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Title: Little sweetheart

or, Norman De Vere's protegee

Author: Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller

Release date: July 10, 2024 [eBook #74006]

Language: English

Original publication: Cleveland: The Arthur Westbrook Company, 1889

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74006

Credits: Demian Katz, Krista Zaleski, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (Images courtesy of the Digital Library@Villanova University.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE SWEETHEART ***

(Printed in the United States of America)

LITTLE SWEETHEART

OR,

NORMAN DE VERE’S PROTEGEE.

BY

MRS. ALEX. McVEIGH MILLER.

HART SERIES No. 49

COPYRIGHT 1889 BY GEORGE MUNRO.

PUBLISHED BY

THE ARTHUR WESTBROOK COMPANY

CLEVELAND, O., U. S. A.

LITTLE SWEETHEART.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

CHAPTER XXIX.

CHAPTER XXX.

CHAPTER XXXI.

CHAPTER XXXII.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

CHAPTER XL.

CHAPTER XLI.

CHAPTER XLII.

CHAPTER XLIII.

CHAPTER XLIV.

CHAPTER XLV.

CHAPTER XLVI.

CHAPTER XLVII.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

CHAPTER XLIX.

CHAPTER L.

CHAPTER LI.

CHAPTER LII.

CHAPTER LIII.

CHAPTER LIV.

CHAPTER LV.

CHAPTER LVI.

CHAPTER LVII.

CHAPTER LVIII.

CHAPTER LIX.

CHAPTER LX.

CHAPTER LXI.

CHAPTER LXII.

CHAPTER LXIII.

CHAPTER LXIV.

CHAPTER LXV.

CHAPTER LXVI.

CHAPTER LXVII.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

CHAPTER LXIX.

CHAPTER LXX.

CHAPTER LXXI.

CHAPTER LXXII.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

CHAPTER I.

The smoking-car was draughty and ill-smelling; the three commercial travelers, with their cards and whisky, noisy to the point of rudeness, and the view from the windows of the slowly moving train was not interesting to one who had gone over the route to Jacksonville a dozen times before. The rocking motion of the train hindered reading with any comfort, and Norman de Vere flung down his newspaper impatiently and went into the ladies’ car.

“There may be some pretty women in there to look at,” he thought, idly, having an artistic taste that could interest itself for hours in traveling in watching the delicate profile of some beautiful face with a ravishing turn to chin and throat, or round cheek shaded by the curled fringe of a long, dark eyelash.

For the matter of that, any woman might have looked twice at him, too, if she had any feminine penchant for manly beauty.

Tall, broad-shouldered, symmetrically formed, with olive skin, large, flashing, dark eyes, wavy dark hair, clear-cut, handsome features, and a mouth so beautifully shaped that the absence of the conventional mustache from the short, curled upper lip seemed almost an affectation to display its beauty. Norman de Vere at two-and-twenty was a magnificent specimen of young manhood, combining in his fine person all the best elements of strength and beauty. You saw, too, from the cut and quality of his well-chosen traveling garments, and from his very air of easy indifference, that he was Fortune’s favorite—beloved of Plutus as well as Apollo.

He dropped languidly down into a seat some little distance back of the woman and child who were the sole occupants of the ladies’ car.

“Wonder where they got on? They were not in here two hours ago when I went forward to the smoking-car,” he thought, with idle curiosity, having nothing better to attract his attention.

The slight, black-robed figure sitting in front of him had its head and face hidden in a little black poke bonnet and black lace veil. The face, turned steadfastly from him, as if gazing through the window, was propped against a small hand in a trim, black kid glove. Before her, on a seat which the accommodating conductor had turned over to face her, slumbered a lovely child of about four years. By contrast with the somber black garments of the lady and the rich crimson velvet of the cushions on which it was lying, the little creature, in its white dress, its tangle of rich golden curls, its round cheeks warmly flushed with happy slumber, its half-parted, dewy red lips giving glimpses of pearly baby-teeth, looked like a beautiful human flower.

But Norman de Vere’s handsome face had assumed a rather rueful expression when he looked over and saw the pretty sleeper.

“Presently it will wake up and squall. Then I shall beat a retreat into the smoking-car. The drummers could be no worse,” thought he, testily.

But pending the meditated retreat he fell to speculating over these chance companions of his railway ride.

“Some poor little widow who has buried her husband among strangers and is going home to her people with her little child,” he decided from her garb of somber black.

And as men always take a peculiar interest in young and pretty widows, our hero began to wish that she would turn her head and let him see her face. That she was young he felt quite sure from her erect shoulders and slight and delicate shape.

But the young widow remained motionless, with her cheek in her hand and her head turned toward the window, seemingly intent on the flitting landscape, with its dreary dead-level clothed with forests of pine, cedar, and cypress, while here and there the glittering leaves and magnificent white flowers of the magnolia-tree divided admiration with the long, swaying wreaths of funereal-looking moss somberly draping the great live-oaks. Perhaps the tropical growth lying under the soft, velvety drizzle of a steady October rain pleased her fancy or held her interest, or perhaps hot, silent tears were falling under the little black veil, for she never stirred from her statue-like quiet even when the door opened noisily presently, admitting the jolly commercial travelers whose loud talk and laughter immediately startled the smiling baby sleeper from her dreams.

There was a low, startled whimper of fear, and the little darling sat erect, first digging dimpled, chubby fists into her eyes, then staring at the heartless disturbers of her dreams with the brightest, bluest, most reproachful orbs they had ever seen.

“She is going to squall! The widow will have to move at last!” Norman de Vere muttered, with triumphant curiosity.

He was right, and wrong. The baby did not squall, but the lady moved. She leaned forward, patted the child with her little gloved hand, murmured some low, soothing words, and immediately returned to her musing position at the window without any one ever having seen her face.

The travelers were staring with all their might. Every heart went out to the little angel in the white dress.

One of them—rough fellow and hard drinker as his red face showed him to be—had pretty little children of his own at home. He uttered a caressing sound and held out eager arms.

The baby shook her golden head archly and made him a little grimace of disdain that set the other two laughing. She climbed down from her seat and up again upon the lady’s, where she stood erect, the sweetest thing alive, already full of innate, unconscious coquetry. The big, cloudless blue eyes wandered guilelessly over their faces as she clung with her tiny dimpled fists to the back of the seat, scanning each face in turn with pretty, fearless curiosity.

By this time every man in the car was in love with the beautiful, bright little thing, and the drummers began to rummage their pockets for something pretty wherewith to tempt her to come to their arms. Their boisterous mirth had already softened to something more respectful, and when one actually found a paper of peppermint lozenges about him, his eyes gleamed with triumph.

“Come, sit on my knee and you shall have candy,” he called out, persuasively.

The little beauty did not notice him. She was watching the face of Norman de Vere and making eyes at him with the sweetest baby coquetry, so “innocent arch, so cunning simple,” that the gazers were transported with delight. The young man, on his part, was regarding her with a gentle gravity of expression that puzzled her guileless mind. The three drummers she recognized instinctively as being already her slaves. What of this silent man who made no effort to attract her, who returned her inviting, wistful gaze without a smile, unless that sparkle in his large dark eyes could be called one?

Was it his seeming indifference that attracted her, or his wonderful, god-like beauty? There awoke in the young mind something of that pain which we of older growth term the yearning for the unattainable.

She sprung down into the aisle unheeded by her silent female companion, and the drummers each reached out for her. She stopped a minute to look at the unique watch-charm that one dangled before her eyes, laughed gleefully as she eluded the outstretched arm of the second, and promptly accepted the lozenges from the third, turning from him with a polite “Ta-ta,” and going straight to Norman de Vere.

“Wretched little flirt!” ejaculated the giver of the candy, with mock indignation, as he saw her climbing upon Norman de Vere’s lap with the most engaging confidence.

Then:

“Don’t oo want some of my tandy?” she inquired, cooingly, as she offered him the paper.

Norman de Vere’s thoughtful gravity relaxed into a laugh, and he promptly put an arm about the plump form that had enthroned itself on his knee.

“I don’t want any candy, please,” he said, shutting his lips tight against the small thumb and finger that were conveying a pink lozenge to his lips; “but I’ll take a kiss.”

No sooner said than the rosebud mouth was pressed eagerly, softly upon his, sending an odd thrill through his whole frame, then she half whispered:

“I ’ove oo.”

“A case of love at first sight,” haw-hawed one of the irrepressibles across the aisle, and the baby shook her tiny pink-and-white fist at him and cried out, disdainfully:

“Go way! I don’t ’ove oo! Oo ain’t pritty!”

Everybody laughed except that slight, silent form like a statue of black marble in the front seat, and Norman de Vere asked with a smile:

“Won’t you tell me your name, little one?”

She beamed upon him with her sunny blue eyes, and answered:

“Sweet’art.”

There was more laughter from across the aisle. The young man reddened in spite of himself, but persisted:

“Yes, I know you are my sweetheart, but what is your other name? What does your mamma call you?”

“Nuffin, only des Sweet’art,” she replied, amiably, reaching up and patting his cheek with a warm, sticky little palm, with a lozenge glued to it by its own sweetness.

“That is her name for you when you are very good, I suppose, but when you are bad—when you cry and scold your doll, what name does she call you then?” he queried, and she replied, intelligently:

“‘Naughty yittle Sweet’art.’”

“I give it up,” he said, carelessly; and then she asked, in her innocent, confiding manner:

“Don’t oo want me to sing mamma’s yittle song all ’bout me myse’f?”

“Yes, please.”

She threw back her curly golden head, swelled her soft, white throat, opened her rosebud mouth, and sung, with bird-like sweetness, these words:

“Yittle sweet’art, tum an’ tiss me,

Des once mo’ before I go;

Tell me truly, will you miss me

As I wander to and fro?

Yet me feel ’e tender p’essing

Of oor wosy lips to mine,

Wif oor dimple’ hands cawessing,

An’ oor snowy arms intwine.

“Yittle sweet’art, tum an’ tiss me,

We may ne’er meet adain;

We may ne’er woam togedder

Down ’e dear ole shady lane.

Uvver years may bwing us sowow

Yat our ’arts but yittle know;

But if tare we s’ould not bo’wow,

Tum an’ tiss me ’fore I go.

“Ah! yittle sweet’art, tum an’ tiss me,

Tum an’ whisper sweet an’ low;

Tell me yat oor ’art will miss me

As I wander to an’ fro.”

No words could describe fitly the wonderful, wooing sweetness, the bird-like melody of the little one’s voice as it rose soft and clear above the clatter of the moving train—every word, though uttered in broken baby dialect, distinctly audible to the listeners.

The innocent little child, absorbed in the delight of her own performance, appeared as unconscious of them all as some wild-wood bird caroling alone upon its leafy nest, and produced as pure an effect upon her hearers.

When she stopped no one moved or spoke for a minute, then the red-faced drummer chuckled:

“Sweetheart, you’re an out-and-out prima-donna!”

The others were touched and silent.

CHAPTER II.

Sweetheart herself remained quite silent and pensive for a moment after her little song, as if it had touched some chord of sadness in her heart. Then she nestled her curly head softly against Norman de Vere’s broad breast.

“Sweet’art tired, Sweet’art s’eepy,” she lisped in a plaintive tone, and shut her eyes.

He held her closely in a tender clasp, looking down admiringly at the lovely baby face, fair as carven pearl, and tinted warmly yet delicately as a Mme. de Watteville rose. How richly fringed with thick gold were the full white lids; how lovely the curve of the scarlet lips; how deep the dimple—a perfect Cupid’s nest—in the exquisite chin! His eyes dwelt long and lingeringly on every perfect outline, and he said to himself, with a half smile:

“If she grows up like this, she will give many a man the heartache.”

A sigh chased away the smile, and a cold, cynical look came into the dark eyes, as if some unpleasant memory stirred within him.

The train rushed on through the rainy afternoon, past the swamps and forests, past the unfrequent little towns where they seemed to make the most unconscionably long stops, considering the small additions received to the stock of passengers, and presently it seemed to Norman de Vere that every one was asleep but himself.

The drummers had each taken a double seat to himself, and with silk handkerchiefs over their faces, snored sedately. Even the “little widow,” as Norman called her in his thoughts, had let her arm and head slip down to the back of her seat, and seemed to be quietly sleeping. Sweetheart still lay close in the fold of his strong arm, and though presently the plump little thing began to feel warm and heavy, he would not rouse her, lest he should call her back from her wandering in the beautiful Land of Nod.

“But what a careless little mother!” he thought. “She takes small concern over her baby, leaving her to be nursed and cuddled by utter strangers. Still,” with an excusing thought, “she must be fond of the little one, she has trained her to sing with such wondrous sweetness and accuracy. It is only that she is tired or ill—broken down with grief most likely—and she knows that even rough men are only too proud to play the nurse to her little pet.”

He wondered vaguely if the face hidden under the little poke bonnet and veil were one half as lovely as the one slumbering so peacefully on his breast, and gazing down at little Sweetheart, tried to fancy the cherub face grown older, and the innocent soul grown wise with woman’s lore; but again a heavy sigh heaved his breast and a frown of deep cynicism drew ungracious lines on his high, white brow.

“Heaven forbid! Heaven forbid!” he muttered, with something like impatient wrath. “It seems a pity for this dear little one to grow up so. Yet,” bitterly, “how else could it be, and a woman?”

The early autumn twilight, hastened by the steady rain, began to darken in the car, and the brakeman came in and lighted the lamps.

“A bad spell o’ weather, sir,” he said, loquaciously, to the occupant of the car who had his eyes open. “Uncommon rainy for Florida; been fallin’ stiddy for two days and nights. ’Counts for the few passengers, I ’spose. Well, ’tis er ill wind blows nobody good. Better sleepin’ ’commodations for the passengers,” glancing around humorously; for this was twenty years ago, reader, and before the luxurious era of Pullman sleepers and parlor cars and fast-flying vestibule trains.

Norman de Vere was about to make some brief, courteous answer to the man’s remarks, but he was prevented by a sudden terrible rumble and rocking of the car—the swift precursor of one of those dreadful railway accidents due to heavy rains and weakened bridge foundations that desolate so many hearts and homes. With a swift instinct he clasped his sleeping burden tightly to his breast just as the doomed car reared upward a moment, like a maddened, living creature, only to collapse the next instant with its freight of human souls and go crashing down through a broken bridge into a mad hell of seething, foaming water.

A little river ordinarily insignificant enough, but swollen now to a torrent by incessant rains for several days, had washed all the mortar from the stone foundations of the railroad bridge and weakened it so that the weight of the locomotive had carried it down crashing to the bed of the river and telescoped the train.

When Norman de Vere realized that, but for a sharp blow on the head from a heavy timber, he was unhurt, and that he held the struggling child safe in his arms, it seemed to him that he must have been saved by a miracle, nothing less.

The whole train was a wreck, and but for the fact that the ladies’ car was on top of the débris, he could never have escaped alive. He was wedged between two seats of the car, which lay on its side, the windows uppermost, and over and around surged the raging water, churned into foam by the rapid descent of the train, and by the explosion of the locomotive’s boiler as soon as it touched the river. To add to the horror of the position, the lamps just lighted by the brakeman had exploded and caught fire, affording a lurid light within the interior of the wrecked car.

The child in his arms waked and screamed with sudden terror. He hushed her with a tender word, and listened appalled for another human sound in that terrible tumult of crashing timbers and raging waters.

But no sound came.

He saw the brakeman’s legs sticking out from under a pile of timbers that had instantaneously crushed the life from his body. Turning about in his cramped position, he looked for Sweetheart’s mother and the drummers.

There was no sign of the slender little black-draped figure, but a pair of masculine arms protruded from under an overturned seat. He put Sweetheart down and went to work manfully to extricate the owner.

To his joy, he dragged the man out, stunned, but alive—one of the jolly drummers. Rapidly as he could, he resuscitated him and made him understand their position.

“We will either be burned or drowned if we do not speedily escape,” he said. “But before we think of ourselves we must see if there are any more alive in the car.”

“I’m with you to the death!” the other cried, heartily; then he shuddered. “But this is horrible! How the water seethes over the settling wreck! And it will be on fire inside presently.”

“Be good, little darling!” Norman cried to the whimpering, frightened baby, who sat very still where he had placed her, with a dazed look in her big blue eyes.

Obeying a pitying impulse, he kissed her lightly, then turned to his grewsome task.

The two other drummers were soon discovered, both stone dead, and one horribly mutilated.

“God rest their souls!” cried the drummer, who was a devout Catholic.

He crossed himself, his face pale with grief and horror, then went on with his task. The mysterious woman had not been found yet.

A few steps further on and they began to pull away great fragments of the roof where it had crashed in over the seat where she had been reclining. They were obliged to work very carefully lest she should be pinioned under them yet alive, and they must not crush out the faintest spark of life.

And above them and around them the fierce and swollen river roared like a tiger eager for its prey, while within the narrow compass of the wrecked car the air began to grow hot and dense with smoke from the burning lamp that had sent its blazing oil running about like tongues of flame, devouring all it touched.

A minute more and they found her, dead. Norman de Vere was never to know whether the face over which he had wondered was beautiful or homely. The heavy timbers had mutilated it beyond all semblance of humanity, and he reeled and sickened at sight of the bloody corpse.

“Oh, my God, how terrible!” he cried, and the Catholic crossed himself again. “God rest her soul!” he muttered, then eagerly: “We can do no more. They are all dead. Let us try to save ourselves. We shall suffocate if we remain in here five minutes longer. See the child!”

Little Sweetheart had suddenly succumbed to the heat and smoke, and fallen senseless.

Norman de Vere caught her up in his arms with a cry very like despair.

“Now don’t give way!” cried George Hinton, the drummer, eagerly. “What do you propose to do?”

“Can you swim?”

“Like a fish.”

“So can I. We must knock out that window there. The water will pour into the car, but we must climb through the opening and commit ourselves to the mercy of the river.”

The hour of deadly peril under the gloomy night sky on the wild, swirling river, battling fiercely with the elements in the effort to reach the lights that glimmered on shore, would the two nearly exhausted men ever forget it?

Norman de Vere’s efforts were greatly hampered by the little unconscious burden in his arms, but he would not listen to the shouts of the other.

“She is dead, poor little one! She was suffocated in the burning car. Better let her go and save yourself.”

“Never! We sink together rather than so cowardly a deed!” Norman de Vere replied above the roar of the water; and by the most heroic struggles he neared the land, where a rope was thrown by friendly hands of excited watchers along the shore. A moment more and safety was assured to them, and a loud, solemn shout of thanksgiving went up from fifty throats for the three solitary survivors of the wrecked train.

CHAPTER III.

Twenty-four hours later it was night in Jacksonville—night, all lovely with countless stars and a full October moon.

“The light of many stars

Quivered in tremulous softness on the air,

And the night breeze was singing here and there.”

Before the gates of a palatial home, whose white walls glimmered like a fairy palace through the dark-green shrubberies of the extensive grounds, stood a line of carriages. The mistress of that Eden-like home had been holding her weekly reception—not a garish ball or a weary crush of uncongenial people, but an assemblage of choice spirits, her most intimate friends, only fifty people all told; and now on the stroke of midnight, after two hours most charmingly spent, they were decorously taking their departure.

The echo of their gay voices came floating out on the orange-perfumed air as they lingered on the pillared portico.

“Oh, Mrs. de Vere, you must be proud of your husband. Such a hero! They say he saved two lives!”

“I am proud of him!” the musical voice of the fair hostess replied, with a note of tenderness breaking through its proud ring; then she bowed good-night to her friends and went back to the deserted drawing-room, around whose door hovered sleepy servants anxious to put out the lights, shut up the house and retire.

Their proud mistress paid no attention to them. She pushed to the door, and began to walk slowly up and down the floor, the rich Turkish carpet giving back no echo to the fall of her silken slippers.

A woman in the early prime of her rich beauty, thirty-three years old, but looking barely twenty-five—beauty is always young—tall, with a magnificent figure draped in black lace that set off with its somber elegance her peculiar type of beauty.

Red hair—rich, dusky auburn red, with soft natural waves in it from where it was drawn simply back from its parting on the low white brow to the loose coil at the back of the shapely head; the clear, colorless, dazzling skin that goes with such fiery locks; eyes of sparkling reddish hazel with full, white lids and long, curled lashes; a Grecian nose long enough to indicate decided characteristics; a rather large mouth, with thin red lips that could express cruelty when they chose, but whose smile could dazzle and betray—such she stood in her somber garb, with diamonds flashing on her bare white arms and throat, looking the siren that she was by right of beauty, passion and power, yet all inconsistency, capable of heights and depths, and predominated by something subtle and tigerish in her animal nature.

“Will he come to-night?” she muttered, half bitterly, as she paced from one end to the other of the splendid room. “It is more than two weeks since I came to our winter home in Jacksonville. Why did he wish to linger, unless it was to be rid of me, to be from his chains, as no doubt he calls them in his secret heart? What has he been doing all this time? I will not believe it was business, as he writes. Had he loved me as he pretends, he would have come with me; he—”

The door opened quickly, arresting the querulous complaint. She turned and saw her husband coming toward her with an eager face, and his name fell from her lips in a tone of mingled reproach and rapture:

“Norman!”

“Camille!” he answered, in a deep voice; and as he paused by her side his dark eyes swept the dazzling face searchingly, and somewhat plaintively, as if doubtful of a welcome.

But she flung herself upon his breast, and her round, white arms clasped his neck with passionate abandon.

His momentary doubt dispelled, he embraced her with an ardor equaling her own, and pressed kiss after kiss on her upturned face.

“You are glad to see me again, Camille,” he murmured, happily. “Ah! this pays for the dreary days of absence from your side.”

Mrs. de Vere half withdrew herself at those words from her husband’s arms, and looking up at him, cried out, reproachfully.

“If you had loved me you would not have stayed so long!”

“Did you miss me, darling?”

She pouted mutinously as a school-girl for an instant, then, as if impelled to the truth in spite of herself, hung her graceful head and murmured, bashfully:

“Yes—bitterly.”

Norman de Vere’s dark eyes beamed with a sort of loving triumph as he answered:

“It was to win this sweet confession that I stayed behind. I know that in your heart you love me well, but when I am with you constantly you madden me with your caprices and humors, your unfounded jealousies and wounding suspicions. Why, you never give me a loving word or an involuntary caress, and you degrade yourself and me with such cruel charges as I can scarcely endure. But when I am away from you, you judge me more kindly, perhaps, and so I find an intoxicating welcome awaiting me. It was no business that detained me, my darling. Maddened by your coldness and distain, I remained away from you, hoping you would think more kindly of me and meet me with just this charming welcome,” drawing her again into his arms and kissing the curved red lips with eager passion.

She returned his kisses ardently, murmuring the while:

“You were cruel—I love you so—I can not bear you out of my sight! I will not bear it—your taming me by so cruel an absence—as if I were a real shrew!”

“I will never do so again—that is—if you will always be like this,” he answered, feasting his eager eyes on the rare beauty of the face that lay against his breast, his tone almost pleading in its earnestness.

She lifted her head and looked into his eyes with a shadowed gaze.

“How can I promise you?” she asked, half resentfully, half sadly. “You do not make due allowance for me, Norman; yet you know well the miserable doubt of your love that turns me sometimes into a fury. How can I be quite, quite sure of your heart, remembering, as I do every hour of my life, that I am quite thirteen years older than you, and that the royal dower my father gave me might have tempted many a man to forget that disparity.”

There was sudden, swift anguish in his face and voice, bitter pain and humiliation in the tone with which he cried:

“Oh, my love, that old complaint again—and so soon, so cruelly soon! You do injustice to yourself and your own charms. It was yourself that won me, not your splendid dowry. For those few years between us, bah! I never remember them unless you remind me. If I had been Cophetua and you the beggar maid, I should have implored you to share my throne.”

“But you were only a boy when you married me—barely twenty. By and by your fancy will change—you will repent.”

“Hush! you will be in hysterics presently,” he said, warningly. “Come with me, darling. You will forget these morbid fancies when you see the sweet little pet I have brought you.”

He drew her into a small anteroom adjoining, and she saw on a velvet sofa, fast asleep, a golden-haired little fairy.

“It is a little child I rescued from the wrecked train,” he said. “I brought her home with me until I could find her friends.”

To his amazement, her thin red lips began to curl into the cruelest sneer.

“Are you displeased, Camille?” he asked, anxiously. “Why, I thought any woman would be delighted with so lovely a pet. I assure you she will win your heart as soon as you look into her sunny blue eyes.”

She flung off his caressing hand as if it were a serpent, and with blazing eyes, hissed out:

“A likely tale! Rescued from the wreck—ha! ha!”

“My God, Camille, what do you mean by your scorn?” he cried, aghast.

She turned on him like a beautiful tigress.

“I mean, Norman de Vere, that you can not deceive me with such a trumped-up tale! How dare you, dare you, think to bring home your base-born brat, issue of some shameless clandestine affair, to the shelter of this honest roof?”

CHAPTER IV.

Norman de Vere was by no means unacquainted with the passionate and jealous temper of his wife, having experienced its evil effects many times during the two years in which he had been her husband.

But her present outburst was so unexpected and so reasonless that he almost recoiled in terror from the fierce and angry glitter of the hazel eyes and the bitter sneer that distorted her lovely mouth.

He could not speak. Sheer indignation and amazement held him silent, and pointing a disdainful finger at him, the angry woman continued:

“No, I am not so easily duped as you expected! I know too much of the world and its wickedness! Your pretense is a very clever one, but I can see through it!”

“Good heavens!” the young man exclaimed, in a shocked voice. His dark eyes blazed with indignation.

She went on, sharply:

“I wish you to understand that that brat can not remain under this roof to-night! You will send it away at once!”

Norman de Vere, by humoring the caprices of a selfish woman, had made himself almost a slave to her despotic will. With her to speak had always been to be obeyed, and she expected no less now.

“But, Camille, think,” he said, remonstratingly. “The child has no friends that I know of. Her mother perished in the wreck. I saved the child’s life, and I must take care of her until I hear from her friends. The charge you bring against me is utterly without foundation. Look at the little one. She is at least four years old. Remember, I was but a boy when I married you, two years ago.”

