The
castle was deserted--Marion was gone! He ran back into the great room,
no longer trying to still the sound of his footsteps, and opened a
second door. The same silence greeted him, the same disorder, the same
evidence that the wives and children of the Mormon king had fled. He
went into a third room--and then a fourth.
For an instant he paused at the threshold of this fourth chamber. A
light was burning in the room at the end of the hall. The door was
closed with the exception of an inch or two.
"Marion!" he called softly, and listened intently.
He went on when there was no reply, and pushed open the door.
A candle was burning on a stand in front of a mirror. The room was as
empty as the others. But there was no disorder here. The bed was unused,
the garments in the open closet had not been disarranged. On the floor
beside the bed was a pair of shoes and as Nathaniel saw them his heart
seemed to leap to his throat and stifled the cry that was on his lips.
He took one of them in his hand, his whole being throbbing with
excitement. It was Marion's shoe--encrusted with mud and torn as he had
seen it in the forest. With her name falling from his lips in a pleading
cry he now searched the room and on the stand in front of the mirror he
found a lilac colored ribbon, soiled and crumpled. It was Marion's
ribbon--the one he had seen last in her hair, and he crushed it to his
lips as he ran back into the great room, calling out her name again and
again in the torture of helplessness that now possessed him.
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