plaintive requiem over the remains of an erring woman. However, they stilled the tongue of gossip. The captain may have been weak in his great forgiveness, but his was a weakness tempered with much mercy.
WHEN Mrs. Horton learned of the flight of Lord Avondale and of the death of her friend, Lucy Osborn, she was prostrated with grief and chagrin. The Englishman had sent her a hastily-scrawled note, briefly stating that he released her daughter from their engagement, and that his immediate departure was of the greatest importance.
A few mornings after this, Ethel asked her father if she might go with him on a trip that he had planned to the Cimarron River. "I just feel, daddy," said she, "like taking a wild ride down the valley. It will do me good. Mamma is much improved, and I can go as well as not." The cattle king looked at his daughter with delighted astonishment. "Go? Of course you may," said he. "Why, Ethel, you are beginning to look like yourself again. It will seem like old times to have my little girl galloping over the range with me."
Soon they mounted their horses, and were off for an all-day jaunt. Ethel rode her horse with queenly grace, and, as they dashed along, the color came back into her velvet cheeks, and her face beamed once more with girlish delight. Occasionally a long-eared jack-rabbit would be startled from his cover, and go skipping away like a deer, while Ethel would rein her horse after him in a wild, mad gallop, not with any expectation of overtaking the rabbit, but simply in a spirit of frolicsome excitement.
"Look at the sunflowers, daddy!" exclaimed Ethel. "What a wonderful wealth of them!"