“I have heard that you were very wild when you were at college,” she replied, tauntingly. “This, no doubt, is the outcome of your youthful folly. The wretched mother has no doubt deserted the child, and you, with a foolish sentimentality, dared bring it under this roof to rear. Or perhaps,” her voice rising almost to a shriek of rage, “you had a double purpose in bringing it here! You wished—wished,” with a hysterical sob, “to taunt me with my childlessness!”

He stood staring at the beautiful fury, asking himself in wonder if this could be the same woman who such a little while ago had lain in his arms, clasping his neck, and giving him kiss for kiss. It scarcely seemed possible; such a fury she looked now with her blazing eyes and distorted features quivering with jealous rage. Yet he had seen her before in fits of jealous anger that usually culminated in hysterics.

Dreading this effect, he endeavored to soothe her; but all in vain, and only his remonstrance that she would be overheard by the servants had any effect in moderating her loud, shrewish tones. But she reiterated, though in a lower voice, her resolve that the child should be sent immediately away.

Her furious tones had already awakened little Sweetheart. She sat up on the sofa without a word, staring drowsily from one to the other with her sleepy blue eyes under her tangle of golden curls.

Mrs. de Vere, in her fury of wrath, shook her jeweled fist threateningly in the child’s face, and the baby shrunk back with a startled cry.

“Camille!” cried her husband, sternly. He caught back her menacing hand. “Would you be cruel enough to strike that innocent baby?”

She laughed insanely.

“Yes, unless you take her away, and at once!” she answered, struggling to free herself.

But he held her firmly.

“You are mad!” he cried, hotly. “You exhaust my patience by your words and manners, which are alike disgraceful. I will no longer bear your exactions. The child shall remain here until her friends can be found. You force me to remind you that this house at least is mine—all that was left me when the war deprived me of my father, the brave soldier, who died for the South, and all our wealth. Here, at least, I am master, and here my poor little protégée shall find shelter!”

She was so dazed with his defiance that for a moment she could not speak, only writhe impotently under the firm but gentle grasp in which he held her wrist, while a low, hissing sound issued from her lips.

Little Sweetheart, who had been watching them in doubt and terror, now slipped down from the sofa, and running to her friend, clasped his leg tightly with her little arms, crying out through frightened tears:

“Oh, p’ease, p’ease, don’t hurt the yady! don’t make her ky!”

“Little angel!” he cried, and released the wrist he was holding.

Instantly Mrs. de Vere flung herself full length upon the floor, screaming and kicking in hysteria.

Norman de Vere picked up Sweetheart in his arms and strode to the door. He expected to find several frightened servants listening, and he was not mistaken.

“Your mistress is ill. Go in and attend to her at once,” he said to the French maid, whom he detected among them.

“Oui, monsieur,” answered Finette, with a courtesy of her capped head.

Then she ran in to her mistress, and Norman de Vere went up the broad, shallow stairs toward the sleeping apartments, still carrying the child.

A dim light burned in the upper hall. He knocked several times at a door near the head of the staircase, and presently a drowsy voice, sounding as if muffled among pillows, inquired:

“Who is that? What do you want?”

“It is Norman, mother. Can I see you, please?”

“Of course, my son;” and in a few moments the door opened and an elderly lady in a dressing-gown invited him in.

CHAPTER V.

“I hope you are well, mother?” the young man said, kissing her tenderly, and as the light fell on her face one saw features still handsome in spite of the silver hair that set off the blackness of her large eyes.

“Yes, I am well. And you, my dear son?” fondly; then she started in amaze: “Good gracious, Norman! where did you get that child?”

He would have laughed at her amazement if he had not been so perturbed by the exciting scene through which he had just passed. As it was, he sighed as he put Sweetheart gently down on a low ottoman.

“It is a child I saved from the wreck and brought home with me until I could find her friends, mother.”

“Oh, poor little one!” said the lady, tenderly. She sat down and held out her arms. “Come here, you little beauty, and let me kiss you.”

Sweetheart ran eagerly to her new friend and held up her rosebud mouth; then she climbed into the lady’s lap with childish confidence.

“Sweet’art so tired an’ s’eepy!” she sighed, dropping the curly head on that motherly breast.

“Poor little thing! she must be put to bed,” said Mrs. de Vere.

She undressed the weary, drowsy child and laid her gently down in her own bed. In a minute she was fast asleep.

“God bless you, dear little mother! Oh, what a relief this is to me!” exclaimed the young man.

“Was she so very troublesome?”

“No; I did not mean that. I—I—But, mother, perhaps you are too tired for me to talk to you to-night?”

“No, indeed: I could sit up for hours. But have you seen Camille yet?”

“Yes, I have seen her. I will describe to you, mother, the charming interview I have just held with my wife,” he replied, in tones of bitter mockery.

She listened while he went over the painful scene, and her eyes reflected the indignation that flashed from his.

“How could she be so unjust, so cruel? Oh, I never dreamed that the daughter of my old friend could be so jealous and so suspicious,” she cried, in real distress, for the mother knew that she was in some degree responsible for her son’s misery.

She had fostered and encouraged the boy’s passion for the mature siren.

The close of the war had left her an impoverished widow with an only son, and it had taxed her shallow resources to provide means for him to have an education such as befitted a De Vere who had some of the best blood of France as well as of the South in his veins. But she sent him to college, and it was on a visit home at Christmas that she took him to call on a lady who was wintering in Jacksonville—a Miss Acton—the daughter of an old friend of hers. Miss Acton was an orphan, and had inherited a million of dollars from her California father and a beautiful face from her mother. She was alone in Florida, except for her fashionable friends and her French maid. She told Mrs. de Vere, who had sought her out for her mother’s sake, that she was unmarried still, because she could put no faith in the disinterested love of any man.

Mrs. de Vere took her son with her when he came home at Christmas to call on the distrustful heiress. He was young and impressionable, and Camille Acton did not look twenty-five. Her beauty, her style, her Parisian costume, all combined made so strong an impression that he fell ardently in love, and as he had the beauty of an Adonis, it was no wonder that her fiery heart was thrilled in return. The ambitious mother saw all with astonishment and delight. She invited Miss Acton to winter at Castle Rackrent, as she often bitterly termed it, and between the two maneuvering women the fatal match was made.

A European tour followed upon the brilliant wedding that took place in a few months, and they remained abroad for a year, during which time the Jacksonville home was put into perfect repair and elegantly refurnished with the bride’s money for a winter residence. In due time they came back, but not before the boy had discovered that he had wedded a beautiful Xanthippe.

Camille de Vere had a jealous passion for the boy she had married that drove her into excesses of rage without reason. Added to this was a distrust of his love, a horror lest he had wedded her from a mercenary purpose alone, for with all her faults she was quite free from vanity. She hated her peculiar type of beauty, and she would not permit flattery. She believed it was addressed to the heiress, not the woman. Proud, jealous, despotic, she yet underrated her own attractions, and made herself wretched in consequence.

The bitterest taunt, the one that cut most deeply into the sensitive spirit of Norman de Vere, was one that she only ventured upon in the most towering flights of rage.

“You never loved me! You could not have cared for a woman thirteen years older than yourself, and with red hair. You married me for my money, and now you are trying to break my heart so that you may enjoy it without incumbrance!” she would cry out, coarsely; and all his protestations would be useless until she relented of herself, touched by his white face of misery. Then she would atone after her fashion by intervals of almost slavish devotion, and by costly gifts, trying to buy the forgiveness she was ashamed to beg.

Norman’s mother knew in her heart that by her ambition and her adroit management she had brought about this misery, but she dared not utter her repentance aloud. She knew that she had to remain perfectly neutral, or her rich daughter-in-law would find means to separate her from the son she idolized.

When she had heard Norman’s story, her motherly heart thrilled with indignation at the false and unjust charge brought against her idolized son.

Angry words rushed to her lips, but she crowded them back. She must not foment strife between husband and wife. The least she could do to atone for her share in their misery was to act the part of peace-maker.

She waited a few moments to quell the indignant words that swelled in her throat, then began to talk to her son in kind and soothing terms, making every excuse that she could for the erring wife.

“She was an only daughter. She has been spoiled all her life, and she can not know how her tempers appear to us. We must try to soften her by repeated kindnesses and by continual forgiveness,” she ended.

Her son’s eyes flashed darkly under the straight, black brows.

“I have already given up to her to the extent of debasing my manhood by almost dog-like humility,” he replied. “‘Forbearance has ceased to be a virtue,’ and the issue now raised between us may become a battle-ground on which her insolent pride of power must be humbled, for I shall never yield.”

“The issue?” she repeated.

“The child,” he replied.

“I do not quite understand,” she said.

“I mean that she has vowed that my protégée shall not pass the night beneath this roof. I am determined that Sweetheart shall remain until I restore her to her friends.”

The pale determination of his handsome face was so marked that she trembled with dread.

“But what if her friends should never be found? What then, Norman?”

“She would have to remain my protégée,” he replied, firmly.

She trembled at the firmness of his tone. Her prophetic mind saw endless vistas of perplexity and trouble looming dimly in the future. The thought came:

“Better, perhaps, if the child had perished with her mother!”

Then her heart smote her as a low, grieving sob broke from the little cherub in its sleep.

“Heaven forgive me!” Mrs. de Vere muttered to herself humbly.

Norman looked at her wistfully, and continued:

“I suppose you can not quite enter into my feelings, mother. I saved the little thing’s life, and somehow she almost seems to belong to me. You can not think how sweet and winning she is, too. What a sunshine she would make in this quiet old house!”

“You can not dream of adopting her!” she cried, appalled.

“Certainly not—under the circumstances,” he replied, grimly. He paused a moment, then added: “Otherwise, nothing would give me more pleasure than to claim my protégée as an adopted daughter.”

“You are mad!” she cried, in dismay.

“I do not think so,” he replied, gently. A slight flush crept up to his temples as he added: “I do not believe that my wife will ever give me a child of my own to love, yet it is but natural I should desire one.”

The same pang, the same regret had touched her own heart, but she had borne it in silence. The tears started to her eyes as she said:

“We must keep on hoping, keep on waiting. In any case, Norman, think no more of this wild fancy. It is impossible you should defy Camille in this affair. Take my advice and carry Sweetheart away early to-morrow to some friend who will take care of her until her friends are found. She will be safe with me to-night.”

“Safe!” he cried, in a startled tone. “Mother, you do not mean—”

“I mean nothing only that I will keep Sweetheart with me to-night, but that you must take her away to-morrow,” she replied, firmly, adding as he moved to the door: “Remember your first duty is to your wife. Go now and try to make your peace with her, dear boy.”

The dark eyes flashed.

“Good-night, mother,” he said, with sudden coldness, and went out.

The shrill screams that had gone with him up the stairway a little while before were silent now. He had heard a bustle in the hall shortly before, and he knew that the servants had carried their hysterical mistress upstairs. He went softly along the hall and tapped at the door.

It opened quietly. Mlle. Finette showed her sallow face, beady black eyes and smart cap in the crevice of the door.

“How is your mistress?” he asked.

“Vair mooch bettaire, and asleep, m’sieur.”

“Did she leave me any message?”

“Non, m’sieur; but she ordered me to stay by her bed all the night,” her eyes snapping maliciously.

“Very well,” he said, calmly, turning away and going down the hall toward the stairway.

He was eager to get into the open air. The house seemed stifling.

The night breeze struck coolly on his heated brow as he let himself out at the back door and walked wearily toward a beautiful grove of orange-trees now in the full glory of blossom and fruit. Their tropical fragrance blended deliciously with the odor of Maréchal Neil roses that clambered over a picturesque summer-house near at hand.

He went inside and sunk heavily into a rustic chair.

“My God, and this is the home-coming to which I have looked forward so longingly for two long weeks!” he muttered, with a laugh that was half self-mockery, half despair. Then a moment later: “Why did I battle so eagerly for life that night? Was it worth it?”

CHAPTER VI.

When Norman de Vere turned away from his wife’s door the maid locked it quickly, and crossed the room to the bedside of her mistress.

Mrs. de Vere had half risen from the luxurious nest of linen and lace, and with her wavy red locks falling backward like a veil, was leaning on her white elbow listening eagerly.

“He did not ask to see me, Finette?” she whispered, half longingly.

“Non, miladi—only about your health.”

“You told him I was asleep—that you were ordered to remain by me all night?”

“Oui, madame.”

“Finette, I wish you would quit your bad habit of falling into French. It is annoying, after the pains I took to have you taught good English years ago!” Mrs. de Vere cried out petulantly.

“Pardon, madame. C’est—that is, ’twas slip of the tongue,” Finette replied, meekly.

“Very well. Try to command your tongue. Now, tell me, what of the brat?”

“He left it with the old lady, madame, as I told you.”

“You heard nothing of what they said when you listened at the door?”

Finette’s beady black eyes glistened malevolently.

“Not vair mooch—they spoke too low,” she said. “As well as I could understand English—which I speak but imperfectly, madame—my master he complained bitterly of you. His mother she said it was one vair great shame you was so jealous and so cruel to him.”

The hazel eyes shot forth red lights of fury.

“Very well; I will pay her out for her interference!” she cried, in a hissing tone of rage; then she lay back on her pillow, gasping with anger.

“Oh, madame! these moder-in-laws they be marplots between the young married ones,” cried Finette, lugubriously.

Having cast this lighted match into the gunpowder of her lady’s wrath, the artful and malicious French maid became discreetly silent.

Her mistress too was very quiet. She was divided between bitter wrath and inconsistent pique. She had forbidden her husband’s presence, yet she fiercely resented the fact that he had not insisted on coming into the room—that he had taken her dismissal so calmly and gone away.

“If he had really loved me, he would have insisted on seeing me,” she burst out, bitterly, and the wily French maid answered:

“Madame, he loves you—be sure of that. But he is too young; that is my master’s great fault. He is just from his books; he understands not, like a man of the world, the caprice of the woman. He knows not that her no means yes, and that her stay out means come in.”

Mrs. de Vere flushed at hearing herself so correctly analysed by the crafty French maid, but she did not contradict her. She remained silent for a few minutes, and Finette waited patiently. At last:

“He defies me; his mother defies me; the ungrateful beggars that I raised from penury to wealth and luxury!” Mrs. de Vere burst forth, wrathful, unheeding the presence of the attendant. “They keep the little wretch here, despite the fact that I ordered him to take it away! Strange! Strange! But I will show them what stuff Camille de Vere is made of! Finette!”

“Madame!”

“Do you not believe with me that this mysterious child is Norman de Vere’s own?”

Finette shrugged her narrow shoulders expressively.

“Dear madame, if I agree to any of the hard things you uttaire against your husband now, you will be indignant with poor Finette when you make up your love quarrel with him.”

Finette had not attained the age of forty years without becoming a clever student of feminine nature. She was too astute to abuse her master. She knew well that the capricious woman before her would like her better for defending him.

Mrs. de Vere bit her lip and answered sharply:

“You are too pert, Finette; but it matters not what you believe—I have my own opinion, and it is unchangeable.”

“Pardon, dear madame,” replied the polite and indefatigable maid.

Mrs. de Vere scowled at her, but smiled a minute after, and asked eagerly:

“Finette, would you like to earn a hundred dollars to-night?”

“Only tell me how, madame!” cried the woman, her small black eyes glittering avariciously.

“Very well. Steal that child from my mother-in-law’s room, take it away from here and place it with some one who will keep it forever away from Norman de Vere, and I will pay you a hundred dollars in the morning.”

“But, madame, it is so late! It is now long past the midnight hour. There is scarce time.”

“‘Where there is a will there is a way,’” Mrs. de Vere replied, sagely.

“Let me think,” said Mlle. Finette.

She stood so long with down-dropped eyes that Mrs. de Vere cried impatiently:

“I will make it two hundred if you will consent, Finette, and I will always be grateful to you for helping me to outwit these tyrants who have tried to impose upon me with their infamous plot.”

Finette smiled.

“I will try,” she said.

Mrs. de Vere showered praises upon her confederate, and then Finette bent down, whispering a question that made her mistress recoil with blanched cheeks.

“Ah, no, no! not that!” she cried, with a horrified gesture of her white hand. “Only let me be rid of her—that is all I ask.”

“Very well, madame—as you wish it, of course. I think I know the woman that will do what you want—a wretched old miser of a rag-picker. But she lives a long way from here. If I might have your saddle-horse—”

“You are welcome to it.”

“Oh, many thanks, madame! The little one will be asleep, you see. I shall have to chloroform both her and the old lady to get her, you know.”

“Do not annoy me with the details. Only do your task as silently and efficiently as possible, and look to me for your reward as soon as you return!” Mrs. de Vere exclaimed, with haughty impatience.

“I go then at once,” Finette answered, in a cringing tone.

“My blessings and my thanks go with you!” exclaimed her wayward mistress.

“I don’t know about that,” the clever maid muttered, when she found herself alone in the darkness of the hall. “You’re a capricious one as ever I see. Maybe by to-morrow you’ll make up your quarrel with your boy-husband and want to undo all I’ve done to please you to-night.”

She crept softly along the hall, and knelt down and applied her ear to the key-hole at the old lady’s door. There came to her distinctly the deep breathing of one asleep.

“Deep in the arms of Morpheus!” she muttered, grimly. “And she never locks her door at night. Come, I do not think I’m going to have vair mooch trouble getting the brat away.”

She slid along the floor and went softly down-stairs to prepare for her evil errand. To do so she had to go out to the stables to saddle a horse.

As she was going softly past the summer-house, she started on coming face to face with a female figure in white with a shawl thrown over its head.

“Oh, Miss Finette, don’t holler, please! ’Tain’t nobuddy but Nance! I’se been to an ebenin’ party, an’ gwine to slip inter de back do’ easy,” half whispered the voice of one of the negro house-maids.

“I don’t know but I ought to report you to the housekeeper, Nance, for keeping such late hours,” Finette answered, jokingly.

“Per’aps I’ll ’port you to your young missus fer de same t’ing!” cried Nance.

“‘Sh! I was fooling, Nance. I had to come out for some fresh air before I went to bed. I’ve been up all night with my lady.”

“In ’nuther tantrum?” inquired Nance, intelligently.

“Yes.”

“Whut’s up now?”

“Master came to-night, and they quarreled as usual.”

“I wonder he don’t leave her for good and all, she’s so aggervating, and he’s the most patientest soul alive,” cried the house-maid, indignantly.

“Well, she is a high one,” giggled Finette, some secret memory seeming to amuse her. Presently she said, confidentially: “Well, she’s been in an outrageous temper since yesterday morning.”

“Fer why?” queried Nance.

“Well, she was looking in the glass at herself, and whatever do you think she found?”

“Oh, whut?” gasped Nance, breathless with eagerness.

Finette, whose coarse, unscrupulous nature always took revenge in private for the snubs her mistress often gave her, giggled softly again and answered:

“The first gray hair in that red hair of hers.”

“Oh, my! she is a-gitten old.”

“Yes; and she cut a caper, I tell you! Actually threw herself down and cried like somebody was dead. Then she got up, glared at herself, and made me pull the gray hair out and burn it in a hurry. She was as cross as could be after that.”

“Lordy!” giggled Nance, who had no love for her young mistress.

“Yes, indeed,” said Finette. “Oh, it cuts her to be so much older than the boy she married. She hates it. She’s as jealous as—a—a—tigress!” said Finette. “But it’s cool, ain’t it? Let’s go in,” and she turned back, saying to herself: “I’ll have to slip out after she’s abed, drat her!”

They both vanished, and the next moment Norman de Vere appeared in the door-way of the summer-house, from whose shelter he had heard every word that had passed outside.

His eyes blazed with indignation, and it was with difficulty that he had restrained himself from confronting the treacherous maid and sternly rebuking her for her flippancy.

“The coarse, ungrateful, shameless creature! It is thus that she repays the confidence her mistress has reposed in her for years!” he thought, and he resolved that to-morrow Camille should hear the story, when he did not doubt that she would rid herself of the woman.

Although smarting with resentment at the false and cruel charge Camille had brought against him, Norman de Vere was touched to the heart by the fact that Finette had betrayed. The story of her grief at finding in her rich, abundant tresses the first gray hair had a deep pathos for the man who loved Camille still, in spite of her caprices and cruelties.

As he thought of her weeping over her misfortune before the hard, unsympathetic eyes of the secretly amused French maid, he forgot for a moment his own grievances; his manly heart grew warm with pitying love.

“Poor Camille! Poor darling!” he murmured, “how cruelly sensitive she is over the slight disparity between our years! It is because she loves me well, in spite of her morbid fancies, and I wish I had been with her yesterday, instead of Finette, when she found that little silver thread. I would have taken her in my arms and kissed that hair so many times she would not have had the heart to remove it from her shining tresses. Perhaps she is grieving over it now, and I might comfort her. I will go to her now; I will risk another rebuff in the endeavor to make peace with that proud heart,” turning hurriedly toward the house.

CHAPTER VII.

Clever Finette found out long before she was summoned to dress her mistress next morning that a reconciliation had most probably taken place between the young husband and his jealous wife, and she was surprised to find her when she entered in one of her most captious moods. She made herself as disagreeable as possible, and when Finette was brushing out the splendid lengths of her waving hair, burst out suddenly:

“If you find another gray hair, Finette, you need not gossip with Nance over it, taking ungrateful pleasure in ridiculing the mistress to whom you owe everything.”

“Madame!”

For once the wicked, imperturbable maid was taken by surprise. The ivory-backed brush fell from her nervous hand, and she recoiled in fear, realizing that her mistress had found her out for once.

“Madame!” she exclaimed, shrilly, and Mrs. de Vere answered, angrily:

“You understand me. I know all your malicious gossip to the negro house-maid last night.”

“So Nance has been telling lies on me, madame? I thought you trusted your faithful Finette better than to listen to those miserable negroes, my lady,” reproachfully.

“Go on with my hair,” Mrs. de Vere answered, shutting her red lips with an angry click. She spoke no more until the last hairpin was pushed into the wavy coil of shining hair.

“Well, did you succeed?” she inquired, in a low, significant voice.

“Yes, madame. The leetle one is far away—far away and safe. Monsieur will nevaire find her again.”

“That is well. You shall have your reward,” Mrs. de Vere said, coldly. She waited until Finette, with a rather sulky face, had finished dressing her in an exquisite morning-dress of soft white mull and lace, with a quantity of fluttering pale-green ribbons; then she unlocked a drawer in her dressing-case, and took out a purse from which she counted out two hundred dollars into the eager hands of the avaricious maid.

“You are paid now for what you did last night; and remember you are to hold your tongue about that forever,” she said.

Finette protested that the secret should never pass her lips.

All this time Mrs. de Vere had been trembling with suppressed anger, which now she could hold in no longer. She turned angrily toward Finette, and cried:

“Now I am going to pay you a month’s wages in advance and discharge you!”

“Discharge me, madame? Oh!” cried Finette, in amazement.

“Yes—for your odious tattling last night. You ridiculed me—held me up to the derision of my own servants—and I shall punish you by discharging you without a character!” Mrs. de Vere retorted, violently.

“And all for the lies of that black hussy, Nance! Oh, madame! I nevaire could have believed this, after all my years of faithful service. But I shall punish the false negress—I will pull the black wool from her head!” stormed Finette, in a towering rage, and in a mixture of French and English impossible to transcribe.

“Be silent! How dare you behave so rudely in my presence?” cried Mrs. de Vere, with a stamp of her slippered foot, her hazel eyes flashing indignantly.

“But such lies! How can I bear it? Not a word of truth in it! That Nance envies me—lies to get me out of my place and turned away homeless. But I will tear her eyes out!” hissed Finette, viciously.

Mrs. de Vere smiled scornfully at the theatrical gestures of the excited French woman.

“You can spare yourself all these denunciations of the poor house-maid,” she said, impatiently. “It was not she who betrayed you; it was my husband, who was sitting in the rose arbor and overheard you and Nance.”

Finette stared—then leered.

“In the rose arbor! Ah, but that is strange!” she cried. “Why, it was just outside the rose arbor I met Nance. The hussy! she told me she had just come from a party. She led me on to talk about you, and all the time laughing in her sleeve, knowing he was there!”

The wicked significance of her looks and tones were most insulting to her mistress. Mrs. de Vere flushed burning red up to her temples.

“Be silent, you miserable wretch! How dare you traduce my husband?” she exclaimed.

“You traduced him yourself last night,” muttered Finette, sulkily.

Mrs. de Vere chose not to hear the retort, and continued:

“Nance did not know my husband was in the arbor.”

“Oh, certainly not, madame,” Finette replied, with a sneer; but her mistress took no notice and went on:

“Mr. de Vere was so indignant at your treachery that he came at once to tell me, and he desired me to send you away this morning.”

“Monsieur is very kind,” said Finette, with a ghastly smile. “I will try to forgive him. I will repay good for evil.”

Mrs. de Vere gave a slight start—the tone was so significant.

“When does monsieur wish me to go?” added Finette, plaintively.

“To-day,” curtly.

“And you, madame?” more plaintively still.

“I agree with my husband,” Mrs. de Vere replied, still smarting under the pangs of wounded pride, and quite ignoring the gratitude she had professed for Finette last night.

She could remember nothing but the fierce shame and anger that had thrilled her when she heard how Finette had held her up to the coarse ridicule of her negro servant.

“Very well,” said Finette, courtesying with pretended meekness; then she whimpered: “Oh, madame! let me stay. I will never tattle again.”

“I wish you to go. No pleading will move me to retain you in my service after your treachery of last night,” was the cold reply.

A malicious light crept into the beady black eyes beneath the downcast lids, and Finette crept servilely toward the door.

“I am very sorry,” she murmured, audibly; then, as if struck by a sudden thought: “Oh, I think I can undo some of my bad work of last night. I will go to monsieur; I will confess—”

“What?” quavered a frightened voice close beside her, and Mrs. de Vere clutched her arm. “What is it you are going to confess to my husband?” she demanded.

Finette turned upon her boldly.

“The abduction of his child at your instigation, miladi,” she replied, with insolent triumph, and she felt herself well revenged for Mrs. de Vere’s contempt when she saw how she had frightened the proud beauty.

The haughty woman recoiled in horror, her cheek grew ashen pale, her hazel eyes darkened and dilated with fear.

Finette smiled maliciously when she saw that she had reduced her domineering mistress to a condition of speechless fear and indignation. She waited a moment, and then continued, coolly:

“You see you are in my power, madame. Turn me away, and you make me desperate. I have always pitied monsieur for the match he made, and I will do him one good turn before I go by telling him what you made me do last night.”

“I paid you well—you promised to keep it a secret forever!” Mrs. de Vere uttered, reproachfully.

“‘A bad promise is better broken than kept,’” quoted Finette, with airy unconcern and audacity.

“What is it that you wish me to do then? Give you a good character when you leave, that you may deceive some other woman?” inquired Mrs. de Vere, angrily.

“You will keep me in your service, please,” was the unblushing reply.

“As the price of your silence?”

“As you please, madame,” with a mocking courtesy; and Mrs. de Vere now realized fully that from henceforth Finette was the mistress, herself the slave. Her secret had placed her entirely at the unscrupulous woman’s mercy.

With a sinking heart she cried:

“What am I to tell my husband?”

“Say that Finette begged a thousand pardons, wept, tore her hair, refused to be comforted until you promised to forgive her and try her again.”

Mrs. de Vere could not repress a slight smile at the cool impudence of the creature.

“Stay, then, and try to hold your tongue in future,” she said, ungraciously, and Finette pretended the most abject gratitude, ending with:

“After all, dear madame, what could you do without your poor Finette? Who could dress you so as to set off to the best advantage your exquisite face?”

Mrs. de Vere knew that Finette spoke the truth. If she had sent her away she would have sorely missed her, but she was too angry and too humiliated to own her dependence. She waved her hand without reply, and swept down-stairs in search of her husband.

He was waiting for her in the breakfast-room. She went up to him and said:

“I find it impossible to get rid of that treacherous Finette. She has begged a thousand pardons, and entreated me to try her again. After all, Norman, I could not do any better if I sent her away. Another servant would be just as deceitful, and would not have the advantage that Finette has of knowing all my ways.”

“Please yourself,” he answered, a little coldly.

CHAPTER VIII.

The entrance of a servant with breakfast hindered further conversation. They took their places, and Mrs. de Vere poured her husband’s coffee. She saw him glance inquiringly at his mother’s vacant chair, and said, carelessly:

“Mrs. de Vere sleeps late this morning.”

A thought of little Sweetheart came to both, but neither uttered it aloud. Last night they had patched up a weak fabric of peace, and both shrunk from the mention of the child’s name.

But Norman de Vere remembered that he had kept his mother awake so late last night that she was tired and weary this morning; so, without any uneasiness over her absence, he finished his breakfast and followed his wife out into the beautiful grounds. She, with the guilty consciousness upon her that as soon as he returned to the house he must find out the absence of his protégée, detained him as long as she could, winding about him anew the siren fetters in which she had bound him two years ago.

“Oh, Camille! how charming you are to-day!” he cried. “You make me almost forget last night. Oh, if only—”

He paused and sighed.

“If only what?” she asked, with a slight frown.

“If only you would be reasonable—if you would repent your absurd suspicions of me last night, and show a woman’s pity for that poor, motherless child,” he said, gently, pleadingly.

She hung down her head, and a slight smile parted her scarlet lips. He thought it was one of tender yielding; he did not dream it was of diabolical triumph.

“Camille!” he cried, eagerly.

Her smiling hazel eyes lifted to his, and she held out her slender, beautiful white hand all glittering with costly rings. He took it and pressed it fondly to his warm lips.

“You relent, my darling?” he exclaimed; and she answered, with a coquettish glance:

“How can I refuse you anything, Norman? You always conquer my will in the end.”

He caught her to his breast, showering thanks and kisses upon her, thankful that the disagreement of last night had not brought about a lasting breach between himself and Camille.

As for her, she despised herself for her double-dealing; yet she would have done the same thing over again, and deep down in her heart there remained the same jealous resentment for the stand he had taken against her last night. She glossed it over with smiles and caresses, but the anger was there still—“the little rift within the lute.”

All unsuspecting, the young lover-husband accepted her pretended relenting for the truth, and entreated her to go with him at once to his mother’s room.

“It is so lovely out here that I hate to go in,” she said, with a sweet, languid smile, for her breath began to come in faint, panting gasps. “Suppose you go, Norman, and bring your little pet out here?”

He agreed to do so, and with a parting caress turned away. Beautiful, guilty Camille sunk into a seat, panting with fear.

“Oh, what will he say? Will he be very angry? Will he suspect me?” she asked of her wildly beating heart.

She knew that she had done wrong, but not for worlds would she have restored the child to her husband, and not for worlds would she have had him cognizant of her sin. All her anxiety was for herself, and she cared nothing for the fate of the lovely child that she had consigned to the hard mercies of Finette.

“I do not care what becomes of it so that it never crosses my path again!” she thought, vindictively, and just then she lifted her eyes and saw her husband before her.

“Why didn’t you bring the little one with you?” she asked, with pretended anxiety.

“Camille, I do not know what to think. Little Sweetheart is gone. She disappeared in some mysterious fashion last right,” he answered, with a groan.

“Norman!” amazedly.

“It is true,” he said. “I found my mother in the greatest distress. She had slept later than usual this morning, and when she awoke the child was gone.”

“Gone!” she echoed, faintly.

“Yes. She thought at first that the little one had slipped out and gone down-stairs, but on making inquiries she could find no trace of her anywhere.”

“I would have the grounds searched. She may be a somnambulist. Perhaps she has wandered off somewhere in her sleep,” suggested his wife.

“Perhaps so,” he said, then he looked at her keenly. “Camille, I am tormented with a dreadful suspicion!” he exclaimed.

“A sus—picion!” she faltered, growing deathly pale.

“Yes.”

“Of—of—whom?” she asked, in feeble, halting accents.

“Of—alas! that I must speak it—of my mother!”

She started and drew a long breath of relief.

“Last night,” he continued, “I told my mother frankly of your opposition to my keeping the child. I could see that she took your part against me. She advised me to take the child away, but allowed me to persuade her to keep it till this morning. What if my mother, out of a mistaken sense of loyalty to you, Camille, has spirited away Sweetheart, lest she should stir up strife between us?”

Her heart leaped with joy as she realized that it was his mother, not herself or Finette, whom he suspected. No pity stirred her heart for the kind mother-in-law of whose loyalty to herself she had just been assured by Norman. She caught eagerly at the loop-hole of escape opened to her by Norman’s suspicions.

“Your theory looks plausible,” she said. “It was very kind of her to take my part, but perhaps she will restore the child when she learns that I have changed my mind about it.”

CHAPTER IX.

A week passed away, and again it was the night of Mrs. de Vere’s weekly reception.

The magnificent house was ablaze with light, and a band of music in the broad hall filled the air with strains of sweetest music.

In the drawing-room the friends of the hostess—fair women and gallant men—were dispersed in social groups, having just returned from the supper-room.

Mrs. de Vere was looking stately and beautiful as usual in a costume of trailing dead-white silk, with a necklace of pearls. The trying costume was relieved by the warm hue of her eyes and hair, and her admirers declared that she was looking her loveliest.

The mother-in-law, too, stately old lady that she was, came in for her share of admiration. Her handsome, high-bred face, with its large, dark eyes and frame of wavy, white hair, gave her a very distinguished air, and her black silk dress with point-lace fichu and diamond pin were very becoming.

But the handsome old face was clouded with pain and grief this evening, for in some way she had become aware of her son’s suspicions, and her loving heart was almost broken by his coldness. Her eyes followed him wistfully as he stood apart from her, trying to do his part in the gay scene, but with a brooding trouble in his deep, dark eyes, for the fate of little Sweetheart rested heavily on his mind.

In the week that had elapsed since the child’s disappearance, no clew to her whereabouts had been discovered. Unknown to any one, he had placed a clever detective on her track, but as yet he had received no tidings, and the suspense began to grow unbearable.

The lovely, winning child had wound herself around his heart in the two days when she had been his sole care. He who had saved her life felt himself responsible to her friends for her safe guardianship.

Already he had had inserted in several newspapers the story of the finding of the child and her mother’s tragic death. He hoped by this means to find Sweetheart’s friends.

But as days went by bringing no news from those to whom the child belonged, he began to feel a sort of relief at the silence, for if any one came to claim her, what was he to do, how answer for her loss?

To-night he was restless and ill at ease in spite of the fact that his capricious wife had been all sunshine for a week. Somehow her smiles and gayety seemed heartless, for she showed no anxiety, no sympathy over the loss that weighed so heavily on his conscience.

He glanced at her as she stood, the center of an admiring group, tall, stately, queen-like in her rich dress and jewels, and turning away with a heavy sigh, sought the seclusion of the grounds, eager for a few moments of solitude that he might drop the conventional smile that social courtesy demanded.

How sweet and cool and silent it was out there in the beautiful moonlight among the flowers! He drew a long breath and murmured:

“Ah, Little Sweetheart, where are you to-night? Are you living or dead? What would I not give to feel your soft little arms about my neck again, and see your sunny blue eyes looking into mine!”

Suddenly he saw the tall figure of a man advancing up the path toward the house. He thought he recognized him, and went hastily forward. It was, as he had thought, the detective he had employed to trace the missing child.

The man lifted his hat with a cry of pleasure.

“Ah, Mr. de Vere, I should not have ventured in so late, but I saw that you were entertaining company, so I thought I would wait about the grounds in the hope of seeing you.”

“You have news?” the young man exclaimed, eagerly.

“Yes. I have found the little girl.”

CHAPTER X.

The guests were beginning to take leave. Already their gay farewells floated out upon the air of the night where Norman de Vere had been walking alone since the detective had left him.

He went back to the house, deathly pale, but calm.

When the last good-night had been uttered, when the echo of the carriage wheels had died away in the distance, the young man turned back into the house.

His mother and his wife were going up the broad stairway to their rooms. He called them back.

“I wish to speak with you in the library,” he said.

His face was so white, his eyes so stern that they followed him in awe-struck silence. He locked the door and placed chairs for both.

Beautiful Camille began to grow a little frightened. She cried out, half defiantly:

“I wish you would wait till morning, Norman. I am tired and sleepy.”

She flung herself indolently back in her chair, with her white arms upraised over her head, yawning lazily.

Her husband paid no attention to her complaint. He had fallen on one knee before his mother. He lifted her soft, white hand to his lips.

“Mother, I have deeply wronged you. Forgive me!” he exclaimed.

“My son,” she faltered.

“I am ashamed to confess it; but perhaps you have suspected—I feared—nay, believed—that you, out of sympathy with Camille, had hidden Little Sweetheart away from me.”

Yes, she had suspected—had guessed his thought—had grieved in silence over his proud coldness to her, his mother. She could not answer now save by a low, pained sob.

Still on his knees before the gentle mother he had wronged, he turned his face toward Camille.

“I was base enough to confide my suspicions to you,” he said, bitterly. “You, Camille, fostered and encouraged them. To save yourself you turned traitor to her who was your mother’s dearest friend, and who for that at least should have been sacred from your treachery. What have you to say for yourself?”

“That I am no worse than you. You first suggested it to me. It—it seemed plausible!” Camille replied, with a defiant face.

A low groan broke from him, and he gazed at her for a moment in steady scorn; then he turned back to the agitated elderly woman.

“Mother, I wronged you,” he said again, in a voice of deep contrition. “Can you forgive me?”

“Freely, Norman,” she replied, tenderly.

“If this was all you wanted, it might have waited until to-morrow. Unlock that door; I am going,” Camille said, sharply, eager to escape, for she began to fear that his suspicions were now directed against herself.

He did not obey her haughty command, but rising, stood looking at her, his arms folded over his breast, a gleam of fierce anger in his eyes.

“You will wait a moment,” he said. “I have news for you. The missing child is found.”

“Really!” she sneered; but an icy shudder shook her from head to foot, and a silent malediction against Finette’s bungling trembled on her lips.

“Yes, she is found, Camille,” he said. “And, oh, Camille, Camille, imagine my feelings when I found that you had deceived me—that you were the guilty party!”

“How dare you accuse me?” she stormed, springing to her feet, wrathfully beautiful, determined to brave it out to the end; but he answered her with that smile that was half sorrow, half scorn:

“Denials are useless. You worked through Finette, your diabolical French maid. She took the child from my mother’s arms while she slept. She went on horseback with her captive to one of the worst quarters of Jacksonville, where she gave her to a miserable, brutal old rag-picker, who has half starved that innocent little angel, beaten her till she is covered with stripes, and forced her to stand in the streets and beg for her food! Oh, my wife! how little I dreamed that you could be capable of such cruelty!”

While he spoke the guilty woman stood her ground, facing him defiantly, her white face twitching with sneers, her jeweled hands clinching and unclinching themselves in impotent wrath, as the young man went on, scathingly:

“It is no wonder you will not part with your clever maid. She is too useful to you. But her time has come now. She shall go!”

“Norman!” cried his mother, beseechingly; but neither of them heeded her. Camille was crying passionately:

“Who is my accuser?”

“The detective whom I employed to unravel the mysterious affair. He dragged it out of the miserable old rag picker with whom Finette made her bargain.”

She stood still a moment, looking at the white set face of the man she loved with such jealous passion, and a feeling like death stole over her at the thought of losing him.

Despite all her caprices, all her taunts, all her jealous madness, she knew that Norman de Vere had loved her well and truly in their two stormy years of wedded life, and she, ah! she—she adored him in her wild, strange fashion. To lose his love were to lose heaven, she thought, impiously.

Yet in the dark, burning eyes that he fixed on her face, in the curl of his beautiful lips she read something that she feared and dreaded—the dawning of that hour when, goaded by her injustice, her jealousy, her cruelty, he should throw off the fetters of love that bound him, and regret the fatal hour that made their two lives one.

As white as death she stood facing him, wondering how she should extricate herself from her terrible strait, how escape from the web of fate her own reckless hands had spun, for escape she must, or bear his stinging contempt to her life’s end.

The passionate, undisciplined creature flung her jeweled hands up to her face, and her slender, graceful figure shook for a moment like a leaf in a storm, then as suddenly she withdrew them, and, with a gesture of infinite pathos, fixed her blazing eyes upon the face of the angry man.

“This from you, Norman—this from you? Oh, Heaven, it is too cruel!” she cried out in accents of reproach and pain.

He did not answer; he stood staring at her dumbly, while she continued:

“Poor indeed must be the quality of your love for me if you can credit such a charge against my honor!”

“There is proof,” he answered, icily.

“There is no proof! There can not be, for I am not guilty of this thing!” she cried out, wildly. “Oh, send for Finette! Surely there is some horrible mistake.”

He crossed to the door and said something to a servant in the hall.

In a few moments Finette made her appearance among them, and the door was again shut and locked.

“Oh, miladi, are you ill again?” cried the deceitful French woman, pretending the liveliest anxiety.

She went eagerly forward to Mrs. de Vere, and a swift, telegraphic glance passed between the two unnoticed by the others.

“No, Finette, I am not ill. It is worse—far worse! My honor is assailed! We are charged—you and I—with being the parties who abducted that child from Verelands a week ago!”

“Oh, miladi!” recoiling in amazement.

“Do you not understand, Finette? My husband employed a detective to find the child. He succeeded in doing so, and now declares that you were the abductor, and that you were doing my bidding. Speak, Finette; tell our accusers that we are innocent.”

Her burning hazel eyes seemed to shoot red lights of indignation and fury, and clever Finette caught the clew at once.

“Oh, my mistress! who has dared accuse you?” she exclaimed, calculating rapidly that if she cleared her mistress from this charge, unlimited opportunities of blackmail lay before her in the future. She assumed an appearance of virtuous indignation, and went on: “I will confess all, miladi! I took the child away, indeed, but I swear it was not done at your bidding. You suspected nothing; but Finette, in her devotion to her mistress, took on herself the responsibility of the abduction. Alas! it has failed, and I am désolé. You will never forgive me—you will drive me from you!”

“Yes, Finette, I will send you away to-morrow. Your sin is too great for me to pardon. Oh! how could you think to please me by so vile a deed?” Camille exclaimed, angrily.

“Miladi, I beg ten thousand pardons! It was a mistake. I thought to serve you, but I erred. I will go to-night. But, sir”—turning to her master—“Mrs. de Vere had nothing to do with that—I swear it. Punish me, but not her; she is innocent.”

He turned to Camille, and saw tears standing thick in her lovely eyes.

“You wronged me,” she said, sadly, reproachfully. He stood undecided, doubting, and she went on, in the same sad voice: “I am innocent, Norman. To prove it, I bid you bring the child back here to Verelands, and no mother could be kinder to her child than I will be to your pretty little protégée. I was mad with jealousy that night, and scarce knew what I said. Whatever wild words I uttered, I take them all back and crave your pardon.”

Her sweet humility, her tender yielding, did what all her defiance had failed in—they melted the ice about his heart. One moment he gazed in silence, then, springing to her side, clasped her closely to his breast, exclaiming, gladly:

“Forgive me, darling, for my unjust suspicions! I will atone for them by deeper devotion than in the past.”

CHAPTER XI.

Norman de Vere did not dream of the depths of duplicity hidden in his wife’s nature. He believed that she was honest in the repentance she professed, and accordingly he had Little Sweetheart brought back the next day to the home from which she had been so rudely torn by the wily French maid, whom Mrs. de Vere had now sent into brief exile to carry out the plot by which she had saved her guilty mistress.

A great change had been wrought in the pretty child by her week with the wretched, heartless old rag-picker. Beaten and starved, her pretty clothes taken from her and replaced with filthy rags, she was a pitiable object when she returned to Verelands, and the big blue eyes staring out of the wan little face were bright with fever. She was given a warm bath, clothed in new and pretty garments, and laid in a little bed beside that of Norman’s mother. There she lay for weary weeks, consumed by scarlet fever. Norman’s wife fled in terror to a fashionable hotel, leaving her mother-in-law to nurse the little invalid, quite ignoring all the protestations she had made so recently.

“I have never had the fever; I should die if I contracted it!” she cried, wildly; and although Norman tried to explain to her that grown people rarely contracted the disease, she paid no attention.

“I am going; you must come with me,” she said, imperiously.

“And desert my mother and the child?” he asked, reproachfully.

“Your first duty is to me,” she exclaimed, throwing her superb arms about his neck and kissing him with pleading fondness.

She conquered, and carried him off in her train, although he said:

“I shall come back to Verelands every day to help my mother. I had scarlet fever when I was a child, so I am not afraid of it.”

She insisted that he would carry the contagion in his clothes.

“I will always change them before entering your presence,” he said; and then she saw that he was obstinately bent upon his purpose. No words of hers, no blandishments, although he loved her dearly, could turn him from what he conceived to be his duty.

She had to acquiesce with smiles, although she was furious with secret rage. She dared not push him to the wall.

“But I will punish him for this in my own fashion,” she raved, wildly, when alone, clinching her jeweled hands in impotent rage, hating and loving Norman de Vere in one and the same moment, so wild was her jealousy, so fierce her love.

“It is his child! Who could doubt it after this?” she muttered. “For naught else would he run so great a risk—for naught else would he defy my wishes. He loves the little beggar—loved her mother, perhaps—and out of some foolish remorse is trying to atone for his sin by devotion to the child. Oh! how I hate the little wretch! I hope it may die of the fever! If only I had the courage to stay and pretend to nurse it, I should give it such careless attention it could not possibly live!”

But she was too great a coward to remain and take the risk of contracting the fever. She thought of recalling Finette to take the place of nurse to Sweetheart, but the fear of opposition to her plan deterred her from carrying it into execution.

“Norman would not approve—might refuse my request. I must give that up, and only wish the brat dead,” she muttered, shrinking sensitively from the thought of committing a crime, and little dreaming how soon those jeweled white hands would be stained crimson with human blood.

CHAPTER XII.

The gay season was just beginning at the fashionable hotel where the De Veres had taken rooms, and Norman’s wife proved a great acquisition to the social circle. Scores of Northerners were arriving every day, fleeing from wintery blasts to the blue skies and warm airs of the Southland, and in the brilliant coterie of fashion and intellect combined she became at once a leader by right of her royal dower of wealth, beauty, and fascination.

And her husband?

He veered back and forth between Verelands and his capricious wife. All the time that he could snatch from the exacting Camille was spent with his mother and the little child whose disease had assumed such a malignant form, and whose life was wavering in a balance so evenly cast that at any moment it might drop her into the yawning grave.

“Is it not sad, poor little one! to have been saved from the wrecked train and the perils of the river, only to die like this?” Norman’s mother said to him, with tears in her eyes, one day as they hovered over the little couch where Sweetheart lay muttering in delirium, her skin covered with patches of the scarlet eruption, her pretty golden curls cropped short by the doctor’s orders, her heavy blue eyes half shut and recognizing no one—strange contrast to the lovely, coquettish little fairy whose baby wiles had won their way to the young man’s heart.

“Mother!” he cried out, in a pained, incredulous tone, and she answered, sadly:

“She is very ill, Norman. It is the malignant type of fever, and it is but very seldom any one recovers from it. Doctor Hall is doing his best, I know, but from his face to-day I do not believe he has much hope.”

His handsome face grew pale, and by the pang that pierced his heart he realized how dear the child had grown to him—dear as a little sister. From his stricken heart there arose a silent prayer:

“Dear Lord, spare this sweet little life. Amen!”

“You have heard nothing of her friends yet, Norman?”

“Nothing,” he answered, huskily; then stood silent, looking down at the poor little creature, who in her delirium was trying to sing her favorite song, but the sweet loving words rose hoarse and tuneless from the sore and swollen throat.

“It is very strange that we can hear nothing of her friends,” Mrs. de Vere said, thoughtfully. “Poor little darling! she will have to lie in an unnamed grave.”

“Don’t, mother—you hurt me,” the young man said, pleadingly.

He was scarcely more than a boy, and could not control his emotion. With a long, deep sigh he added:

“I have so longed that she should live to be a dear little sister to me. You know, mother, how I always wished for a sister’s love.”

“I thought you had got over that—since you married,” she said, with some uneasiness.

Somehow the thought of his fondness for Sweetheart was not pleasant to his mother. There hung over her always the dread of Camille’s jealous anger. She said to herself:

“Foolish boy! He does not understand his wife, else he would not display such fondness for the child she hates.”

But she dared not breathe her thoughts aloud, lest he should reproach her for her share in his marriage. Her cue was silence.

He did not answer her half-questioning words save by a long, deep sigh, and presently he went away from the darkened room and the suffering child back to his beautiful wife, who was so deep in a flirtation with a new-comer at the hotel that she barely nodded to Norman, and did not think it worth her while to ask after the welfare of the sick child. The only news she would have cared to hear would have been that Sweetheart was dead.

The proud, passionate, undisciplined nature was bent now on punishing Norman for every jealous pang she had suffered over innocent Little Sweetheart. To wound him with her indifference, to torture him by the smiles she gave to others, in this she found a bitter balm for the indignity she felt she had suffered at his hands when he had taken Sweetheart’s part against her—his wife.

He sat apart with sad eyes and watched the beautiful, vivid creature as she coquetted with the flattered Englishman whose admiration was plainly written on his face, and wondered if it could be true that she really loved him, her boy-husband, or had she wearied of him long ago? Did she chafe at the fetters that bound their two lives in one?

“I believe that in her heart she despises me; that she believes me a miserable fortune-hunter, who loves her gold more than her charms,” he said to himself, miserably, with a pang of shame so great that it seemed to him he could almost have died to assure her of his innocence of all mercenary designs upon her fortune.

She stole furtive glances at him, and she knew by his pale, stern face that he was suffering intensely. Her beautiful lips curled into a smile of triumph. Had she not vowed to pay him back?

“Let him suffer,” she said to herself, with cruel firmness; but by and by, when a beautiful young girl sat down near Norman and began to talk to him, she grew restless and ill at ease. She did not want him to be consoled, so she soon found a pretext for dismissing her companion and joining her husband and the fair girl who seemed to find such pleasure in his company.

The young girl—an heiress from New York—smiled mischievously as Mrs. de Vere came near. Her jealousy of her young husband was an open secret.

“Mrs. de Vere, I was just telling your husband that we are going to have a real live lord here to-night,” she said, vivaciously.

“Indeed, Miss Spaulding? Why, how delightful! What is his name?” exclaimed the lady, pretending great interest in the subject.

“He is Lord Stuart, and is said to possess vast estates in England. He has engaged a suite of rooms here for a month, the landlord says. All the girls are in ecstasies! There will be great fun seeing them pullings caps for him, won’t there? But of course I shall be as bad as any!” said Miss Spaulding, candidly.

Mrs. de Vere made up her mind that she would be before any of those silly girls in winning the admiration of the titled Englishman. She would show Norman de Vere how she could be adored by others. It would teach him a needed lesson. When he began to realize that she could be happy in the society of other men, his jealousy would be aroused—he would be more careful how he offended her, lest he should lose her love.

She made her toilet with the greatest care for the ball-room that night. Her dress was of dead-white silk; her ornaments were of emeralds set in pearls. It was very effective, as she meant it should be. Every one gazed at her admiringly as she swept gracefully into the ball-room, leaning on the arm of her handsome husband, and carrying in her hand the superb bouquet of white camellias he had brought her from Verelands that day. There was a glow on her smooth cheek and a fire in her hazel eyes, brought there by the praises he had just been whispering in her ear.

Lord Stuart was there, looking on with the rest—a rather common-looking man after all, and fifty if he was a day old. But he was dressed in the extreme of English dude fashion, and was attracting his full share of attention from title-hunters, Miss Spaulding foremost among them, as she had declared she would be.

His lordship started with surprise and admiration when he saw Camille de Vere in all her stately beauty.

“What a magnificent beauty!” he exclaimed, in some excitement; and it was not long before he managed to secure an introduction to Mrs. de Vere.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked; and she lifted her eyes and looked at him with a puzzled gaze.

His voice sounded strangely familiar.

“But I certainly can not have met him before,” she decided; and she acceded to his request with a winning smile.

“You have been abroad, Mrs. de Vere?” he asked, in a pause of the dance.

“Several times,” she replied; and she wondered to herself if she had ever met him before.

Certainly there was something strangely familiar to her in his voice and eyes.

But she did not intimate to him that such was the fact. Something deterred her, for Camille de Vere shrunk from the memory of one past episode in her life. If Lord Stuart belonged to that time, she would not dare recall it to his mind.

“But I need not be afraid. It is so long ago, and all is so different now. No one would know me for the same,” she said to herself, with a sensation of keen relief, though her hands turned icy cold with the bare memory of that never-to-be-forgotten time.

CHAPTER XIII.

Days passed, and no matter how angry it made the young girls at the hotel, no one could deny that Lord Stuart admired the married coquette more than any of the others. He was always to be found in Camille’s train. He danced with her at the balls; he was only too proud to carry her fan and her bouquet. If she had been free, she might have become Lady Stuart at any time, said the gossips.

It was no wonder that every one was indignant with the red-haired siren, for every single woman at the hotel had had hopes of his lordship. It was a shame for them to be disappointed for the sake of a married woman who had made a conquest of him simply to gratify her own vanity. Her dear five hundred friends said hard things about her behind her back—spiteful things that when they came to the ears of Norman de Vere made him grind his white teeth in fury.

He had watched Camille’s course with bitter disapproval all these weeks, but when he remonstrated with her, she flung her white arms about him, vowing that she loved him only, that she was but amusing herself with my lord to show those spiteful women her power.

“They are only angry because I have rivaled them, that is all,” she said, caressing him fondly, for she began to think that she had punished him enough.

He had suffered, and she knew it. Her wayward heart had been touched by the look she had sometimes seen in his eyes. She began to relent—to feel ashamed of herself.

“Camille, will you not come home now? The child is almost over the fever. I do not think there can be any fear of infection now,” he said, pleadingly.

She started and frowned. Her white arms fell from his neck.

“I thought you told me the child would die!” she cried, sharply.

“We feared so. The doctor had but little hope during those days when Sweetheart lay in that deep stupor without taking food for so long. But thanks to my mother’s excellent nursing, she survived the terrible disease, and is now on the way to recovery.”

The frown on the beautiful face, half turned away from him, grew dark and deep. There was murder in Camille’s heart.

“Oh, God! how I hate the little wretch!” she thought, feverishly; and turning to him, she asked: “Have you never had any answer to the advertisements you sent to the papers?”

“None,” he replied.

“And so it is quite settled that I am to be taxed with the little foundling’s support!” she exclaimed, malevolently.

A deep-red flush came to the young man’s handsome face.

“No, Camille; the expense of the child’s maintenance will fall upon my mother, who has a small income of her own, you know. It is her wish.”

“She is very foolish,” Camille said, bitterly.

Then she paused abruptly. She remembered that she had to keep up some pretense of kindness toward the child, else Norman would discredit Finette’s clever story by which she had saved her mistress.

She put on her sweetest smile, and promised that she would go back to Verelands as soon as he wished.

“Of course I will keep away from the child’s apartments until she is quite well, for I am horribly afraid of that fever,” she said. “But I am heartily tired of the life here, and long to be at home, where I can have more of your society, Norman. Indeed, you ought not to blame me for amusing myself with other men, when you have been spending half of your time at Verelands with your mother and Little Sweetheart.”

“Come back with me, and you shall not have to complain of any lack of my society,” he replied, gayly; and she agreed to go that very day.

The ladies at the hotel were heartily glad to hear of her going, but Lord Stuart declared that he was désolé.

“I shall haunt Verelands,” he declared.

“Oh, pray do not threaten anything so ghostly. I give you leave to call in the orthodox fashion,” she replied, carelessly.

In truth, she did not care in the least whether she ever saw the infatuated nobleman again. He had served her purpose—helped her to punish Norman—and now she was ready to fling him aside like a worn-out glove.

But her grace and beauty, her coquettish wiles, had thrown a glamour over the mature man’s heart. He believed that she was weary of her boy-husband; he pitied her and despised Norman de Vere. What right had that boy to appropriate this peerless creature?

So strong was his passion that he began to indulge dreams of winning her for his own—honorably, of course. Lord Stuart was the soul of honor. But what was there to hinder a divorce? She no longer loved that smooth-faced boy, and he fancied that she had shown signs that she cared for himself.

Carried away by an irresistible spell, the nobleman thought of no rights but his own. The withdrawal of Camille’s constant presence from the hotel almost made him frantic. He began to make daily calls at Verelands, but these brief glimpses of her did not satisfy his craving. It occurred to him one day that it would be romantic to send her flowers daily—flowers whose delicate petals should hide dainty notes with love verses written within them.

Camille had great gardens full of flowers, but that did not matter to Lord Stuart. Perhaps one flower from his hand would be dearer than all the rest. He was mad enough to think so.

He spent a whole afternoon with the poets choosing an appropriate verse to accompany the bouquet of deep-red roses he had selected. At the witching hour of twilight he dispatched his valet, a handsome, saturnine-looking fellow, with the fragrant offering.

Camille was walking that twilight hour by the river which skirted the lawn at Verelands. She had left the house in a rage because her husband had excused himself for an hour that he might spend some time with the little invalid in his mother’s room.

Lord Stuart’s valet had never yet seen the lady his master adored. Indeed, the valet was a reserved, unsociable fellow, and did not have much to do with the other servants at the hotel. He spent the greater part of his time in his master’s rooms attending to his wardrobe, and he did not seem to take any interest in anything else, said the aggrieved maids at the hotel. If he had not been so good-looking they would not have minded it so much, but the fellow, with his black hair and eyes and silky black beard, was handsome in an evil, morose sort of way, and not one of them but would have been charmed if Robert Lacy had noticed her. But he did not seem to care for any one. He was gloomy and morose always, as if brooding over some secret trouble.

But when Robert Lacy heard it whispered at the hotel that his master was in love, he woke up to a feeble sort of curiosity, coupled with vexation. He had a good place as valet to a bachelor, and he felt that he would be sorry indeed if the condition of affairs was changed. Life could not be half so pleasant for him should Lord Stuart marry. When he found out later on that his master was enamored of a married lady he did not feel much easier in his mind. There was no telling what would happen. They might take it into their heads to elope. That would be quite as bad as a marriage.

He became possessed of an ardent curiosity to see the lady who threatened to spoil the ease and comfort of his life with indulgent, easy-going Lord Stuart.

But Mrs. de Vere had returned to Verelands. There was small chance for Robert Lacy to see her now, so he hailed the errand to Verelands with secret delight.

When he made his appearance at Verelands he refused to surrender the magnificent bouquet to the servants. He told them, with unblushing audacity, that his orders were to give the flowers to no one but the lady herself.

Mrs. de Vere was walking in the park, they told him, and Robert Lacy replied that he would find her himself. He turned from the curious negro servants and went into the grounds that now, in the latter part of November, were a wealth of tropical growth and flowers, with here and there a statue gleaming whitely through the twilight gloom and the luxuriant shrubbery.

Camille was walking by the river-bank. It looked weird and gloomy there in the fast-fading light. Tall cypress-trees grew along its banks, and the water, swollen by recent rains, rushed along with a sullen sound. The proud, jealous woman stood leaning against the trunk of a tall cypress-tree, thinking perhaps that the angry, brawling river typified her feelings, when a step near by sent the quick blood to her face with the thought that her husband had followed her there. She turned with a swift smile of eager welcome, but recoiled in terror when she saw beside her a tall, dark, saturnine-looking man with a bunch of red roses in his hand. One swift glance into his face, and a cry of wild alarm and horror issued from her lips.

The dark face of Robert Lacy had arisen like a ghost from her dead past—that past from which she shrank with loathing indescribable.

As for the man, his recognition of her had been swift and instantaneous, too. The red roses dropped from his hands as he flung them up, and her name fell from his lips in accents of wolfish menace, strangely blended with a sort of fierce, angry joy: “Camille!”

Mrs. de Vere fell upon her knees, and crouching, with uplifted hands, wailed, tremulously: “Vanish, in the name of God!”

“Ha! ha! so you take me for a ghost, do you?” jeered Robert Lacy. He bent down and looked into her frightened face and staring eyes with an evil smile, continuing: “Well, it isn’t strange that you do, seeing that the last time we met I was hanging on a gallows-tree, betrayed into the hands of Judge Lynch by you, madame—by you, you false jade! You went away with the rest and left me there for the buzzards to pick my bones, while you fled so fast from the scene that perhaps you never heard how one spectator—one man with a heart—cut me down and saved me from my awful fate. My neck was not broken, and he brought me back to life again. Then I fled from California with him, and have been in his service ever since, with but one thought in my heart, and that was to find my heartless wife and punish her for her perfidy!”

She crouched on the ground, muttering fearfully, with chattering teeth:

“You—you—are mistaken—in the person! I—I—never saw you before, sir!”

Robert Lacy laughed most bitterly.

“That is a lie, madame!” he retorted, scornfully. “You recognized me the moment you saw me, in spite of the twelve years that have passed since those days in California when you loved me at first with a fierce love that turned to a fierce hate—a hate that compassed my death, as you thought. But I am alive, no thanks to you, Camille. And I have found you at last. Should I not know that red head and those hazel eyes in a thousand, madly as I once loved them—cruelly as I have hated them all these years? Do not dare deny your identity to me! Get up and tell me what you have done, and where you have been all those long years when you believed that my bleached skeleton was swinging still in the wind on the Californian hills!”

He bent threateningly toward her with so fierce an expression that she dragged herself fearfully up to her feet, clinging with both hands to the tree, while she muttered defiantly:

“I will tell you nothing, you miserable horse-thief, only that I am sorry you are not dead as I believed! Go away and leave me. I have naught to do with such as you!”

“We shall see,” he said. “Come, tell me, what you are doing here; why are you so richly dressed? Did you go back to your father in San Francisco and tell him that the handsome book-agent with whom you eloped turned out to be a horse-thief and a desperado, that you betrayed him to the vigilantes, and had him hanged? Did he forgive your disobedience, commend your treachery, and take you back?”

“Hush!” she whispered, fearfully, glancing about her in the purple twilight. “You will be overheard. Nor—Some one will be coming to look for me.”

“You belong here, then?” hissed Robert Lacy, excitedly. “Perhaps you mean to tell me that you are mistress of Verelands—that you are Mrs. de Vere?”

“Oh! no—no! I do not belong here!” she cried out, wildly; but the valet lifted a heavy hand and struck her in the face.

“Quit your lies, Camille Lacy!” he said, brutally. “You’ve known the weight of that hand in the past, and you’ll feel it again if you don’t shut up! Oh, yes, I know you, Mrs. de Vere,” mockingly, “and I’ll tell you what I mean to do to punish you—you false, heartless wife! I always meant to kill you on sight. I’ve carried a knife for your heart for years, but I won’t use it just yet. I will take you to my heart again. Ha! ha! I’ll show you to Lord Stuart, who sent me here to bring you flowers, as the false wife who brought me to the gallows from which he saved me. And this gentleman—this Mr. de Vere that you’ve married, thinking yourself a widow—I’ll show you to him as a traitoress—a woman who hounded her husband to death!” fiercely.

She lifted her bruised face from her hands and moaned:

“Spare me, for God’s sake! I am rich; I will divide the whole of my fortune with you if you will only go away and leave me in peace.”

“I hate you! I would not forego my sweet revenge for the wealth of a Rothschild or a Vanderbilt,” was the sullen, evilly triumphant reply, and suddenly she flung herself upon him, whether in love or wrath it was so swift he could not determine for a moment. In that fatal moment of indecision Camille’s stealthy hand found the knife in his belt—the knife he meant for her heart. She drew back her hand and struck furiously once—twice—at his breast. The hot blood spurted into her face as she recoiled and flung him from her—flung him so skillfully that his limp form fell into the swollen river and went hurrying away with the blood-stained tide.

CHAPTER XIV.

While that terrible scene was transpiring by the river, Norman de Vere was sitting quietly in his mother’s room with pretty Little Sweetheart on his knee, talking to her of the nice ride that the doctor said she was to have to-morrow in the pretty pony-phaeton with his mother. The wan, pathetic little face brightened into smiles at the prospect, for the poor little one was very weary of her close confinement to the house.

Norman was very glad to see a smile in the little invalid’s face again. She had been so ill and weak that with the first return of health she had become petulant and fretful, sobbing bitterly sometimes when Norman had to tear himself away to rejoin his exacting wife, who begrudged every moment spent with his little protégée.

“Why don’t the pritty yady tum to see me?” she had asked, wistfully, more than once, and Mrs. de Vere had been obliged to explain to her that Camille feared infection from the fever. The child was quite intelligent, and comprehended so clearly that she asked no more for the proud woman, only looked with wistful longing for Norman’s daily visits, and the pretty gifts of toys that he always brought to amuse her in her loneliness. She had one formula always for thanking him, and that was the simple one, “I ’ove oo,” with which she had charmed him on their first acquaintance. That she truly meant it was quite evident from the confiding way in which it was said as she leaned her dear little head against him and looked up at him with the beautiful deep-blue eyes that looked so large now in the little pearl-fair face. She loved Mrs. de Vere, her faithful, tender nurse, too, but not in the absorbing way that she did Norman. When he was with her she seemed to care for no one else, and his mother sighed even while the little one’s devotion amused her, for she felt that this strange bond of tenderness between her son and the child whose life he had saved only lent color to Camille’s degrading suspicions of her husband. The mother knew her son too well to share in these suspicions, and the knowledge of them in her daughter-in-law’s breast was hard to bear.

“The child will live. What will be her future if her friends are never found?” she said to herself after the crisis of the fever had passed, and Sweetheart had lived instead of dying, as every one expected.

She prayed daily that Sweetheart’s friends might be found, for she did not trust Camille’s protestations of regard for the child. She had not been deceived like Norman by Finette’s clever lie. She comprehended all Camille’s jealous hatred and deceit, yet not for worlds would she have whispered her suspicions to Norman. No, let him go on living in his Fool’s Paradise as long as it would last, she thought, sadly.

“And it will come to an end the sooner if this beautiful little one remains here. His penchant for the child will drive Camille desperate,” thought the clear-headed woman, and she prayed all the more earnestly that Sweetheart’s people might be found.

All unconscious of the trouble she had brought into Verelands, Little Sweetheart lavished a full heart’s affection on these two who were so kind to her, never seeming to think of the past until this twilight hour when she sat on Norman de Vere’s knee, with her golden head against his breast.

There was a thoughtful expression on the sweet little face, And all at once she murmured, pathetically:

“I want Mattie.”

Mother and son bent eagerly to hear, hoping to gain some clew to the mystery that seemed to surround the little one.

“Do you mean the lady that was on the train with you?” asked the young man.

“Yes—Mattie,” eagerly.

“Was she your mamma, dear?” Mrs. de Vere inquired.

“No, no!” said Sweetheart, quickly. “Not mamma; only Mattie!”

“Your nurse, perhaps?”

“Only des Mattie, dat’s all,” was the uncompromising reply; and although they questioned her closely, they could get nothing definite from her. She had only some vague ideas of a beautiful mamma, who called her Sweetheart, and who taught her to sing some pretty little song. The shock of all she had gone through had somehow blunted the keenness of her memory, and after that one flash of recollection when she had called for Mattie so eagerly, she said no more of the past, and presently the tired head drooped to Norman’s arm and she slept heavily.

The young man laid her softly on the bed, kissed the sweet little sleeping face, and turned to go.

“Mother, won’t you join us in the drawing-room this evening? I should think Nance might sit awhile with Sweetheart,” he said.

“Perhaps,” she answered, evasively; and then he went away, wondering uneasily whether Camille would be angry because he had stayed longer than he had intended, for the simple reason that he had feared to put the sleeping child out of his arms, lest she should be awakened.

To his relief, Camille was not yet in the drawing-room.

“She has not yet finished dressing for dinner,” he thought, and rushed upstairs to make his own toilet for the eight-o’clock dinner. He hurried some, but he looked wondrously handsome when he came down again.

“No Camille yet!” he exclaimed, in wonder; and it was several minutes more before the queenly woman entered the room, elegantly attired as usual, her eyes glittering with excitement, her cheeks even more colorless than their usual wont.

CHAPTER XV.

“You are rather late,” the young man said, smilingly, as Camille came up to him for a caress.

“I had a new novel, and I was so interested in it that I could scarcely put it down to dress,” she replied, and just then the dinner-bell rang.

Norman gave his arm to his beautiful wife, and she went with him to the elegant dining-room, where they dined tête-à-tête, for the elder Mrs. de Vere had had her own meals served upstairs ever since she had been nursing the little invalid.

Never had Norman’s proud, beautiful wife been more charming than to-night. She was restless, brilliant, and more fond of her husband than she had ever seemed before. Her hazel eyes shot gleams of passion as they rested on the handsome face opposite her, and she seemed to realize more fully than ever the strength of her love for the husband who adored her, although he had had to bear so much at her capricious hands.

Despite her jealousy, despite her caprice, Camille adored her young husband; and as the thought of what had happened awhile ago rushed over her mind, and she realized how nearly she had lost him, she did not regret the terrible deed she had done. She rejoiced rather in the cleverness with which she had rid herself of her terrible foe.

Now and then, in the pauses of their talk, there came to her a thought of Robert Lacy, and she wondered if his dead body would ever be found. Would Lord Stuart ever know what had become of his servant? for such she had gathered from his words he was. She shuddered violently at thought of the danger she had been in at the hotel. Well, it was all over now. She was free—safe! The swirling river was swiftly bearing away all evidence of her ghastly crime. Oh, God! how cruelly she had hated the man whom she had sent to his death; yet she would not have had his death on her hands could she have helped it.

“But there was no other way.” She shuddered over and over as she lay sleepless by her beloved’s side through the long hours of the night, for the horror of bloodshed was upon her. She would never sleep sweetly again. She would wake trembling many a time with the sound of the river soughing in her ears, to live over in memory that scene beneath the cypress-trees; to see the dark, fiendish face of Robert Lacy; to feel him struggle in her arms as she struck the knife into his breast; to sicken as the hot blood spurted into her face and deluged her dress. She would remember always how much water it had taken to wash the stains away, and how guiltily she had stolen home in the twilight gloom, thankful for once that Finette was gone, and that she had no prying maid to take notice when she crept into her own room of the wet and draggled clothes she wore, and of the shivering fit that seized her as she fell on the floor, moaning faintly:

“Oh, God, I did not think I would ever be a murderess! I betrayed him to the vigilantes, I know, but their hands drew the fatal rope, not mine. I believed him dead so long that even his memory had grown dim in my mind till I saw and knew him again. But I would not have killed him if I could have bought him off. It was his own fault—brutal and relentless ever, he brought his fate on himself. I—I—did not let Finette murder that child, much as I hated her. It seemed too horrible. But sin has fallen on me, anyway. Ah! now I know why Lord Stuart’s face was so strangely familiar. He was in the crowd around the gallows-tree. I wonder if he saw my face there? But, thank Heaven! no, for I remember that I fled from the scene as if pursued by fiends, and soon made good my escape to my father.”

From those wild mutterings she had to drag herself up to dress and meet her husband, who was coming straight from the presence of innocent Little Sweetheart, to meet the wife who had rushed wildly from that terrible scene by the river, with blood-stained hands, to his embrace.

She spared no pains to make herself beautiful—she placed a strong guard upon her feelings. Never had she been more charming, but she was glad when the strain of the evening was over and she could put her head down on her pillow in the friendly darkness and let the lying smile fade from her lips.

The slow hours of the night wore on, bringing the morrow—the morrow, and what?

Would the river give up its dead? Perhaps—but surely there could be no clew connecting her with the secret of the murder. Why should she keep on thinking of that? It was impossible.

Ah, if only she could sleep! If only to-morrow did not haunt her so! At last, just before the faint dawn-light crept into the eastern sky, the tired lids dropped and she slept heavily—so heavily that hours went by unheeded and the sun was high when she awoke again. To-morrow was here, and with it sensational tidings. A dead man had been found in the river a mile below Verelands—a murdered man, and he had been identified as Robert Lacy, the valet of Lord Stuart.

Norman himself told her this when she came down to a late breakfast, and she asked eagerly, with an appearance of interest:

“Murdered? Who could have done it?”

“That is the strangest part of it. There is not the slightest clew to the murderer. The man was a stranger here. He had made no friends nor enemies in the place so far as known. An inquest will be held to-day, and if any one knows anything it will probably come out there,” he said.

“What does Lord Stuart think? What does he say?” she inquired, eagerly.

“He thinks it may be a case of suicide. He says the man was morose and unhappy. It would have been quite natural for him to tire of his life and throw it away.”

“Of course,” she said.

Her heart throbbed with relief. She blessed Lord Stuart for his clever thought.

“I am going now to attend the inquest,” Norman continued.

“Oh, pray do not! How can men have the heart to care for such horrible things?” cried Camille.

But all her blandishments could not keep him away.

“I will come back as soon as possible and tell you all about it,” he said, as he kissed her and went away.

Camille flung herself upon a sofa and waited in wild suspense for his return. Presently some callers came in. They could talk of nothing but the murder of Lord Stuart’s handsome valet. She was glad when they went away. It was so hard to keep up an appearance of careless interest when her head was burning and her feet and hands were like ice.

Oh! when would Norman come back? She longed yet dreaded for him to return with the verdict of the coroner’s jury.

Suddenly he appeared before her, pale and with a troubled light in his dark eyes.

“Camille, they have sent me for you. You are wanted as a witness at the inquest,” he said, abruptly, and a low cry of alarm burst from her ashen lips.

“But I know nothing about it—I have never even seen the man!” she exclaimed, hoarsely.

CHAPTER XVI.

Norman de Vere looked eagerly into the beautiful, startled face before him. It was ashen pale, and the hazel eyes were dilated with terror.

“Camille, try to be calm. No one accuses you of knowing anything about it, but the coroner wishes to ask you a few questions—that is all,” he said, reassuringly.

She tried to subdue her traitor nerves—to appear calm and disdainful.

“I—I refuse to appear before a vulgar crowd like that. How dare they summon me?” she panted.

“Sit down, Camille, and I will tell you the truth. Your name has most unfortunately been connected with this affair, because Lord Stuart swears that the last time he saw his poor devil of a valet alive was yesterday at twilight, when he sent him to Verelands to bring you some flowers.”

“Flowers—to me! Oh, there is some mistake! I never received them. The man did not come to Verelands.”

“Yes, the man came to Verelands, Camille. Two of our servants, to my great surprise, were present at the inquest. They identified the corpse as a man who came to Verelands yesterday at twilight with flowers for you. He refused to give them into any hands but yours, and when they told him you were walking in the grounds, he went in search of you. No one ever saw him alive afterward unless you did.”

“Good heavens, Norman! I never saw the man in my life, either alive or dead. Do they think I murdered him?”

“Certainly not, Camille. Pray do not get so excited. Then you did not meet Robert Lacy anywhere in the grounds?”

“No, I did not. I only stayed out a few minutes. I came in and went to reading. You know I told you, Norman, how interested I was in my book last night.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said, in a strained voice.

She noticed it with a throb of fear at her heart. Why did he look at her so strangely?

“I suppose I need not really go. You can tell them that I never saw the man, can’t you, dear?” she pleaded, laying an entreating hand on his coat-sleeve; but he answered almost impatiently:

“I’m afraid you must come with me, Camille, or they will send an officer of the law for you. I promised I would bring you. You need not feel so nervous over it. They will only ask you a few questions. Of course, no one has any thought that you harmed the man. They are only trying to find out who saw him last in life.”

With bitter reluctance she went with him, trying to steel her nerves to the cruel ordeal.

Were they going to make her look upon the face of the dead man and swear that he was unknown to her—that she had never seen him before? Must she add perjury to the list of her sins?

When it was all over she wondered at the calmness with which she had gone through it all. How had she ever done it. How had she borne so unflinchingly the keen questions, the suspicious looks, and beaten down all with that air of complete innocence? If for a moment her heart had trembled within her on looking at the dead and ghastly face of the man she had slain, there was no one to know. She took credit to herself afterward for the hardihood with which she had denied everything, making so strong an impression on the coroner’s jury that, after a very brief deliberation, they brought in a verdict that Robert Lacy had compassed his own death, first by stabbing with a knife, which Lord Stuart affirmed he habitually carried on his person, and had made sure of his work by casting himself into the river. Suicide, not a doubt of it.

CHAPTER XVII.

Camille could not get home fast enough, she was so eager to go down to the river and search for the fatal bouquet that Lord Stuart had sent her. It had rushed over her suddenly that when Robert Lacy had come upon her he had carried something in his hand—the flowers, of course—and in his astonishment at seeing her they had fallen from his grasp. They must be lying there now, and she must hasten to destroy them before they were found.

She sprung hastily from the carriage, and went into the house with eager footsteps.

“Norman, I am going upstairs to rest,” she said. “This affair has completely unnerved me. To think that that poor man should have destroyed himself when upon an errand to me. It is simply horrible. I shall take some valerian and lie down for an hour. And you, I suppose, will go and sit awhile with your mother and the little invalid?”

“Yes,” he replied, mechanically, and they went upstairs arm in arm. Then they paused, for Camille had put up her face to be kissed.

He stooped and pressed his lips gently to hers.

“I am sorry you are so unnerved. Do not forget to take the valerian, dear,” he said, and held her in his arms tenderly for a moment.

If she had known that this was the last, last time they would hold her, would she have been so impatient to be gone?

But she could think of nothing but the tell-tale flowers lying on the river-bank ready to betray her at any moment. She felt as if she could fly to the spot.

She turned quickly from him and sought her own apartments, but she only remained long enough to make sure that he had entered his mother’s room ere she fled from the house, as if driven by pursuing fiends, to the river-bank.

Then ensued a frenzied search for Lord Stuart’s flowers—a hopeless search—under the shade of the dark cypress-trees, for the tokens of Robert Lacy’s presence here that might betray her crime.

Camille flung herself at last upon her knees, crawling about in the long grass, peering here and there with pitiful intentness for the missing flowers. She did not hear a light, quick step coming toward her. The murmur of the river drowned every sound. She did not feel the glance of the dark eyes fastened upon her in a kind of horror. She believed herself utterly alone in this secluded spot. The Verelands grounds were private.

“Good heavens! what if some one has found it!” she muttered, fearfully. “But, no, it must be here; or if any one had found it, I should have heard of it from Norman. It is here somewhere.” She continued groping about on her hands and knees until all at once she came upon a little pool of blood in the damp grass. “Blood!” she cried, in a startled tone of horror, and fell to work dipping water from the river in her jeweled hands and flinging it on the crimson spot till the clear water mingled with the gory stains and flowed away in a tiny stream through the grass. Then Camille began to collect handfuls of dead leaves which she flung hurriedly on the fatal spot. All the while her face and actions were so full of guilty consciousness that the unseen watcher behind a neighboring tree gazed and listened appalled.

She paused at last in her frenzied search, and muttered:

“What am I to do? I can not find it, yet it must be here. Oh, God, how wicked I feel! Why do I keep thinking of Lady Macbeth washing her hands and crying: ‘Out, out, damned spot!’ He might have been alive now, if he would have let me make terms with him, the brutal wretch! for the keeping of that hideous secret. Oh, God! his dead face will always haunt me; but there was no other way—no other way!”

She sprung to her feet, wringing her hands despairingly.

“I can not find it. Pray Heaven no one else will; for I can stay no longer—I must go. My husband will be seeking me. He must find me at home—he must not suspect this!”

She caught up her pretty beaded wrap, that had fallen in a glittering heap on the grass, flung it about her shoulders, turned to go, then recoiled with a piercing cry.

“Norman!”

For it was her husband who had come upon her in the solitude where she groped wildly for the missing flowers—her husband who had been gazing in horror at the pale, distorted features of the guilty woman—who had listened in shocked silence to the utterances by which she had convicted herself of her terrible sin. It came upon her with a shock like that of doom that Norman knew all her guilty secret—that he had been a witness of her frenzied search and her bitter disappointment.

So terrible was the shock that Camille thought she was going to fall down dead at her husband’s feet, slain by shame and despair at her own ignominy.

But her heart kept beating on, though wildly and tumultuously. Her trembling limbs still upheld her, and by degrees, as he forbore to speak, some of her native audacity returned to her. She determined to make one bold effort to regain lost ground.

She lifted her drooping lids, gazed at him appealingly, and cried:

“Oh, Norman, how you startled me! I—I—did not know you were here! I have lost one of my diamond rings—the prettiest one I had—and I’ve been searching for it everywhere. You haven’t seen it, have you, dear?”

CHAPTER XVIII.

Camille waited breathlessly for her husband’s answer. After a moment’s silence it came, sternly, yet with infinite sadness:

“Camille, have pity on your immortal soul, and do not blacken it further by such terrible perjuries! You have lost no ring. You were searching for the bouquet that Robert Lacy brought to you at this spot yesterday—the bouquet that I found when I came back this morning to escort you to the inquest.”

“You—you!” she almost shrieked.

“Be quiet, unless you wish to draw listeners to the spot,” he said, sharply. “Yes, I found the flowers, Camille. When I heard the evidence at the inquest I wondered what had become of the flowers Lord Stuart had sent you. I thought they would form an important link in the chain of evidence. Some instinct drove me to search for them on my way home. I found them. There were clots of blood on the green leaves redder than the fading red roses, and the note among the flowers was dyed crimson, too. In this cool and shady spot the stains were scarcely dry. I was frightened, Camille. I took the bouquet home and hid it, and at the inquest I dared not say one word about it. Yet I hoped that the man had committed suicide—”

“Oh, he did—I swear he—” Camille interrupted, eagerly; but he frowned her coldly down.

“Hush! denials are vain! By your own lips you stand convicted of your guilt. Almost as soon as I entered my mother’s room there came to me a fear that some clew might have been left at this spot by which the world might find out that Robert Lacy met his death at Verelands. With a shrinking from the notoriety such knowledge would entail on the De Veres, I hurriedly left the room and hastened here. You know the rest.”

“You spyed upon me! You did not make your presence known!” she muttered, hoarsely.

“I was dazed with wonder and with horror. My feet refused to move, and my tongue grew stiff as I realized the awful truth. I seemed at first to be turned to stone by the horror of my discovery,” he answered, in a slow, troubled voice, and in a minute he added: “Some one may come upon us here. We will go back to the house, Camille. I must speak to you in private.”

She pulled the small lace veil down over her face and followed him in dead silence to the beautiful mansion among the trees.

He went to the library: she followed in dumb misery and despair. The door was locked, and he pushed forward an easy-chair for her to sit down. She sunk into it, glad to rest, for her limbs were trembling and weak.

“Now tell me, Camille,” he said, sternly, “what was Robert Lacy to you that you should take his life?”

She attempted to deny the accusation, but he would not permit her to do so.

“I heard you confess your guilt when you thought yourself alone,” he said. “You said that if he would have made terms for the keeping a secret, you would have spared him, but that there was no other way.”

She sat silent and sullen, feeling her doom sealed.

“Shall I tell you what my suspicions are, Camille?” he asked, after a moment’s pause.

She nodded without looking up at his white, awfully stern face, and he continued:

“You had been carrying on with Lord Stuart a flirtation more shameless than I suspected, and this valet became cognizant of the truth and threatened you with exposure. To save your good name you murdered him. Hush! do not perjure yourself with useless denials. I shall not betray you. I will keep your hideous secret for the sake of the love I had for you in the past.”

“Oh, my God, do not desert me, Norman! I am innocent! Lord Stuart will tell you that it was the most harmless flirtation,” she cried, in terror and entreaty.

He unlocked a drawer and took out a bouquet of faded red roses with their awful stains, shuddering as he touched them. From among them he took out a sheet of blood-dyed paper on which was the crest of a noble house. Unfolding the paper, he said:

“I can not believe, Camille, that any man would dare write such lines as these to a married woman unless there was some secret guilty consciousness between them.”

He read aloud, in tones vibrant with scorn:

“‘Ah! one thing worth beginning,

One thread in life worth spinning;

Ah, sweet, one sin worth sinning

With all the whole soul’s will.

To lull you till one stilled you,

To kiss you till one killed you,

To feed you till one filled you,

Sweet lips, if love could fill!’”

He paused, and she cried out, passionately:

“How dared he? I gave him no cause for this insult.”

A smile of bitter scorn and anger crossed his deathly pale face as he said:

“Untrue wife and guilty woman, we must part! You have slain all love between us by your sins. The murder of Robert Lacy I will never betray, but in order that the world may have an excuse for the divorce I shall procure from you, I shall publicly chastise Lord Stuart to-night. In a few hours I shall leave Verelands. I presume my mother will accompany me. Our divorce I will manage with as little scandal as possible for both our sakes.” He bowed, and, without giving her a chance to reply, abruptly quitted the room.

CHAPTER XIX.

Left alone by her angry, outraged husband, Camille flung out of her chair and dragged herself upstairs to her own room. There she locked the door and threw herself down upon the bed in tearless despair.

Hours passed over her head, and still she lay there mute and still as though stunned by the awful shock she had received. The dainty bonnet, now crushed and spoiled where it was pressed upon the pillow, still adorned her head, the jetted wrap clung about her regal shoulders. She had removed nothing; she had thought of nothing save the awful fact that the husband she loved in her jealous, tigress fashion had found her out in her sin, and was going to put her away from him forever. She lay there a long, long time so dazed and wretched that she was conscious of but one thought—a sick longing to die at once and be out of her horrible trouble.

At last her cramped and uncomfortable position began to make itself felt in tired and aching limbs, recalling her to bodily consciousness. Rising slowly to a sitting posture, she flung off the bonnet and wrap, and drew out the pins from her tawny tresses, letting them fall loosely on her shoulders.

A strange sense of desolation, of friendlessness, stole over her, as her heavy eyes roved about the room. Out of all her fashionable acquaintances she had no bosom friend, no one to turn to in this terrible hour. She thought for an instant of her mother-in-law, then a shamed consciousness stole over her that she had taken no pains to retain the love of that good woman since she had married her son. She could not look to her for consolation.

Suddenly a new idea presented itself to her mind.

“Finette!”

The French maid had, in many respects, been to her a trusted friend as well as a servant. She was clever and crafty, and Camille had bitterly missed her since she had gone into a temporary exile with the understanding that she should be recalled as soon as her mistress could cajole Norman de Vere into willingness for her return.

“Oh! if Finette were only here, she would advise me what to do—she might suggest something,” the unhappy woman muttered; and with the thought a tiny little ray of hope began to flicker into life within her breast. She continued: “I will send for my maid. I need not ask his permission now. I have a right to claim the presence of my best friend in this dark hour.”

She crossed to a small writing-table, and, sitting down, hastily scrawled a note in French to Finette. Sealing and addressing the envelope to an address in Jacksonville, she touched a bell, and in a few minutes it was answered by Nancy, the house-maid.

“Take this letter down to Sam and tell him to deliver it immediately,” she said, curtly; then, as Nancy stared in surprise at her heavy eyes and colorless cheeks, she slammed the door quickly in her face.

The house-maid went down to the errand-boy, and dispatched him on his mission with the remark:

“You better make dem black legs fly, too, ’cause madame’s in a towerin’ rage, her face as white as snow, her eyes a-blazin’, and her hair hangin’ down her back all tangled up like she been a-tearin’ of it out by de han’fuls. ’Spect dat’s why she done sent for Mamzellie Frenchy to come and fix it up in style like she useter.”

CHAPTER XX.

It seemed to Camille that she would go frantic with suspense, it was so long before Finette came.

Never had the thin, sallow face and beady black eyes of the French maid looked so welcome.

“Finette, I am in bitter trouble. I sent for you to come back in defiance of my husband’s wishes, for I shall need your help—if, indeed, there is any help for me,” she said, quickly.

Finette protested that she was ready to go to the ends of the earth to serve her generous mistress.

“I will tell you all my trouble,” said Camille. “I stayed at the Hotel Française while my husband’s protégée was ill with scarlet fever. There was a nobleman there, Lord Stuart. He seemed to admire me very much, and paid me more attention than any other lady there. We became great friends. I own I flirted with Lord Stuart, but it was an innocent affair—nothing culpable, I vow.”

“I understand. But m’sieur became jealous,” Finette said, intelligently, as her mistress paused.

“Exactly, Finette. We had a stormy interview to-day. My husband accused me of the worst. He swore that he would chastise Lord Stuart to-night in order to publish my alleged disgrace, and that afterward he would take steps to procure a divorce from me.”

“And miladi—she is against the divorce?” asked the maid.

“How can you ask such a question, Finette? Surely you know I love him more than life itself. If I lose him I shall die.”

Finette looked with polite cynicism at the burning dark eyes in the marble-white face. She did not believe that any one was likely to die for love. She had read Shakespeare:

“Men have died and worms have eaten them,

But not for love.”

“But, then, what can you do with that silly boy?” she said, curtly.

“That is for you to tell me. I depend upon you, Finette, to help me, you are so worldly wise, so clever. Oh, try to keep him from getting a divorce, and I will make you rich, Finette!”

“If madame would take my advice she would jump at the divorce from that proud and silly boy—she would marry the nobleman,” insinuatingly.

“Finette, you are stupid, you are ridiculous! Do I not tell you I adore Norman de Vere? I want you to help me regain his love and ward off a divorce, not to advise me to marry some one else!” Camille cried, stamping her dainty foot in sudden fury.

Finette smiled a little contemptuously, but with a few well-chosen words she smoothed the beauty’s ruffled feathers, and inspired her with some degree of hope.

“Now, let me do up your hair, and I will try to think how I can help you,” she said.

She brushed and arranged the long, wavy red hair with deft fingers, her fertile French brain busy.

“You are sure, miladi, you have told me all the cause of disagreement?”

“Yes,” unblushingly.

“Monsieur will not believe you are innocent?”

“No; he is so furious with anger, so blinded with jealousy, he will not listen to one word.”

“And he will sue for a divorce on grounds of a guilty flirtation with milord?”

“Yes.”

“You will plead not guilty?”

“Of course.”

“Then you will file one counter-charge against votre mari—infidelity, of course, and cruel outrage, bringing dat child—dat illegitimate—under your roof, refusal to take it away, brutal disregard of your tender feelings,” Finette mused, softly; and there was silence for a few moments.

Then Camille said, petulantly:

“But I do not see how that is to prevent the divorce. I—I—do not want to villify my husband publicly. I would rather make up our quarrel quietly. I have been hard upon him always. I can see that now, and I can hardly blame him for resenting it at last. Oh, God! I will humble myself in the dust at his feet—I will hear anything rather than to be put away from him forever.”

“Even to a temporary separation?” Finette hazarded.

“Even that—so it should be temporary alone,” agreed Camille.

“Then, miladi, I think we can manage it.”

“How?”

“You must write m’sieur a letter. Plead all your love and innocence. Tell him you will consent to a separation, but not a divorce. Threaten to make a scandal about the child, and blacken his name unless he agrees to your terms. You know his family pride. He will shrink from exposure—he will agree to your terms.”

“Clever Finette! Oh, what a brain you have! But after—what then?”

“We will go abroad, you and I. We will let your boy-husband severely alone for a little while. He adored you once—he will not forget you. The scandal will die out, and you will lead a nun’s life. He will be touched, sorry; he will hear of you at last breaking your heart in seclusion for him, and, voilà! there will be a reconciliation.”

Finette had poured out those sentences excitedly, with a mixture of French gestures and phrases impossible to translate. Camille listened breathlessly, her eyes on fire, her cheeks aglow.

“Oh, you give me new hope, you clever creature! Only help me to bring it about as you say, and I will make you rich!” she repeated, appealing to the maid’s ruling passion.

CHAPTER XXI.

“But, Norman, you will forgive her. Surely it can not be so bad as you think. These flirtations of married women are so distressingly common in high society, and Camille is too proud to run any risk of her good name. Besides, she loves you.”

Mrs. de Vere looked distressfully into the white, drawn face of her handsome son as she pleaded eagerly for Camille, but by the way in which he shook his head she knew it was all in vain.

He had confided to her the story of the flirtation with Lord Stuart and his resolution to have a divorce, and the gentle woman had been shocked and incredulous. She knew all Camille’s faults and follies, but she did not think the wife had done sufficient wrong to be put away from her husband.

“Think better of it, Norman. You were not wont to be so stern and unforgiving. Camille has been imprudent perhaps, but not criminal, I am sure,” she kept on; and her son was compelled to see that she disapproved of his resolve. He sighed and resigned himself to bear it. He could not betray Camille’s hideous secret—not even to his mother.

He sat there some time pale, silent, and abstracted, without noticing the pretty gambols of Sweetheart, who was rapidly regaining strength and spirits. As he sat there, the child’s sweet, familiar little song fell unheeded on his ears:

“Yittle Sweet’art, tum and tiss me,

Whisper to me sweet an’ low,

Tell me yat oor ’art will miss me,

As I wander to and fro.”

“Be quiet, dear. Norman does not feel well,” the mother said, gently.

Sweetheart ran to his knee, and stood very quietly, peering up into his face with her large, wondering blue eyes.

“Sweet’art sorry oo sick,” she said, cooingly, wistfully; and with a sigh he lifted her up in his arms.

“Poor little angel! I wonder if you will ever grow up to be cruel, false, and wicked as some of your sex?” he muttered.

“No,” she replied, shaking her bright little head intelligently, as if she understood every word. Then she slid down from his lap, and ran to chase her little spotted kitten around the room.

Norman forgot her in an instant, and returned to his wretched thoughts.

Presently there was a light but decided tap upon the door.

Mrs. de Vere colored with surprise and displeasure when she met the impudent, leering gaze of the discharged French maid.

“Nance told me I sall find m’sieur with you,” she said, her keen, serpent-like eyes peering past Mrs. de Vere into the room. She scowled at Sweetheart and the kitten, then pushed past Mrs. de Vere and went up to her son.

“My mistress sends you dis lettaire,” she said; and as Norman took the scented envelope into his hand she flounced out of the room.

Norman tore off the covering of the letter and began to read.

His mother sat waiting anxiously. She guessed that Camille had sent some passionate petition for pity and pardon to the husband she loved. She prayed silently that it would melt his heart.

Mrs. de Vere was a proud woman. She could not endure to think of the notoriety that must inevitably attend upon her son’s divorce. She pitied Camille, whose caprices had brought her to this shameful pass.

She saw a tempest of emotion sweep over Norman’s darkly handsome face. It grew alternately pale and crimson, the lips worked with passion, the dark eyes shot gleams of fire.

He finished at last, and flung the letter into his mother’s lap.

CHAPTER XXII.

Camille had written from the dictation of the infamous French maid. She had alternately implored and threatened, vowing that Norman’s little protégée should serve her turn to point an infamous charge against him if he persevered in his resolve to procure a divorce.

The delicate cheek of the matron flushed indignantly as her dark eyes traveled over the paper. Meanwhile, the observant child had secured the envelope, which had fluttered to the floor, and sitting down, she cut it into bits with her tiny scissors. She waited silently but patiently for the letter, turning her blue eyes with bird-like eagerness toward the reader. When at last Mrs. de Vere finished and handed it back to her son, and he crumpled it in his hand and flung it disdainfully from him, Sweetheart pounced upon it unnoticed and sat down to destroy it with the aid of her little scissors.

She spread out the pretty pink sheet, but the delicate fragrance exhaling from it arrested her olfactories, and after holding it pensively to her nose a moment, she concluded not to immolate it yet; so, quite unobserved by her elders, she crossed the room to her box of toys, and hid Camille’s letter among the leaves of a picture-book.

Mother and son stood looking at each other in wordless dismay, unmindful of the child at her play. Neither could bear to speak.

At last the mother said, sadly:

“You see now that you must give it up, Norman. You can not drag our proud old name through the mire. She will consent to a separation, she says. Will not that content you?”

“No,” he replied, bitterly.

“But, Norman, this is horrible! Will you not think of me? How can I bear it that this shame should fall on you and on the proud name that was your father’s pride? Have pity on my gray hairs,” she faltered.

“Mother, you torture me,” he cried, for it seemed most cruel that she should misjudge him—should deem him careless of her happiness. But he could not tell her the truth. He must bear his pain in silence.

She went on, pleadingly:

“I am old. I should not live long to bear the burden of shame; but, Norman, think of that sweet and lovely little child. The mystery that surrounds her may never be penetrated, and this horrible scandal, if promulgated, may cast an ineffaceable blight upon her future. Think of all these things, Norman, before you proceed further.”

He was thinking of them. The white agony of his face showed it. In the face of his despair he silently wished himself dead and at rest from the war of emotions raging within him.

That he must break with Camille he knew. Her sin had placed an insurmountable barrier between their lives.

He would gladly have parted with her without giving cause for scandal, but it was impossible. The curious world must have reasons or it would make them. Better they should say he was jealous—unreasonably jealous, of Lord Stuart than that there was some guilty secret hidden behind the death of Robert Lacy, who had carried flowers to Camille the last hour of his life. Her safety hung in the balance. Between her two sins he must choose the lesser for her own sake, for part they must. The mad, feverish love he had borne Camille was dead and cold. It had fallen down in ruins in the moment when his appalled ears had heard her own lips admit her guilt.

He owed it to his mother’s gray hairs to save her from shame, and no less to Sweetheart yonder in her innocent youth and helplessness. What under heaven was he to do?

The sad, anxious voice of the mother broke in again:

“Norman, if you feel that you can not live longer with your wife, why not consent to a separation, as she wishes? Put off the thought of divorce. Who knows but that in the future you may learn she was innocent? Then there may be a reconciliation.”

“Mother, you madden me!” he cried, hoarsely. He knew how vain was that hope.

But he began to think seriously of her words. Might it not be best to cut loose quietly as possible from his guilty wife for the sake of his mother and Sweetheart?

His heavy eyes wandered to the child who was playing with her kitten in sweet unconsciousness. A deep sense of his responsibility suddenly overwhelmed him. He had saved her life, and it had been thrown on his hands in all its sweet helplessness. He would be answerable for her future.

He sat thinking, miserably, intently, his mother watching with anxious eyes. Suddenly he spoke:

“Mother, you comprehend the cruel malignancy with which Camille means to stain the name and future of this innocent child?”

“She will relent if you accede to her request, Norman.”

“I have come to a sudden but wise conclusion, mother. I know that the child can expect no mercy from Camille’s cruel heart. I must send her from me for her own good.”

“But where, Norman?”

“I will tell you, mother. In the wreck with me—indeed, the only person saved with Sweetheart and myself—was a man, a commercial traveler, named George Hinton. He took a strange fancy to my little protégée, and begged to have her if her friends were not discovered. He was a married man with a small family—two boys, and a girl of seven who longed for a sister.”

“A good man, Norman?” anxiously.

“Rough, perhaps, but with a good heart, I am sure. He gave me his address. His home is in a little Virginia town on the line of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. Mother, what if you were to take Sweetheart to him? Then you could satisfy yourself as to whether the Hintons would be proper people with whom to leave the child. I would make them an allowance for her support and education, of course. I should like it if you could go very soon.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes, if possible. We must go away from here for awhile, you know, dear mother. You remember it was Camille’s money with which we improved Verelands. Unless she decides to live here, the place must be rented out until sufficient money is realized to repay the debt. Dearest little mother, you know we are poor again, now. I shall have to work for us both.”

“There is my little income. It is more than enough for me. All I can spare shall go to help the Hintons if they take Sweetheart,” she said, but her voice was hoarse with tears. How could she leave the dear old home, and how could her son sit there and talk of it with that calm, white face? It was cruel! He might have borne with Camille, if only for his mother’s sake.

Hard thoughts of her son came to her for the first time in her life, but she did not utter a single reproach. Perhaps it would all come right soon, and she could come back to Verelands.

“You will want to answer your wife’s letter,” she said, looking around for it; then she saw the fragments of the pink envelope strewing the floor. “Naughty Little Sweetheart, you have cut it up with your toy scissors!” she cried.

Sweetheart looked solemn and rueful over the detection of the mischief she had wrought.

CHAPTER XXIII.

“It does not matter in the least, mother. I am glad Sweetheart destroyed the infamous thing. I only wish she could blot it out from my mind, too,” Norman said, impatiently.

He rose, shook himself—for he had been sitting still until he was cramped and weary—and continued:

“I will not write to her, mother. I will ask you to deliver a message to her. Say that I accept her terms—separation instead of divorce. It will amount to the same thing in the end,” curtly. “For the rest, she has her choice—to live at Verelands or rent it out. You and I will be gone away—that is”—bitterly—“if you elect to follow the fortunes of your erring son.”

“I shall go with you, dear. You are all I have, and I can not part with you. I will carry your message to Camille; yet, poor soul, I pity her, and I fear you are making a great mistake, my son,” she ventured.

But he went without a word.

When she saw Camille’s tears—when she heard her passionate protestations of innocence, her wild prayers for her husband’s pardon—Mrs. de Vere could not help but pity the passionate, undisciplined creature. She spoke only the kindest words to her; she promised her that in time she would win her husband’s heart back to her, if it had not turned to ice.

“Only be prudent and good, Camille. Shun all other men and live only for your husband, and all will come right,” she advised, in her ignorance of Norman’s true reasons.

Camille clung to her, protesting passionate gratitude. Indeed, she was eager to enlist her mother-in-law’s influence on her side.

“You will let me settle some money on you? I will be so glad to do something to show my gratitude!” she pleaded; but Mrs. de Vere gently declined the offer, and went back presently with the news that Camille would leave Verelands in a few hours.

Norman received the news with icy calmness—calmness that filled his mother with wonder. She knew how deeply he had loved his beautiful bride, how patiently he had borne with her caprices and reproaches. Had love failed at last under her ceaseless exactions, or was this the calm of a terrible despair—

“Despair that spurns atonement’s power?”

He made no comment on the news she brought.

“I shall stay at the Hotel Française to-night,” he said. “In the morning I will come back to Verelands, and if you can get ready to go with me we will go to Virginia and leave Sweetheart with the Hintons. Then,” half bitterly, “the world will be all before us where to choose. But I think I shall go to New York, for I must find work now. I shall no longer be that ignoble thing—a man dependent on a rich wife.”

The bitterness of the closing words gave her a passing glimpse into the pangs his pride had suffered in his marriage. She sighed, but did not reply. She had the bitter memory always with her that she had helped to forge his chains. Ah, if she only had it all to go over again, how changed all would be! But the glitter of gold had blinded her to all she should have known.

She went about her duties in a dazed, miserable fashion, unable to see any light fringing the dark cloud that hung over Verelands. When Camille, deathly pale and wretched-looking, came to bid her farewell, she could not restrain her tears at the breaking up of their domestic life.

“I am going abroad,” said Camille. “Finette goes with me. I had to take her back because she is devoted to my interests, and is the truest friend I have now. I will write to you, dear Mrs. de Vere, and you shall always know where I am, so that if Norman relents, he will always know where to find me.”

Mrs. de Vere was sorry for the desolate creature, in spite of her glaring faults. She tried to impart some consolation to her, and if Camille knew how vain her hopes were, she made no sign. She kept up a faint pretense of clinging to hope.

“And as for the child, my dear, I believe you were all wrong about that. Norman is going to send her away. There was another man saved from the wreck who wanted Sweetheart very much, and she will be sent to him,” said the elder lady, believing that this news would comfort Camille very much.

It did, for she saw in it a concession to her prejudices, made by Norman even while he pretended to defy her. She had rendered it impossible for him to keep the child. She listened with silent exultation.

“I have triumphed although driven away in disgrace, and I will yet return to his heart and home. He has no real proof of my guilt, and time will make his impressions fainter until they seem mere illusions,” she muttered, as she turned away from the beautiful home in which she had made such cruel havoc of Norman de Vere’s happiness.

Night fell darkly over the fairy-like home, and a strange, heavy silence seemed to settle down about it. Toward ten o’clock the silence was broken by a startling ring at the door-bell. When the door was opened a group of men came in, bearing among them the unconscious form of the master of the house.

Shrinking sensitively from scandal as he did, Norman de Vere could not forego the chastisement of Lord Stuart. It must be done to lend color to the cause of his parting from his wife.

Armed with a small whip, he had proceeded to the Hotel Française and publicly lashed Lord Stuart, alleging his flirtation with Mrs. de Vere as the cause. Lord Stuart drew a pistol and deliberately shot his assailant.

Then he fled.

Norman de Vere’s wound was in his breast, narrowly missing the heart. He was borne home to his anguished mother, and long weeks elapsed ere he was well again. Meanwhile, Lord Stuart had never been apprehended. Popular rumor declared that he had gone abroad and joined the false wife of the man he had wronged.

It was spring before Norman’s physician agreed that he should quit Jacksonville for the colder climate of New York, so much had his wound and the long fever it caused enfeebled his frame. Heaven only knew what the young man had suffered physically and mentally in that time. His pain could only be measured by the depth of the love he had felt for the woman who had proved so unworthy.

“I lived, if that may be called life

From which each charm of life has fled,

Happiness gone, with hope and love—

In all but breath already dead.”

While he lay suffering, an odd little letter had come to him from Paris, from Lord Stuart:

“My dear fellow, I hope you will forgive me for the suffering I caused you. My aim was bad. I only meant to give you a slight flesh wound in the shoulder, but I learn from American papers that you came near losing your life. I hope you will live. Camille was not worth the sacrifice of your strong young life. She is not with me, as I see it rumored in the papers. I have got over my fancy for her. I hear she is in London, but I do not know. I hope you will never make up your quarrel with her, for you are too good for such a woman.”

Camille had written, too, from London, begging to be allowed to return and nurse her husband. Mrs. de Vere was compelled to write that her son refused the offer.

CHAPTER XXIV.

“Sweetheart, will you go with me to the dance this evening?”

“I’ve promised to go with Frank—so there! And I wish, Tom Hinton, you wouldn’t call me that babyish name, Sweetheart. I can’t bear it!”

“What then?” asked Tom Hinton, a dapper young man, with dry-goods clerk written all over him too plainly to be mistaken.

“Why, Thea, of course,” said the beautiful golden-haired girl. “You knew when I went away to school we made that name up out of Sweetheart. I was called so by every one at school, and I want to be called so by my home-folks, too.”

“Sweetheart is so—much sweeter. I like to call you that,” said the young man, giving her a tender look.

“No matter, I won’t have it! Mind that, please,” the girl answered, saucily tossing her long golden curls and pouting her ripe red lips in a sort of disdain.

“What made you promise Frank? Didn’t you know perfectly well that I was going to ask you?”

“Maybe I did, and maybe that’s the reason I asked Frank to ask me first. Ha! ha!”

No words could describe the exquisite unconscious coquetry of the girl’s looks and manner—coquetry blended with airy contempt of the tenderness that shone in the man’s blue eyes—maidenhood is so cruel.

Tom Hinton’s face flushed deeply, and he chewed the ends of his small, fair mustache uneasily.

“Do you mean that you prefer my brother to me?” he asked, angrily; and Thea laughed again, and answered, with inexcusable slang for a boarding-school miss:

“That’s about the size of it, Mr. Hinton.”

The young man regarded her wrathfully a moment, then answered with an irrepressible sneer:

“Maybe you don’t know that Frank’s got a sweetheart already when you’re throwing yourself at his head so boldly?”

The exquisite creature laughed again. She seemed fairly bubbling over with mirth and gayety. Her blue and brilliant eyes sparkled with mischief.

“Oh, yes, I know it, thank you,” she said, nodding her bright head with a bird-like motion. “That’s the very reason I like him,” she continued. “His heart is set on some one else, and he isn’t always making me sick by talking love to me, as you have done, Tom Hinton, the whole three weeks since I came back from school.”

“Oh, come, you needn’t pretend you don’t like to be made love to. All girls do,” the young man answered, a little sulkily; but Thea fired up in a minute, and answered with childish petulance:

“That’s a story. I don’t, for one. I like to go with young men and have a good time, just as well as any other girl does, but if a fellow begins to talk love to me—faugh! it makes me sick!” disdainfully.

Tom Hinton was watching her doubtfully. He did not half believe in the indifference she professed. He believed it was more than half coquetry—girlish coquetry—that invited pursuit.

“See here, Thea,” he said, half wistfully, half with a man’s masterful air, “I don’t believe you mean half you say. If I did I should feel mighty bad, I tell you, for I’ve got my heart set on you, and I made up my mind as long as three years ago that I’d have you for my wife if I could get you.”

Thea stared. Her short upper lip curled in scorn.

“Tom Hinton, you must be crazy! The idea of picking me out, when I was only fourteen years old, for your wife! Well, I like your impudence!” she ejaculated.

“I am glad you like it. I thought you would,” he answered, falling into her mood of wicked banter. “Well, what do you say, my darling? Will you marry me?” tenderly.

“Not to save your life, Tom Hinton!” answered she, heartlessly, darting away.

CHAPTER XXV.

Thea West, for such was the pretty name the young girl had made out of her pet name Sweetheart, bounced into the house and flung herself down at the piano, leaving her discomfited lover alone on the porch of his cottage home. In a minute a flood of music poured out through the open windows, and the girl sung sweetly, saucily, cruelly:

“The Laird of Cockpen, he’s proud an’ his great.

His mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the state;

He wanted a wife his braw house to keep,

But favor wi’ wooin’ was fashions to seek.

“He took the gray mare and rode cannilie—

And rapped at the door o’ Clarverse-ha’ Lee,

’Gae tell Mistress Jean to come speedily ben;

She’s wanted to speak wi’ the Laird o’ Cockpen.’

“Mistress Jean, she was making the elder-flower wine;

‘An’ what brings the laird at sic a like time?’

She put aff her apron and on her silk gown,

Her mutch wi’ red ribbons, and gaed awa’ down.

“And when she cam’ ben he bowed full low;

And what was his errand he soon let her know.

Amazed was the laird when the lady said ‘Na,’

And wi’ a light curtsey she turned awa’.

“Dumfoundered he was, but nae sigh did he gi’e;

He mounted his mare and rode cannilie;

And after he thought, as he gaed through the glen:

‘She’s daft to refuse the Laird of Cockpen!’”

The pert song was followed by a brilliant waltz, a march, a sonata, then some sentimental songs. Evidently, Thea West was in the highest spirits. No sympathy did the rejected suitor get from his heartless lady-love. She had forgotten him long before he turned away from the sound of her maddening melody and went back from his suburban home to the chief dry-goods store in the village, where he was employed as clerk, and where so many pretty faces smiled daily on the good-looking, well-dressed young man that he could not help knowing that he was a favorite beau—a knowledge that made Thea West’s insouciant scorn sting even more bitterly.

His proposal had had an undreamed-of listener—his sister Emmie, a tall, rather pretty brunette of twenty years. The young lady had been sitting at a vine-wreathed window, close to the porch, unnoticed by anyone, and every word had plainly reached her ears. Her cheeks crimsoned with mortification as she realized that Thea West had rejected the hand of her elder brother, whom Emmie loved so dearly, and of whom she was so proud, knowing well that there were a score of girls in the village who would have gladly said yes to his offer. Beaus were scarce and young girls plentiful in the town of Louisa.

“The pert thing! Refusing Tom, just as if he wasn’t ever so much too good for her, and making fun of him into the bargain! I suppose it’s because she’s dead in love with Frank, and he as good as engaged to Maude Fitz, although it’s true he has hardly been near her since Thea came home from Staunton. I suppose he’ll marry Thea and give Maude the go-by now. I declare, I never will like Thea as well as I used to, after this, and I’ll give her a piece of my mind, too, about her boldness in asking Frank to take her to the party, and I think I’ll give Charley McVey a hint about her carryings-on, as I fancy he was beginning to get sweet on her, too,” Emmie muttered, irately, for Charley McVey had been her favorite beau for some time, and it was here that she suffered most deeply in her pride.

For thirteen years Thea West, as she was called by her own desire, had been a well-beloved inmate of George Hinton’s home, petted by all, and happy in their kindness. Mrs. de Vere had sent regularly a sum sufficient for her maintenance, and when she was eleven years old had directed that she should be sent to boarding-school at Staunton, a city about twenty-five miles from where the Hintons lived.

Emmie had also attended the same school, but had graduated two years before. Thea had spent all her vacations at the home of Uncle George, as she called Mr. Hinton, and upon her graduation this summer had come back there to stay.

She was seventeen years old now, and the cherubic beauty of her childhood had fulfilled its rare promise. She was lovely in a bright, bewitching fashion that carried all hearts by storm. Piquant features; large sapphire-blue eyes with long, curling lashes of chestnut brown, and slender, arched brows of the same lovely color; dimples; a skin like the velvet petals of a tea-rose; an arch, red mouth; a wealth of golden hair; a form divinely molded; feet and hands of the most aristocratic beauty and delicacy—no wonder that the dazzled youth of Louisa could look at no one else when she was by. Yet in no sense was Thea a flirt, although her high spirits, her charming cordiality and engaging frankness of manner, coupled with her striking beauty, had begun to earn for her that unenviable reputation.

She was only a lovely, high-spirited, noble young girl, with strong capabilities for enjoying life, and eager to do so—a fair type of bright, happy maidenhood—

“Young, innocent, gay,

With the wild-rose of childhood yet warm on her cheek,

And a spirit scarce calmed from its infantine play

Into woman’s deep feeling.”

In the three weeks since Thea had been home from school, time had passed very pleasantly. Parties and picnics had rapidly succeeded each other in this charming Virginia town, and not one had Thea missed. Withal, she had turned the heads of half the marriageable men in town—a fact which afforded the careless child nothing but amusement.

She knew nothing of love, save from poetry and novels, and she had a fearlessly open opinion that love was tiresome in real life. She did not scruple to tell Tom Hinton that he was not half so nice as he had been when she was only a little girl.

“And you brought me candy and nuts and raisins, and all the things that Aunt Hester said were not good for little girls. You bring them still, and I enjoy them, but not as much as if you didn’t talk nonsense to me,” she said, candidly.

Emmie Hinton had always been fond of the girl, but she was in danger of forgetting it now in her resentment over Tom’s rejection.

“As if it wasn’t really better than she had any right to expect, for who knows who she is, anyhow?” ran on the tenor of her angry thoughts. “She was found in a railway wreck, and she hasn’t even a name but the one she made up herself out of a silly pet name. She can not have any people that amount to much, or they would have answered some of the advertisements papa says Mr. de Vere put into the papers. I wish he would come and take her away. I—I—wish she had never come here!” finally boo-hooed Emmie, spitefully, for she was growing miserably uncertain over the tenure she had upon Charley McVey’s heart.

That night, when the girls were dressing to go to the dancing-party, Emmie’s wrath broke out.

“Thea West, you ought to be ashamed of youself, asking a young man to escort you to the dance. If no one asked you for your company, you ought to stay at home.”

Thea was dodging behind Emmie’s shoulder, trying to see if she had tied her blue sash properly over her airy white mull dress. She gave a gasp of surprise.

“Oh, you needn’t pretend you didn’t!” Emmie continued, angrily, her cheeks as red as the roses she was pinning on her corsage.

“Who says I did?” Thea asked, quickly.

“No matter; I happen to know that you asked Frank,” snapped Emmie. “I should think you’d know Maude Fitz wouldn’t like it, and he as good as engaged to her. Why, before you came from school they went everywhere together. Now you keep him running after you all the time, the same as if he were your beau.”

“Frank is the same as my brother. Maude knows that I didn’t think she’d care,” Thea said, flushing, and keeping back two started tears that wanted to fall.

Emmie had never scolded her before.

“I suppose Tom is the same as your brother, too, but he didn’t think so this afternoon when he was asking you to marry him,” snapped Emmie.

She moved aside from the mirror, but Thea did not want it now. She had forgotten about the sash.

“Did Tom tell you that?” she asked, in a low voice.

“No; I heard it. I was in the sitting-room window.”

“Well, what of it? Are you mad about that, Emmie?” in astonishment.

“No, I’m glad,” Emmie burst out, longing to punish the pretty, careless thing. “You don’t think I’d want my brother Tom to marry a girl so poor that she hadn’t any name nor any relations, but just seems to have ‘growed’ sort of like Topsy! No, indeed! I hope and pray my brothers may marry their equals in life.”

Thea stood like a statue. Never before in her bright, careless life had any reproach been flung at her for her misfortunes. She had held herself as high as these Hintons with whom she had been raised. She had never dreamed that she was not the equal of any one. Emmie’s barbed thrust pierced deep.

She stood still, facing angry, jealous Emmie, the sweet, gay smile fading like magic from the rosy lips, the rose-leaf bloom from the dimpled cheeks, the sparkle from the deep-blue eyes. Not a word came from her. She was catching her breath hard as if some one had struck her a blow.

Suddenly, while Emmie stared at her, angry still, yet half ashamed of her ignoble outburst, the girl turned swiftly and rushed from the room. She flew down-stairs to the parlor, and Emmie followed her as far as the hall.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Frank Hinton was walking up and down the pretty cottage parlor, all ready for the dancing-party. He was a handsome young fellow, not small and fair like his older brother, but tall and broad-shouldered, with brown eyes and hair like Emmie, and a pretty silky mustache outlining his upper lip. Frank was studying medicine, and expected soon to add M. D. to his name.

As he walked up and down the small parlor’s length with his hands under his coat-tails, Frank was indulging, like Hamlet, in a soliloquy:

“Deuce take it! I wonder if Maude feels cut up over this? I’m afraid I certainly gave her cause to think I was serious in that quarter. Well, I was, too, or thought I was. But Thea wasn’t grown then. The minute I saw her when she got back from school, I knew it was all up with Maude. Dear Little Sweetheart! I almost think it was mutual, too. How plainly she shows her preference for me. And how furious it makes Tom. He’s dead gone on her, I know, but it’s no use. He can have Maude if he likes. Sweetheart’s mine, and I haven’t made myself a calf over her like Tom and some other fellows either. I— What’s that?”

There was a rush of feet down the slippery oil-cloth of the stairway, the door was pushed violently open, and Thea West bounced into the room.

When she saw Frank standing there alone in the room, so handsome and smiling, in his black evening-dress, with a rose in his button-hole, her blue eyes flashed with returning fire. She ran up and laid her slim, ringless white hand impetuously on his arm, demanding, breathlessly:

“Frank Hinton, have you gone crazy like the rest, or can you listen to what I’ve come to say?”

He saw at once that something had gone wrong, but he answered, lightly:

“Say on, Sweetheart.”

“It is only this,” said Thea. “I release you from your promise to take me to the dance. You can go with Maude Fitz.”

“Up—on—my—word!” ejaculated the astonished young man.

“I—I—was only joking, Frank, when I asked you to go with me,” pursued Thea. “You—you—didn’t think I was in earnest, did you, Frank?” eagerly.

“Of course I thought so. You were, too. You don’t think you can throw me over at this late hour, do you?” Frank laughed, and clasped his hand over the slim one on his arm with quite an air of possession.

Thea flushed slightly. She made a feint of drawing the hand away.

“I’m not going with you. I—I—didn’t mean to go at first. It was only fun. You know Maude wouldn’t like it. She mightn’t think I was just like a sister to you, Frank.”

Frank Hinton flushed and held tight to her hand.

“What are you driving at, my dear?” he asked, a little roughly. “Of course Maude won’t think you’re like my sister. She knows better. What has she got to do with you and me, anyhow?”

“You’re as good as engaged to her, aren’t you, Frank?” a little wistfully.

“Good heavens, no! I never thought of such a thing.”

“But Emmie says you are. And so maybe Maude might get jealous of me; that’s all, Frank, only I’m in earnest; you can’t take me to the dance,” nodding her bright head decidedly, and trying in earnest now to pull away the hand he held so tightly.

But Frank tried to draw her closer to him, while he said, indignantly:

“I wish Emmie’d mind her own business, and look after Charley McVey instead of me. I think he needs watching. I’m not engaged to Maude Fitz, and never will be engaged to anybody unless it’s you, Little Sweetheart.”

“Quit your joking; I don’t admire it,” Thea answered, a little shortly; “and let go my hand, Frank Hinton. It don’t belong to you.”

“But mayn’t I have it, darling—say, mayn’t I have it?” whispered the young man, eagerly, his eyes gleaming with sudden passion, his voice vibrant with emotion that made her draw back further with a sort of dawning terror, and exclaim in a scared voice:

“Let me go at once, I tell you. I’m not in the mood for fun. I can’t bear it.”

Her face was deathly white, her blue eyes flashing, but he would not let her go.

“This is no fun, but earnest,” he said, with sudden gravity. “Listen, darling—I love you. Of course you know that already, but will you love me in return—will you promise to be Frank’s little wife?”

The honest, manly tone left no room for doubt. Thea stared at him in angry disgust.

“You are crazy, too—as crazy as Tom!” she cried, indignantly. “And to think how I fooled myself! I loved you like a brother, and all the while you had this foolishness in your mind. Why, Frank Hinton, I wouldn’t marry a king—there now!”

“I know; but maybe you will marry me,” said the young fellow, pleadingly. “I love you so dearly, Sweetheart, and I certainly thought you encouraged me. You made so much of me—you seemed to enjoy being with me so much, and—”

“Oh, hush!” she interrupted, eagerly. “I am sorry, Frank; indeed, I am sorry, for now I see that you have deceived yourself. I am fond of you—just as Emmie is, you know—that kind of a love; but if I loved you that other way,” trippingly, “I—I—don’t think I should make so much of you. I mean, I—I—don’t think I’d want you to guess my—my—feelings,” blushing as if with some subtle perception of the master-passion her innocent heart had never known.

“Go away, you miserable little flirt! I feel like I hated you!” Frank cried, flinging the white hand roughly from him, and turning away in bitter anger.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Thea did not wait for a second bidding from her indignant lover. She ran hurriedly out of the open door, and in her haste almost fell over Emmie, who had been listening outside. They both paused, and Thea cried out, scornfully:

“So you’ve been listening again!”

“Anybody could hear that chose. You left the door open so that every one could hear you triumph in rejecting another one of my brothers,” Emmie answered, sulkily.

Frank came hastily to the door.

“Emmie, were you listening?” he asked, in surprise.

“The door was open; I couldn’t help hearing.”

“You might have coughed.”

“Yes; but she didn’t want to!” Thea cried, furiously. “She doesn’t think it any disgrace to eavesdrop. She listened to-day when Tom asked me—asked me—the same thing. Boo-hoo! oh, boo-hoo!” breaking into a sudden storm of sobs.

“Don’t cry, dear; you’ll spoil your eyes for the dance,” Frank said, kindly.

“You needn’t care if she cries them out!” snapped his sister.

“But I do,” said the young man. “And so Tom asked you, too, Thea?” he said, with a short, mirthless laugh. “Well, did you tell him ‘No’?”

“Of course—the ungrateful little flirt! After all the Hintons had done for her, too! Not that I think she’s half good enough for either of my brothers, but—”

“Hush, Emmie! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Frank said, severely; and Thea, who was drying her eyes on a tiny lace handkerchief, chimed in, reproachfully:

“I don’t think you ought to be mad, Emmie. I can’t see that I’ve done anything wrong. Why, I thought Tom and Frank were my brothers—or just as good—and I’d as soon thought of marrying my grandmother!”

“You never had any grandmother that anybody knows of, and it was an honor to you for either of my brothers to offer to give you a name, as you never had one of your own!” stormed resentful Emmie; but Frank put his hand sternly over her mouth.

“Oh, for shame, Emmie! I would not have believed this of you!” he said, sharply. “But I can see through it, and so can Thea, no doubt. It’s not for Tom and me you’re taking up so angrily, it’s because you’re jealous over Charley McVey! You think maybe she’ll cut you out with him to-night.”

“I don’t—I—” Emmie began to splutter furiously, but a slight tinkle at the door-bell made her start, then rush wildly upstairs.

She knew that Charley had come, according to his promise, to accompany her to the dance.

Frank opened the door, holding a fold of Thea’s dress so that she should not follow Emmie, lest the quarrel be renewed.

“Come in, Charley; walk into the parlor; Emmie’ll be down in a minute,” he said; and as the young man disappeared he whispered, hurriedly:

“Go and bathe your face, Thea, and come along with me to the dance. There’s no one else to go with you now. Emmie,” laughing a little, “would tear your eyes out before she’d let you go with her and Charley.”

The bright face dimpled into a faint smile.

“I don’t want to. You needn’t tell her that he asked me first; but he did,” she whispered, roguishly; then turning to the stairway, “I’m going alone. It’s moonlight, and I’m not the least afraid.”

“You sha’n’t!”

“I will!”

“I’ll walk behind you!”

“You won’t!”

“Wait and see, that’s all,” said Frank Hinton, resolutely; and this, after all, was the manner of their going.

After the first couple had got a square ahead, Thea darted out alone, and after walking a few rods with her head high, glanced furtively behind her; Frank was coming out of the gate.

Thea began to run. Then Frank ran a little, too. She slackened her pace for fear of overtaking Emmie, and he slackened his too. At no time did he approach her, but he kept her all the time within sight, and when they reached the illuminated building where the party was to come off, he chose to enter by her side. Afterward he left her severely alone, as he saw that she desired him to do.

Tom was already there, looking “killing,” so some of the girls said, in his elegant evening attire, with a tuberose in his button-hole. He was a consummate little dandy, and a favorite with most of the girls, who spent many a dollar that might have been saved, for the sake of leaning over the counter of Brocade & Bromley and chatting with the agreeable head clerk.

Tom frowned when beautiful Thea came in looking so charming in her white mull and blue sash, with a string of white wax beads around her bare, white neck, her exquisitely molded arms guiltless of all adornment, save the narrow lace that edged the short sleeves. He devoted himself assiduously to the other girls, and did not speak to Thea the whole evening, a spiteful procedure which was copied by his sister, so that by and by it began to be whispered among the guests that “all the Hintons seemed to be mad with Thea West.”

Thea did not seem to mind it in the least. She was as gay as usual, perhaps more so. She danced all the time and she talked incessantly. Her blue eyes sparkled, her pink cheek glowed with excitement. She flirted this time if never before, and she had a little group of admirers about her all the time. Her one thought was to spite Emmie Hinton for her unkindness, and when Charley McVey joined the group about her she threw him some of her sweetest smiles and glances.

“Just to punish Emmie,” she said to herself. “Not the equal of the Hintons, indeed! I’ll show her whether Charley thinks so or not.”

She knew very well that Charley had been longing to desert Emmie’s standard and come over to hers for a week past, but for Emmie’s sake she had held him at arm’s-length.

But now Thea was struggling with a hot and bitter resentment against the girl she had heretofore loved so dearly. Emmie had wounded her cruelly, and the impetuous girl vowed to herself that she would pay her back.

So it was that Emmie saw with alarmed eyes her beloved join the train of Thea’s admirers. She saw him dance with Thea three times, and when they went into supper Thea was hanging on his arm.

In a perfect fury of secret anger and jealousy, Emmie managed to get quite near them at the table. She was wild to hear what they were talking about.

“Thea will be making up some dreadful story about me, of course,” she thought, for, having entertained the young man on the way to the dance with a recital of Thea’s shortcomings, she supposed the girl would retaliate on the first opportunity.

But she was mistaken. Thea was only looking pretty and interested, and stuffing her rosy mouth with goodies, which she seemed to enjoy like a child. It was fickle, faithless Charley who was doing the talking—telling Thea all about the base-ball game, and even offering to take her to the next one.

Naughty Thea! She knew quite well that Emmie was very close, and that she was eagerly “swallowing every word,” as she said to herself, and there was no need of raising her voice ever so slightly; but she did, so that several others beside Emmie heard the sweet girlish voice reply:

“Oh, thank you, Mr. McVey! I always enjoy seeing the game so much, and I would be glad to go with you, but the truth is, I have another engagement. Besides, I’m quite sure that Emmie expects you to take her to see it. She has as good as told me so.”

“And, mamma, it was all I could do to keep from catching hold of her then and there and giving her a shaking!” cried Emmie, pouring her sorrows into her mother’s ear a few hours later, when she had come home with Tom from the dance, having had high words with faithless Charley before she left.

“I told him at the door when he followed me out to see me home that I did not desire the company of one who had taken me to the party and then neglected me all the evening for the most outrageous flirt in the world! So I pushed away his arm and called Tom to come with me home,” she said, angrily, between her bitter sobs, for rankling jealousy had stirred poor Emmie’s nature to its deepest depths of pain.

Mrs. Hinton had been confined to her bed several days with a sprained ankle, and her husband being away from home, Emmie shared her mother’s room at night, so she took advantage of her opportunity to relate the whole story of Thea West’s transgressions.

“And there is this thing about it, mamma,” she added, as she undid the rich masses of her thick brown hair and let it fall loosely about her plump white shoulders, “either Thea West has got to leave this house or I will leave it!”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear, I only wish your father was here to advise me!” cried her mother, weakly.

“I told Tom the same thing as we were coming home, and he declared I was quite right. He did not blame me for being so determined about it,” pursued Emmie, who always domineered over her weak little mother.

“But, my dear, where is Thea to go, I should like for you to tell me?” she said, with feeble remonstrance.

“To the De Veres, of course; the people papa got her from,” answered Emmie, recklessly. “I’ll bet that man knows all about her, anyway, for papa says, you remember, that Thea took to him the minute she opened her eyes on the train that day, and of course if she had not known him already she would have been timid and huffish as she was with the others.”

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Verelands was looking its fairest that October morning when George Hinton’s letter to Norman de Vere came into it like a thunder-clap falling from a seemingly clear sky.

It was almost thirteen years ago that the De Veres had quitted their beautiful home, with something almost akin to the sorrow of Adam and Eve in leaving Eden, so dear was the old ancestral home to their hearts. Leaving Sweetheart with the Hintons, they had journeyed northward, the young man seeking a career in life, and the mother only wishing to be near her son.

A wealthy tenant was soon found for Verelands, and the rent was forwarded yearly to Camille’s lawyer to liquidate the amount she had spent in improving the estate immediately following her marriage with Norman.

At first there had come letters of protest from the banished wife, but Norman had returned them to her without comment, and the rent continued to be forwarded to her lawyer.

Now and then, too, as he began to prosper in the profession of journalism, which he had chosen, he found means to add to the amount sent to Camille, for the weight of his indebtedness to her weighed sorely on his proud spirit.

“I shall never return to my old home until it is freed from that hateful debt,” he had said many times to his mother, and she, with a sigh, acquiesced. She had almost given up the hope now that Norman would ever be reconciled to his wife, he turned so impatiently from all her entreaties that he would pardon Camille, and more than once he had mystified her with the strange answer:

“Mother, you see only upon the surface. It is most unfortunate for both you and me. I see that you do not understand, and yet I can never explain.”

Mrs. de Vere brooded half her time over those strange words, but she could never see any reason in them.

“It is very true that I do not understand his hardness of heart toward Camille. No one could,” she often said to herself, impatiently, for it seemed to her that Camille had been sufficiently punished for her thoughtless flirtation. “No one could ever make me believe that there was any guilt in it. Camille was a pure woman,” she had said more than once to her son, but he always answered firmly:

“I will not argue the point with you, mother.” If she persisted he always left the room.

He did not know how often she was spurred on to fresh effort by the frequent letters she received from her banished daughter-in-law—letters whose passionate, piteous appeals brought tears into her kind eyes. She forgot Camille’s faults, her caprices, her jealousies, her arrogance of wealth, her thirst for admiration, in pity for her genuine despair at the separation from her husband. At first she begged Norman to read these letters. She thought they must surely soften his heart.

He refused her request. He expressed a stern displeasure at the correspondence.

“If you persist in keeping up communication with that wicked woman, be good enough not to force the fact upon my notice, mother,” he said, bitterly.

Camille stayed abroad three years with Finette, but to the amazement of the wily maid, her plot did not succeed. The indignant boy-husband did not relent, Camille remained unforgiven.

“There must be more than she confessed to me, or that foolish boy would have made it up with her long ago. I will watch closely. She has deceived me; she has not told me the whole truth,” she decided; but her keenest scrutiny, her most artful speeches, failed to make her acquainted with more than she knew already. Camille faithfully kept up the rôle of the true wife and wronged woman.

CHAPTER XXIX.

“I can not bear this any longer! I shall die if I do not see my husband soon! I am going back to America!” Camille cried, passionately, at last.

Finette encouraged her in the resolve. She began to feel alarmed for her mistress. She could not understand how Norman held out so long.

“He loved her so well. I can not make it out why he is so stubborn,” she thought, wonderingly. “Perhaps dere is some oder woman in the case. Boys are feeckle always, and what is it dat the American poet say:

“‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will.’”

Decidedly it was the best to go back, thought the maid—that was, if her mistress still had her heart set on that silly boy. For herself, she thought it all folly; she would not have given a snap of her fingers for Norman de Vere.

“A penniless, smooth-faced boy!” she thought, contemptuously. “Pah! why did not madame make him turn out a mustache? How could she bear to kiss him? There could be no more flavor to it than a girl’s or a baby’s kiss!”

But madame was going to make her rich when by her help she became reconciled to her angry husband, so Finette swallowed her disgust and set her crafty brain to work.

“To leave Paree and go back to dat hateful America—it is hard, but ‘needs must when the devil drives,’” she sighed; so they set their faces homeward.

They went to New York and settled down quietly in a flat, taking care to keep their presence a secret from Norman de Vere; but his mother was duly informed, and by collusion with her, Camille had many opportunities of seeing her beloved, herself unseen, and every furtive glance at the pale, stern, yet darkly handsome face only deepened Camille’s passion for her husband. She would have given all her wealth now—all the world, if it had been hers to bestow—for the love she had prized so lightly when it was all her own.

“For just one kiss that your lips have given

In the lost and beautiful past to me,

I would gladly barter my hopes of heaven

And all the bliss of eternity.”

Poor, guilty soul! It seemed to her that she could have forgiven her husband a sin as terrible as her own had been. She could not understand the absolute horror with which he shrunk from her, the abhorrence of her guilt that filled his soul. She could not believe that his love was dead.

“I will throw myself in his way—I will make him remember me. Perhaps the embers of the old love will leap into flame again,” she thought with a passionate yearning; and she resolved to throw off all disguise and let him know that she was near him.

He was living with his mother in a small flat where they played at keeping house in a sort of doll fashion. He came home one winter afternoon tired and cold from one of the great newspaper offices to his tea, and found her there in the tiny parlor, a great basket of hot-house flowers on the cozy tea-table, and behind it her face.

Camille’s face—colorless, yet dazzling as ever, with the feverish fire of hope shining in the wine-dark eyes, the red mouth trembling with a smile of hope and love, about her the sheen of silk and velvet and lace, the glitter of diamonds, the seductive breath of some rare perfume. She was all alone, and when he entered, she flung herself wildly at his feet.

“Oh, my beloved! my beloved! I could not stay away from you any longer. Forgive me, take me back!” she pleaded, wildly.

The young man grew pale as death, but he drew back from her; he pushed away the white, jeweled hands that would have clung to him.

“Do not touch me! There is blood on your hands!” he said.

Camille started and looked down at her hands.

“Oh, Norman, how you frightened me. I—I—thought—” she wailed, then paused abruptly.

“What madness is this? Why have you come here?” he demanded, bitterly.

“I could not stay away, Norman. Oh, I shall die if you do not take me back! I am your wife—your wife!” she cried, passionately.

He stood with his hand upon the door-knob, looking at her. She knew that if she came a step nearer to him he would go out.

“Oh, Norman, do not be so cruelly hard. Do you remember how you used to love me? Is it all dead now? Have you found a new love?” she asked, pathetically; and he shook his head.

“I have found no other love. I have no faith in women. I shun them with the single exception of my mother,” he said, sternly. “But the old love is dead, Camille. You murdered it that day by the river. You can never resurrect it from its bloody grave.”

She shuddered.

“Oh, Norman, you were mistaken. I had lost my ring. It was that I was talking of—only that,” she cried, beseechingly.

“Does my mother know you are here, Camille?”

“Yes. I am here by her consent. She pities me, she sympathizes with me. She longs for you to forgive me, Norman.”

He stood in silence a moment, but there was no relenting on his stern, white face, only trouble and disgust.

“I am sorry this has happened,” he said, slowly and sadly at last. “I have tried to forget you, Camille, as the greatest kindness I could show to you, for my thoughts of you are always mixed with shuddering horror and disgust. Remember, I know you as my mother does not know you, as the world does not know you. How can you think to move my heart toward you again? I pity you, I pray often that Heaven will make you repent and grant you pardon for your terrible crime, but to love you, to trust you again you must be mad to dream of it!”

She stood looking at him despairingly, rebelling passionately against her fate.

“You will at least let me live under the same roof with you, Norman? I will not trouble you; I will not even speak to you unless you wish me! But do not drive me to despair. Let me stay where I can at least see you daily,” she implored.

He comprehended the hope that buoyed her up. She would not accept her fate.

“It is useless,” he said, sternly. “The same roof can never shelter us both, Camille. You can never be anything to me again, and you must go away and leave me in peace.”

“I will not go!” she exclaimed, shrilly, flying into one of the old gusts of passion he remembered so well. “I am your wife, and I have a right to stay here. I will not leave you!”

“It is I then who must go,” he answered, gravely and firmly.

“I will follow you,” she retorted, furiously, stung by his indifference, and he answered:

“Then I must still flee.”

“I will haunt you!” she shrieked, throwing her arms above her head in a tempest of fury. “You shall not escape me! Wherever you go I shall pursue you. You shall learn that there is no escape from love like mine!”

An expression of intense pity, mixed with disgust, crossed the young man’s face; but he made no attempt to reply to the beautiful fury. With a long, deep sigh he turned from her, left the room and left the house, without seeing his mother, to whom, an hour later, there came a brief, stern note:

“By your conspiracy with Camille you have driven me from you. Within an hour I leave New York. I will write you through my employers, and they will forward to me your letters.

“NORMAN.”

CHAPTER XXX.

It was no empty boast that Camille uttered when she threatened to haunt her husband. She meant it, and in the years that followed she made him realize her vindictive purpose many times.

It was with bitter regret that the young man had deserted his mother, but he knew that only this determined move on his part could break up the intimacy that Camille kept up with her for the selfish purpose of having her husband always under surveillance.

But, although the unhappy mother herself had no clew to her son’s whereabouts, and could only communicate with him through the medium of his employers—a great newspaper firm—Camille was more successful. Perhaps she employed a detective. Certain it was that she pursued Norman from city to city, as she had vowed she would. Whenever he believed that he had finally escaped her she turned up brilliantly beautiful as ever, defiant or humble by turns, as seemed to serve her purpose best. She found him wherever he chose to hide himself. She took possession of his apartments very often by coming in his absence and proclaiming herself his wife. She created lively scandals sometimes by her inveterate habit of falling into hysterics when Norman left her, as he invariably did, in the first moment of their meeting.

The young man was driven to despair.

He was not rich like Camille, and his small stock of money began to give out under the stress of these untoward circumstances. He could not keep his position on the New York paper which had kindly made him one of its traveling correspondents.

Camille’s persecutions began to make him a marked man. She did not suffer him to remain long enough in one place to cull satisfactory material for his journalistic letters. Disappointed love, and the fierce longing to punish Norman for his scorn, had turned beautiful Camille into a restless fiend.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

It was this struggle for existence under adverse circumstances that first turned the thoughts of the young man to authorship.

“I shall have to give up my position on the paper; I shall have to find work that I can do on the wing, as it were,” he thought, drearily; and his first clever sketch was penned en route to a distant western city, Camille being left behind until such time as her well-paid detective should hunt him down.

This time his escape and his disguise were so cleverly planned that his fair foe was baffled several years. In the meantime, a publisher was found in the editor of a first-class magazine. The public was pleased with the firstling of his eager pen. He achieved success and a flattering offer—all under a nom de plume. At last he had found his vocation.

The unhappy mother, parted now for three long years from her exiled son, heard with delight the news of her idol’s success. She had broken with Camille long ago. Indeed, the heartless woman had coolly dropped her when there was no more comfort to be had out of her. So Norman wrote:

“Mother you must forgive me for deserting you so long. Indeed, there was no other way. I shall try now to make a little home where you can come to me and we can be peaceful, if not happy, after our old fashion. You and I have both had so bitter a lesson that I do not believe you will ever betray me again to Camille.”

Mrs. de Vere was quite sure of that. However much she might pity Camille and feel sorry for her, she resolved that she would not interfere again between the unhappy pair. Within a short time she journeyed West to a simple little home where her son was essaying his first ambitious work—a serial for the magazine which had published his sketches for a year past.

Meanwhile, Camille’s detective had been thrown off the track by a clever little ruse of Norman, and he reported to his employer that her husband had sailed for Europe. Thither went Camille and her maid by the next steamer. She remained several years, and strangely enough on her return to America the man she sought had only very recently gone abroad with his mother. Fate seemed to be playing at cross-purposes with the imperious beauty. For five years she had not looked on the face of the man she now loved and hated almost equally in her resentful wrath, for Norman did not return for two years, and eleven years had now passed since the dark days of her terrible sin, when sentence of doom had been passed upon her by her outraged husband.

“Eleven years! My God! only to think of it, Finette! Kept at bay, scorned, despised for eleven years by the man I once had at my feet! And I am an old woman now. Old in spite of the fire that burns in my veins—old in spite of this passionate heart!”

“Non, non, miladi—you look as young as you did ten years ago. Dat artiste in Paree she is one clever mistress of her art. Your skin is smooth and fine as a baby’s; the gray is gone out of your hair—”

“And it is as red as ever!” her mistress interrupted, impatiently. “Don’t try to flatter me, Finette. I am not vain, whatever other faults I may possess. I know my hair is red, my mouth too wide, my skin too pale. I know, too, that I always had some fascinations for men, despite my lack of beauty. But what matter! I am despised by the only man I wish to charm. As for you, Finette, you are a wicked fraud! You promised I should have him back. You lied. It is eleven years, and I am no nearer him than when he cast me off,” she raved, passionately.

Finette raised sullen, defiant eyes to the angry face.

“It is your own fault that I deceived you. You did not tell me all—you kept back things far worse than you confessed, else he could not have held out against all your devotion and—persecution,” she said, boldly.

“How dare you!” her mistress cried; but she quailed as with terror. “I told you everything,” she said, after a minute, defiantly.

“I do not believe you,” Finette muttered, sulkily; and for some minutes the war of words raged fiercely between them, for in their long years together their respective positions were often forgotten or ignored.

The day came when to her joy Camille found out her husband’s hiding-place. It was in New York where he had settled again with his mother on their return from abroad. She knew that he must be prospering, because only a few weeks ago her lawyer had made to her the last payment due to her on the improvements at Verelands.

“Why, it was ten thousand dollars! He must be rich,” Camille cried.

She and Finette consulted again, and the result was a plan more daring than any that had gone before.

There came a night when Norman de Vere awakened from a kind of nightmare dream and struggled for breath in the clasp of warm, round arms with passionate lips clinging tight to his.

At first he thought it was a dream, for once such dreams had visited his pillow, but soon he realized that it was fact. Struggling from the clasp that would have held him, but was too weak, he lighted the gas and saw with a shudder, the Nemesis of his life.

“My God, again!” he cried, hoarsely.

“My place is here. You shall not drive me from you again,” the beautiful creature cried, half pleadingly, half stormily; but she shrunk and cowered at last before his lightning glance of scorn.

“Have you no shame?” he cried. “Can you force your presence thus on a man who loathes you? Listen, then: I will bear this persecution no longer. I threatened you with divorce once, but you begged to be spared this disgrace; you preferred, you said, to go quietly away and fade out of my life. You have broken your promise. That absolves me from mine. To-morrow I shall institute proceedings for a divorce. I will obtain it, even if to gain the suit I have to betray my full knowledge of your wickedness—your foul murder of the man who held some guilty secret in your past life!”

“Hush, for Heaven’s sake! You may be overheard!” she faltered, cowering down beside the bed in her white robes, with a look of guilty terror in her burning eyes; but he gazed at her unmoved.

“What does it matter?” he said, hoarsely. “Every one must know it when the case goes to court, for I swear I will dally no longer. I will free my life from your claim, despite the bitter cost.”

“It will be a bitter contest, then, for I will fight you to the last gasp! You have earned my hate and you shall know its power!” she cried malevolently; but he stayed to hear no more. Bowing coldly, he quitted the room, and a little later two disguised women glided stealthily down the stairway, and emerging into the street, lost themselves in the lights and windows of the great city. They were Finette and her baffled mistress.

“He has threatened me again with divorce, Finette. I can not bear it. Think of some plan to stave it off. My God! I can not live under such humiliation!” Camille breathed hoarsely, and Finette saw that she was on the verge of hysteria. She began to reassure her at once, promising that she would think of some plan by to-morrow by which to thwart Norman de Vere’s purpose.

Three days later Finette Du Val made her appearance in Norman de Vere’s study with a pale, grief-stricken countenance, and announced that her mistress had committed suicide.

“She threatened yesterday that she would do it rather than bear the shame and grief of a divorce, but I did not believe her. Poor thing, she had said it so often before I thought it was nothing but talk. But when I went to call her this morning, she lay dead, with the bottle of poison by her side,” was the plausible story she told.

Norman de Vere was shocked at the awful closing of Camille’s guilty life. He went with Finette to look at the corpse, and spent some solemn moments gazing into the cold white face of the woman he had loved so well before he found her out in her terrible sin. She was changed and altered very much from the effects of the poison, but the beautiful, wavy red hair was the same, and no suspicion came to Norman that he had been made the victim of a clever trick by the crafty maid. The corpse was buried quietly in Greenwood, but with all due attention. Norman and his mother going as chief mourners; and very soon a tasteful monument marked the last resting-place of the dead woman.

“She promised to leave me all her money, I hope you will see her lawyer for me, sir, as soon as possible,” Finette said; and Norman, touched by the grief she had displayed, went at once to the lawyer. He was told that Mrs. de Vere had withdrawn all her property from his hands. She had told him that she meant to convert everything into money, with which she would purchase unset diamonds, thinking them a safe investment.

Finette protested that she did not know where her mistress had deposited the gems for safe-keeping. She wept because she did not have money enough to carry her home to her beloved Paris, and Norman handed her the requisite amount, and gave her possession of all the dead woman’s effects.

He went away then with a heavy heart, hoping he had seen the last of the French woman, whom he had always despised in secret.

Mrs. de Vere grieved very sincerely for poor Camille, as she called her in her thoughts. She thought that Norman had been unnecessarily hard with his wife, and that he must of necessity suffer the pangs of remorse over her tragic death. But she was too wise to utter such thoughts aloud. Camille’s name was never uttered between them any more after the rainy day when they stood side by side and saw the clods falling on the new-made grave in Greenwood, where the dead woman had been laid to rest. That her memory saddened them for many days after was evident by the pale, grave faces they wore so long, but to either heart had come an unowned sense of relief that the restless, unhappy creature was dead.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Camille had been dead more than two years now, and the shock of her death had worn off some from the minds of Norman de Vere and his devoted mother. They had gone back to Verelands and settled down to a quiet, passively contented life, he with his books and writing, she with her birds and flowers and the old associations that were so dear to her tender heart.

In their troubles they had almost forgotten Little Sweetheart, the child they had given into George Hinton’s care. Mrs. de Vere sent annually out of her slender income the requisite sum for the girl’s maintenance and education, and there always came back a letter of thanks from him, giving an account of his stewardship. They knew that the girl was well and happy, and in the last letter they received they learned that she had graduated with the honors of her class, and was at home now for good. Mrs. de Vere said timidly then that it would be pleasant to have a daughter to brighten up the quiet old house, but her son had answered, gravely:

“We do quite well as we are, mother.”

She knew then that she must strangle the faint yearning she felt for the child she had been so fond of long ago. Norman had forgotten, perhaps, how he had coveted her for a little sister. He had changed so much in these thirteen years that he was not much like the ardent, impulsive boy who had married the mature woman, and then repented his folly at such bitter cost. Kind and gentle as ever to his adoring mother, he seemed to have hardened to the rest of the world.

He shut himself up long hours each day in the library, evolving from his busy brain the clever novels that brought in such solid returns in the shape of useless gold—useless because it brought no happiness to the stern, grave man, who found in ceaseless labor the only antidote for wearying retrospections.

He cared nothing for the world—nothing for society. It chafed him to know, as he did, that people judged him severely; that it was whispered that he had wronged his beautiful wife by jealous, causeless suspicions; that he had driven her to madness and to suicide by his cruelty. He knew it was the world’s verdict; he read it even in the faces of those who looked most kindly upon him. He could not explain—he could not betray Camille, even in her grave, where no harm could reach her, save the scorn of men. He had punished her as lightly as lay in his power; he had been merciful to her to the verge of wronging others, but, though he was suffering a most bitter penalty for his clemency, and though Robert Lacy’s blood seemed to cry aloud from the ground for vengeance, he would not speak. But it hardened the man, this unjust verdict of a world against which he would not defend himself, and he held himself coldly aloof from it.

Yet his heart had sometimes throbbed a little faster at thought of the child whose life he had saved, and whose future, in all its helplessness and beauty, had been thrown upon his hands. He had done his best, he knew, yet he had always been haunted by a secret regret that a cruel scandal had obliged him to put away from his heart the coveted pleasure and comfort of a sweet little azure-eyed sister.

On this fair October morning, as he dallied over his coffee and inspected his mail, he had come upon a letter from George Hinton—an unexpected letter, for they only heard once a year from Virginia.

“That is George Hinton’s writing. I hope poor little Thea West is not ill,” said his mother, curiously; but he did not answer. His eyes were traveling eagerly down the closely written pages.

She waited most impatiently till he had finished, and then he looked across the table with a troubled light in his grave, dark eyes.

“Mother, this is most distressing news,” he said.

“Oh, dear! I hope dear Little Sweetheart isn’t dead, Norman?” she uttered, nervously.

“Oh, no, no!” he said, and smiled; then the smile gave place to vexation. “Thea has dreadfully disappointed the Hintons—ungrateful, and all that. Really, it is too bad.”

“But, Norman, what has she done—eloped?” anxiously.

“She has grown up into a beautiful, heartless little flirt, who delights in breaking hearts for pastime. She has jilted both George Hinton’s sons, taken away his daughter’s lover, and played universal havoc with the youths of Louisa, and now she has run away from her guardian’s and sought work in a milliner’s shop,” he replied, displeasedly.

CHAPTER XXXII.

“Let me see George Hinton’s letter, Norman?” said Mrs. de Vere; and he passed it to her across the table, then sat musing with a far-off light in his grave, dark eyes.

He sat thinking of the past—of that day long years ago when going into the ladies’ car he had first seen the lovely child whose life he had afterward saved. He remembered, as if it had been yesterday, the moment when Sweetheart had first awakened and turned upon him and the others in the car the sweet light of her drowsy, azure eyes. What a little beauty she looked with her dazzling coloring, her rosebud mouth and dimples, her fluffy golden hair! If she had grown up like that, was it any wonder men went down like chaff before her smiles?

A light came into his eyes. Something had dawned upon him suddenly but convincingly.

“Why should I be surprised?” he thought. “The child was a coquette even then to the tips of her rosy fingers. The drummers all saw it, and smiled at it. She made a victim of me, even in innocent babyhood. Is it any wonder that she has fulfilled the promise of early years?”

He frowned, then sighed. It was not pleasant to think of that pretty child, scarce more than seventeen, amusing herself in this wicked fashion. Norman de Vere had old-fashioned ideas in many things. He called it wicked to trifle with the human heart.

Mrs. de Vere looked perplexed.

“Norman, what are you going to do?” she said. “Mr. Hinton seems to think we ought to take her back here.”

“There is not the least doubt about that. We will have to do so,” he replied, decisively.

“If she is so pretty and so wild she may prove troublesome,” Mrs. de Vere observed, anxiously.

“Doubtless,” her son replied, grimly; then he sighed. “But our duty remains the same. I wish she had been content to marry Frank Hinton, whom I believe to be a manly young fellow. I saw him once on a trip with his father, and it was some such idea that made me offer his father the means to educate the boy for a profession.”

“Norman, to think of your turning match-maker!” his mother exclaimed, in amused surprise.

He flushed, then laughed.

“It seems ridiculous, I know, mother,” he owned. “But the child’s future was on my mind, and it seemed natural that, growing up in the house with those young men, she might grow to fancy one of them.”

“As a brother, yes, but not as a husband. Girls are much more likely to fancy strangers as lovers. They are capricious,” Mrs. de Vere said; and she quoted Longfellow to her son:

“‘Thus it is our daughters leave us,

Those we love and those who love us!

Just when they have learned to help us,

When we are old and lean upon them,

Comes a youth with flaunting feathers;

With his flute of reeds, a stranger,

Wanders piping through the village,

Beckons to the fairest maiden,

And she follows where he leads her,

Leaving all things for the stranger!’”

“How strange is human nature!” he mused, aloud; then, decisively, again: “There is no other way but to bring her to Verelands. Young, beautiful, willful, she needs a guiding and restraining hand. Yet, mother, it will be hard upon you to have our sweet home life broken up by this.”

“Do not think of me. I am ready to do my duty,” she said, hurriedly, and there was a minute’s silence.

Norman looked grave, even reluctant; yet finally he said:

“I will write to Mr. Hinton and ask him to bring Thea West to Verelands immediately. I will write Thea, too, and lay my commands upon her to accompany him, for I can fancy that she might rebel against his authority.”

The letters were promptly written and dispatched, and a beautiful suite of rooms was prepared for the coming guest.

“After all, Norman, she may prove a pleasure and a comfort to us,” Mrs. de Vere said.

She liked to look on the bright side.

“Let us hope so for your sake, dear little mother,” he answered, dryly. Then he looked at her with something like compassion. “After all, life must be lonely for her, poor thing!” he mused. “She has no absorbing work like mine to fill up the measure of her time. I believe that at the bottom of her heart she is glad that Thea West is coming, only she will not confess it for fear of offending me.”

Mrs. de Vere was certainly in a flutter of pleasant anticipation. She spared no pains to have Thea’s rooms bright and attractive. She had dazzling visions of a lovely girl fluttering about the house and grounds; of the long-closed piano being opened; of music trilling through the long-silent rooms. She had almost given up society, because Norman cared so little for it, but now she would accept more invitations for the sake of the bright young girl, who would love music and dancing and everything that was gay and happy, and whose lovers would quite besiege Verelands.

“It will be almost like having a daughter of my own—and I always wanted a daughter so much,” she sighed.

But to her dismay the postman brought one morning a little letter in a pretty, school-girlish hand to Norman de Vere—a letter breathing defiance and independence.

“I refuse to recognize your alleged authority over me, Mr. Norman de Vere. I have been told that you found me in a wreck, and that the only interest you have in me is that of charity for a friendless child. I thank you and your mother for the charity bestowed on me, and, God helping me, I will repay in time the obligations I owe you—at least, as far as they can be repaid in money. I am a woman now, and no longer need eat the bitter bread of charity. I left my home at Mr. Hinton’s because my presence was unwelcome there, and am earning my bread and butter with my own hands. In the full intention of continuing to do so, and firmly declining the home at Verelands, which it must be as irksome for you to offer as it would be for me to accept, I remain,

“Gratefully yours,

“THEA WEST.”

Mrs. de Vere sat gazing at the letter like a statue. She could not realize it, this proud, defiant spirit of the girl she remembered so kindly. A vision of the child stole over her—the sunny curls, the frank blue eyes, the loving heart. How could this be Little Sweetheart?

“Well, mother?” Norman said at last, impatient of her blank silence.

“I do not know what to say! I can not realize that Little Sweetheart could defy us like this,” she answered.

“She has not been well trained, I fear,” he said. “I have a letter, too, from George Hinton. She has refused to come with him. She is determined to earn her own living, he says, but it may be that her old associates have wounded her pride by unkind allusions to her dependent condition, and fairly driven her into asserting her independence,” thoughtfully.

She caught eagerly at the idea.

“It may be true. Perhaps she has been misjudged. If she is so pretty, men may have fallen in love with her without much effort on her part.”

He smiled, and said:

“Dear little mother, always looking on the bright side of human nature!”

“Is it not best?” she asked, pleadingly; and Norman smiled again as he answered:

“Yes.”

“But what are you going to do, Norman? Must we give it up like this—after all my trouble, too? Those pretty rooms!” she sighed.

“Mother, I believe you are actually disappointed.”

“I am,” she said; and the great tears started into her eyes.

The handsome old face was drawn into lines of disappointment.

He stooped down and kissed her with something of the old boyish love so long repressed under the bitter consciousness that she blamed him for Camille’s sorrow.

“Dear mother, you must not be disappointed,” he said, tenderly. “You have set your heart on this girl, I see. Then why not undertake a mission to Virginia? I flatter myself that no one could resist my mother.”

“Do you mean it, Norman? Would you like for me to go?” she cried, in real excitement; and he saw how much her heart was set on having the girl at Verelands.

“Yes, I mean it, mother. I would go myself, but I am not sure I would succeed. With you it would be different. She would fall in love with you.”

“And why not with you?” she said, brightly. Then the color flew to her cheek. “Oh, Norman, I didn’t mean that way!” she said, vaguely. “But she couldn’t help liking you on sight—as a dear older brother, of course.”

“‘Of course,’” he echoed, smiling at her confusion. “Let me see, mother—how old am I? Thirty-five? I feel fifty; and Thea West is about seventeen—almost young enough for my daughter.” He flushed as a certain bitter memory rose in his mind, but added, lightly: “I hope the inveterate little coquette will have more respect for my gray hairs than to try her arts on me.”

“There is not a gray hair in your head!” Mrs. de Vere cried, indignantly, as she ran her fingers through the clustering dark curls. “But I dare say the child is not half the coquette they pretend,” she added, for her kind heart went out more and more to the absent, friendless girl.

She paid no attention to Norman’s careless banter. He was too old and saddened and busy, and Thea West too young and giddy for the two to have anything in common with each other.

“So you will go?” he asked.

“Yes, to-morrow,” she replied, with eager interest.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

“After all, it is very lonely without my mother. I am glad she is coming home to-night,” Norman de Vere said to himself, when quite two weeks of time had elapsed since his mother’s departure for Virginia.

He had not had the least idea that she would remain away more than a week, for he had great faith in her powers of persuasion. She, if any one, would be able to overcome Thea West’s sturdy notions of independence.

She had succeeded, as he had thought she would. Thea capitulated to the sweet and gentle woman’s arguments and persuasions, although she would have stood firm as a rock against Norman de Vere’s commands. The first letter had told Norman she had succeeded.

“She will come with me to Verelands, but we are going to Richmond first. I want to buy Thea some new things,” she wrote, indefinitely, so it was two weeks now, and to-day there was another letter saying that to-night they would be home. Mrs. de Vere wrote:

“Thea remembers you, although she was so young when she saw you last. She is a sweet child.”

“Rather a big child now,” Norman de Vere thought, with some amusement. “I wonder if she will take to me now as she did when she first saw me? But, no; I was a handsome young fellow then. I am old and altered now;” and he glanced disparagingly into a mirror that reflected a man whose claims to good looks far exceeded even those of thirteen years ago, while he certainly did not look more than thirty. Time had only touched him to improve, although he had added a touch of sad gravity to the beautiful beardless lips and a thoughtful light to the splendid dark eyes.

“I hope the little coquette will not turn the house topsy-turvy with her whims. Why could she not have married Frank Hinton and settled herself for life?” he had thought many times since his mother had gone away, with an inward chafing against the change the girl’s coming would make at Verelands. Then he would take himself severely to task: “I am growing selfish, bearish. I ought to be glad for my mother’s sake.”

And for her sake more than Thea’s he directed the gardener to fill the house with flowers the day of their coming. The halls, the drawing-room, the dining-room, the bedrooms, all blushed with beauty, and gave out a fragrant welcome to Sweetheart when she again crossed the threshold of the grand old home and stood in all her fresh, girlish beauty before the handsome, stately man who smiled a little as she impulsively held out both little hands, but certainly pressed them warmly enough in his as he uttered some cordial phrases of welcome.

Thea West gave him a bright, arch look.

“You do not mean it, I know,” she said, saucily. “You believe all the bad things the Hintons say about me, and you’re afraid I shall run you crazy with my flirtations. But I sha’n’t. I’ll be good.”

He gave her a look in return before which her white lids drooped shyly to her cheeks, then turned to welcome his mother, who thought that Norman certainly seemed younger than when she went away. How kindly, almost fondly, he had welcomed Thea, too.

“I hope we shall have time to dress before dinner, Norman, we are so dusty,” she said.

“Plenty of time. But do not be long. I shall be impatient,” he answered; and as they went upstairs he turned into the drawing-room to wait.

There was an unwonted glow on his smooth, dark cheek, an eager light in the dark eyes.

“I have never quite realized that my protégée was a young lady till now,” he mused, dreamily. “But she is as sweet and winning as when a baby. I wonder if she remembers how she used to kiss me?”

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Norman waited something over half an hour, and found himself growing oddly impatient for his mother’s return. A servant came in and lighted the gas, and then to pass the time away he sat down at the grand piano and began to play some dreamy chords that sounded strange in his own ears, it was so long since he had played before. But he was a little excited over his mother’s home-coming, it seemed.

“Oh, Mr. de Vere, you play the piano? I’m so glad!” cried a clear voice, with that indescribable ring of hope and youth in it that is so sweet to world-weary ears.

He turned his head. A white figure was coming toward him over the soundless Turkish carpet—Thea, in all the glow of her young beauty, smiling, eager.

She came close to his side. She laid her beautiful white hand, dimpled and ringless, on his arm, and said, frankly:

“Before I came I was angry with you. I did not care what you thought of me, but I—I have changed my mind. I’m going to tell you the truth in the beginning, for—somehow—I don’t want you to think as badly of me as you seemed to in that letter.”

He sat silent, looking into the flushed, eager face, not helping her by a word or even a smile.

But Thea went bravely on:

“Tom and Frank, you know? The Hintons said I used them outrageously. I didn’t mean to, and I think they misunderstood. We were brought up together, and they seemed just as much my brothers as Emmie did my sister. I loved them both, but not—that way,” vaguely.

“What way?” Norman de Vere asked in a puzzled tone. He looked keenly into the eager face, and Thea’s blush deepened to scarlet.

“Oh, you know,” she said, rather helplessly. “I didn’t like it when Tom tried to make love to me. It actually disgusted me. So I snubbed him every time, and—thinking Frank wasn’t so foolish—I treated him like a brother. The great goose thought I was in love with him, and wanted to marry him—the idea! So they both—Frank and Tom—proposed the same day. Of course, I said no. Emmie eavesdropped—the mean thing—and made a row about it.”

“But wasn’t there some one else—Emmie’s lover?” he suggested, quietly.

“So they wrote you that, too?” angrily. “But it wasn’t my fault! He was fickle, I think. He tired of Emmie, and wanted to pay me attention. I said no every time, but she wouldn’t believe me, so just once—to tease her because she had scolded me so—I danced with him as often as he asked me, and I—I was real spiteful toward Emmie that time, I own it, but she provoked me! I never thought of flirting with anybody. The boys all seemed to like me. I suppose it was because I was fond of dancing, and could sing—”

She paused for breath, and the dark eyes watching her face seemed to say, mutely:

“Isn’t there more yet?”

Blushing deeper than ever, she added:

“Well, some of them made a great fuss over my curls! I can’t see why! I don’t like the color. I would have changed with Emmie any day for her beautiful brown braids!”

Norman de Vere smiled as his eyes wandered to the beautiful ripples of gold falling to the small, round waist. He thought there was some excuse for “the boys,” as she called them.

Thea drew a long, half-sobbing breath, and the small hand on his coat-sleeve unconsciously tightened its pressure.

“Do you believe me?” she asked, eagerly, anxiously. “I—I—can’t bear that you should believe their stories. It was just as I have told you. I never thought of flirting with anybody.”

She looked at him eagerly, fondly, almost as if she were going to fall into his arms, as in that long past time of babyhood that recurred to him vividly now. But he said to himself, amusedly:

“No doubt she looks on me as a brother, too. No wonder poor Frank Hinton lost his heart if she played sister in this sweet, confiding fashion. Little witch, she is very charming, and perhaps she does not really know her power.”

“Do you believe me?” Thea repeated, alarmed at his silence; and the frank innocence of her face compelled him to answer:

“Yes, I believe you. I think they wronged you.”

“Oh, thank you!” she cried, radiantly. “If you had not believed me I don’t think I could have borne to stay at Verelands. How good you are! But I remember that you were just as kind to me when I was a little child. You saved my life. I feel so grateful to you for that!”

He did not understand why he should feel that odd pique because she was talking to him so freely, so gratefully, so unrestrainedly, as if he were a hundred years old. Something made him say, daringly:

“Do you remember how you crept into my arms and kissed me the first day we met? You said you loved me, and fed me peppermint drops. Mr. Hinton said then that you were a little flirt.”

Her cheeks were pink as roses, and she removed the little hand from his arm in a furtive way.

“I remember that I was very fond of you,” she said, with a smile; but she did not meet his questioning glance. “How forward I must have seemed to you!” she added, constrainedly.

“No, indeed,” he began; but Thea was glad not to hear any more of his reminiscences, for Mrs. de Vere entered very opportunely at that moment, and the girl went to a seat where she sat in silence, furtively studying that darkly handsome face, and wishing he had not remembered she had made love to him when she was a mere baby.

CHAPTER XXXV.

After that first night, Norman de Vere found no occasion for unconscious pique at Thea’s sisterly frankness toward him. By the next morning her manner had changed indefinably. It had developed into a pretty dignity that just escaped shyness, and was almost reserve. She tacitly avoided her handsome guardian and clung to his mother with all the tenderness of a daughter.

But he knew that for the first week or two she was engaged about half her time in reading his own works, for his mother had come herself to the library for them.

“Sweetheart is so anxious to read them, but she would not come herself lest she should disturb you,” she said.

“Good little girl!” her son muttered, dryly, and went on with his scribbling; but more than once that day he wondered if Thea was reading his books, and how she liked them.

“But I shall not ask her, since she is so silly as to pretend to be afraid of me,” he thought, severely; and tried to dismiss her from his mind, chafing to himself at the persistency with which her image came between him and his work.

Why should the blue eyes haunt him so when they scarcely saw each other save at the table, for he spent half of his time in his library, the other half walking or riding unsociably by himself, with now and then an evening at the Author’s Club or theater. Thea and his mother rode a great deal, too, but it was always in the elder lady’s two-seated pony-phaeton, which she drove herself. There was only room for two, and in any case Mrs. de Vere would not have asked him to make one of the party. She vaguely felt that Norman was not to be annoyed for the sake of a simple school-girl who seemed to him a mere child.

Norman saw it all—his mother’s care that he should not be bothered by Thea, and the girl’s entire acquiescence. Before she came he would have been pleased to know that it would be this way. It piqued him now.

“I do not want her to fear me now—she confided in me so sweetly when she was a child,” was the excuse he made to himself for his pique.

But Thea firmly determined on being “good,” as she phrased it—gave him not the least trouble. She subdued her joyous spirits when he was by; she did her daily practicing on the piano when he was out for his walk; when the neighbors began to call, and the young people found her out, she was demurely social; she held firmly in check the gayety that in Virginia had earned her the title of coquette.

“He said he believed in me, and he shall have no cause to change his mind,” the girl said to herself, when the temptation to be recklessly gay assailed her.

She had grown morbidly anxious to appear at her best in those dark eyes, whose grave glances haunted her dreams by night and her thoughts by day.

The same strange attraction that had drawn the two together so long ago was at work now—had been magnetizing both ever since that night when they had met again; but both were struggling against it, both called it by a colder name. To her it was gratitude, to him it was anxiety lest she should be repelled by one she had once trusted in so tenderly.

Across the gulf of reserve and apparent indifference each heart clamored eagerly for the other. Thea knew that he was always in her thoughts—that he was the handsomest man she had ever seen, the most famous, the most cultured. She lay awake at nights to think of him, and sometimes the snowy pillow was wet with tears.

“Oh, what is the matter with me? Surely, I am not pining for any one of those who treated me so harshly!” she would sigh, in plaintive wonder. Then, pityingly: “I wonder if Emmie has caught Charley back. I hope so. It must be sad to love in vain. I am sorry now for Frank and Tom. Perhaps I did not refuse them kindly enough. It seemed so ridiculous, because I was so young then” (she was about four months older now).

And one day Norman saw in the mail that was about to be sent out two letters addressed respectively to Frank and Tom Hinton. He called Thea into the library.

“Are you renewing your flirtation with your jilted lovers?” he asked, severely.

She blushed as she saw the letters in his hand.

“Oh, no, indeed! How can you think it? Please let me explain,” she cried, eagerly, and he waited curiously. The big, lustrous blue eyes lifted to his face, and somehow the glance they met in return held them fixed, though Thea trembled with strange pleasure at her own boldness; so she said: “I will look you straight in the eyes, Mr. de Vere, then you will see I am telling you the truth. I have been thinking lately that I was cruel to those poor boys—”

“And that you love them, after all?” he interrupted, harshly.

“Oh, no, no—never! I am sorry I laughed at them, that is all. I think now I ought to have refused them more sweetly—more kindly—so I am writing just to ask them to forgive me for laughing at them.”

Her eyes withdrew themselves reluctantly from his, and the long-fringed lashes swept her cheeks. She looked adorable.

“I never heard of such nonsense!” he exclaimed, but not sternly. “If you will take my advice, Sweetheart, you will put the letters into the fire. Your cruelty helps them to forget you. Send them, and you will only have Tom and Frank at your feet again.”

“Do you really think so?” she cried, snatching the letters and tearing them to fragments in a hurry.

Her cheeks were glowing and her heart beat fast. How strange, yet sweet, it seemed to be here alone in the library with him—sitting in that chair before him like a little culprit, yet a happy one withal, for only to be near him was an exquisite delight to the girl! Her heart throbbed faster and the blood ran quicker through her veins with painful pleasure, at his mere presence.

Norman in his arm-chair, with his pen waiting for him on the desk, was in no hurry to begin writing. He was wishing he could think of something that would detain her yet longer. How the fair face and golden head seemed to light up the somber library!

She, on her part, was thinking that she must go now—that he had nothing more to say to her. But she—she had something else to say to him, if only she could muster up courage.

She glanced bashfully at him under the long lashes. Yes, he was regarding her attentively. The color flew warmly to her cheek in the dread lest he was remembering again with amusement that she had adored him when she was a very, very little girl.

But she kept her seat despite a sudden impulse to fly. She must tell him now.

“Oh, I am very sorry, Mr. de Vere, that—that—about Frank—you know. I couldn’t—couldn’t—” she stopped helplessly, her face like a rose.

“I am sure I do not understand what you are trying to tell me. Why are you so afraid of me? I’m not an ogre, child. Go on. I shall not scold you, what ever you confess.”

The sudden, kind, reassuring smile was a wonderful help. She could look at him again—she could say without blundering:

“I’m sorry you were disappointed in me—about Frank, you know. I’ve heard all about it—how you educated him for a profession, thinking—thinking to provide a nice husband for me. It was so kind in you. Were you very angry with me? I hope you can forgive me,” anxiously.

He bit his lip with vexation. So his mother had betrayed him.

“You don’t say a word, Mr. de Vere. I suppose you are vexed still. Perhaps you did not want me here, breaking up the peace and quiet you had with your mother before I came. This is what I wanted to say. It isn’t likely I will ever marry anybody, so you can’t get rid of me that way. But, please, can’t I go away and support myself? I could teach music. I have a talent for that, and for millinery, too. I—would—rather go, please, because I’m afraid I’m in your way here.”

The big blue eyes shone pathetically through starting tears.

Norman held out his hand to her as if she had been a child, and said, huskily:

“Sweetheart!”

She arose and went to him with the docility of a child, and put her dimpled white hand in his. When he pressed it tightly he felt how she was trembling.

“Dear Little Sweetheart, I have wounded you,” he murmured, tenderly. “Forgive me, child. That was a foolish fancy of mine to provide for your future. But it was different then. I did not know it would ever be so that you could come back to live at Verelands. I am glad you did not marry Frank Hinton. I hope you will never marry any one. I want you to stay always at Verelands to make the sunshine brighter and the flowers sweeter, as they have been ever since you came.”

His arm slipped around the slender, throbbing waist and pressed it gently.

“Never think yourself unwelcome again,” he whispered. “You must never be afraid of me again. Stay at Verelands and be my mother’s daughter, Sweetheart, and my own dear little sister.”

He turned and pressed his lips to the tear-wet cheek, and it seemed to him that it suddenly grew cold, the fair head drooped against him, the form grew limp in his arms. For a moment he held her quite unconscious, then she revived and struggled from his clasp.

“Let me go,” she said, with sudden coldness; and the next moment, alone in her room, she fell sobbing on the bed.

“His sister!” she moaned. “His sister, dear Heaven! just in the moment when I realized I loved him and hoped—hoped—he was going to ask me to be his wife!”

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Poor little Thea! she knew now why she had suffered with that late remorse for her scorn of her rejected lovers. It was because she had realized in her own heart all the sweetness and the pain of real love, and out of this knowledge could sympathize with the emotion which had once been the butt of her scornful ridicule.

All in a moment, as it were, while she had stood in the warm clasp of Norman de Vere’s arm, there had come to her a realization of the truth. She loved her guardian, not with the grateful affection of a ward, but with a woman’s devotion. It seemed to her now that she had loved him thus since that first night when he had smiled into her eyes and bid her welcome to his home; but the knowledge might have lain dormant in her mind much longer had not Norman’s sudden tenderness awakened her to the truth. All in one dizzy moment she knew that she loved him and believed that he loved her, that he was going to tell her so, and ask her to be his wife.

As swift and sudden as was her hope followed the cruel downfall. She was dazed, breathless, with its terrible suddenness. Crouching on her bed, she wept with passionate abandon.

“Why did I ever come here?” she moaned, despairingly, “and why was it that I learned to love him, this selfish, cold-hearted man? I can not understand it. He did not try to win me,” her pride rising in arms at the thought that she had given her heart unsought.

The love and admiration that had always surrounded Thea had naturally given her a good opinion of her own self. She had heard so often that she was beautiful, that it would have been an affectation to pretend not to know it. But until now she had not cared about it—she had taken it as a matter of course.

“Beauty is not all,” she sighed now, with bitter chagrin. “Perhaps he has never even noticed that I am passably pretty. He has seen very beautiful women, of course—proud, cultured, wealthy women—his equals in everything, not dependent little nobodies like me.”

She sat up presently, dashing the tears from her violet eyes, her sweet lips curling in fierce self-scorn.

“Thea West, you are a little simpleton. How could you have such a fancy for one moment? You know perfectly well how far he ranks above you in everything—even age. He was a man—a married man—when you were a baby. He thinks you are a baby still.”

Some more fierce sobs came at that. Oh, how young, how silly, she must appear in his eyes! If she could only add ten years to her age!

“He would not dare hug me then and call me his little sister. I should seem too grown up and dignified.”

But Thea West was a very sensible girl in spite of her gay spirits. When her first passion of disappointment had worn off, she began to argue the case with herself. She saw that her little tempest of resentment against Norman de Vere was all wrong. He had been very, very kind to her. She owed him a world of gratitude.

“It is no wonder I fell in love with him, he is so handsome, so noble, so gifted! One could love him just from reading his books,” she said, sadly, yet with a thrilling consciousness of Norman’s dark, magnetic eyes. “But with him it is different. He could never think of loving me. Besides, he can have no faith in women. The Hintons have told me that he was separated from his wife because she was false to him. Is that why he looks so grave and sad, I wonder? Perhaps he loved her so well that he can never love another, now that she is dead.”

A sudden pity filled her heart for the man whose life had been so cruelly wrecked by a woman’s falsity.

“I wish I could comfort him. I wish I were really his little sister.”

She resolved suddenly that she would not disappoint Norman de Vere, who had been so kind to her, who had asked her not to be afraid of him, but to give him the confidence of a sister.

“I will fight down this too warm love of mine. It will soon die with no hope to feed on,” she decided. “I will be a sister to him in truth. It is possible I might be a comfort to him in that way.”

Drooping her face into her white hands, Thea prayed dumbly for strength and patience—strength to hide her secret of love from Norman de Vere, and patience to fall into her place as his sister—only his sister, without daring to hope for anything sweeter or better.

“If I can repay him for his goodness to me by any sacrifice of self, that happy consciousness shall be sufficient for me,” she vowed; and a sort of pride came to her that she was conquering so nobly this fatal passion that had stolen upon her unawares.

But she needed all her strength to meet Norman’s questioning gaze when she met him again. He had been puzzled by her sudden faintness and her abrupt departure from the library. Had she been offended by the interest he had displayed in her? Had she fancied he was falling in love with her like the rest, and so taken this means to express her disapprobation? He turned hot and cold at the thought.

“It was most imprudent in me offering her that caress,” he thought. “I had no right. I can not tell what came over me. I could not resist the impulse, she was so sweet, so charming, and only a child as compared with me. Yes, she is only a child to me. If she were more nearly my equal in age, I should be frightened, fearing it was love I felt for the beautiful little coquette.”

And when he again met Thea he looked at her with some anxiety.

It was in the drawing-room, just before dinner. Thea never dallied over her toilet. She came in, as usual, before Mrs. de Vere, and she found Norman waiting and pretending to be engrossed with a new book.

He looked up eagerly at the entrance of the blue-robed figure, and their eyes met.

Thea smiled as she accepted the chair he placed for her, and said:

“I hope you will excuse me for leaving you so abruptly this morning. I had a sudden faintness, and was obliged to seek the fresh air.”

“Are you quite well again?” anxiously.

“Oh, yes, I am quite cured.”

There was a faint emphasis on the last word, and Thea sighed so faintly that he did not perceive it.

“I feared I had offended you by my unsought advice about your lovers,” he said, questioningly.

“Oh, no, no; everything you said was kind. I thank you for what you said to me,” with a frank glance quickly withdrawn.

Thea knew that she must not let her eyes linger on the noble face and form. It would make her rebel heart beat too quickly.

But Norman came closer. He was not afraid yet to look his fill on the lovely face set off so sweetly by the pale-blue dress with white lace trimmings. He did not quite realize as yet the danger he was risking. He thought:

“How that little pearl locket becomes the half-bare white neck, and how perfectly molded are her dimpled arms! She has all the signs of good blood and ancestry. I wonder if we shall ever find out her parents, or will she always belong to me?” Then a most unwelcome thought came: “In a few years at best some triumphant lover will bear her off to a new home, and Verelands will know her charming presence no more.”

There was positive pain in the thought, but he tried to put it away from him, as he said, gently:

“You did not tell me, Sweetheart, whether you would give over being afraid of your elderly guardian, and be like a sister to him.”

“I shall be only too grateful,” Thea answered, softly; but she looked down at her slim, white hands instead of into the dark eyes regarding her so eagerly. In a minute she added, shyly: “I’ve never felt afraid of you—only anxious not to disturb you at your work.”

“You can never disturb me, child. I shall be pleased to have you about me. I suppose you sometimes want books from the library. You must come and get them when you wish. It will not annoy me in the least.”

“Oh, thank you; but I don’t read very much, I’m afraid. I love to walk and ride and row,” Thea said, hastily.

She did not dare to be alone in the library again with Norman de Vere.

He felt her reluctance. His face flushed deeply.

“It was that most unlucky kiss. Indeed, I had no right,” he thought, but he could not regret it. The memory was too thrilling.

He immediately began to lay plans to join her in the outdoor life of which she pretended to be so fond.

“Can you row?” he asked.

“Like a sailor,” she replied, gayly.

“And ride horseback?”

“I have never had an opportunity to learn.”

“Should you like to, Sweetheart?”

He had never adopted the new name by which others called her. Like Tom Hinton, he found it pleasant to say Sweetheart, and his tone in pronouncing it was very tender.

She was obliged to own the truth. She was most anxious to ride horseback.

“Then I shall teach you,” said her guardian. “We will begin to-morrow. You shall accompany me in my morning canter.”

CHAPTER XXXVII.

The next morning a box was sent to Thea’s room, and on opening it she found a beautiful riding-habit of dark-blue cloth and a cap to match. To her surprise, it fitted exactly, and in the pretty little watch-pocket she found a card:

“TO MY LITTLE SISTER.”

A momentary cloud came over the radiant face, and Thea sighed as she murmured:

“Sister!”

Evidently she had not become reconciled to bearing that relation toward Norman de Vere.

She stood a moment looking intently at her lovely reflection in the long mirror, and she could not help but see that she was surpassingly lovely. The dark, rich blue of the habit set off at their best the dazzling tints of her complexion and the living gold of her long curls. The close jacket showed every exquisite curve of the lissom, girlish figure. But the blue eyes flashed and the red lips curled into a pout as Thea gazed, and she sighed:

“If he were younger, he could not be so cold.”

She went down and found a beautiful, cream-white pony awaiting her pleasure. Norman, on a magnificent bay horse, looked his best, and his dark eyes kindled with admiration as he beheld Thea.

How carefully he assisted her into the saddle, how particular he was that the dear little foot should be properly placed in the stirrup. He knew quite well that he held it in his hand something longer than was necessary. It was a temptation like the kiss of yesterday, impossible to resist.

As they rode slowly away, side by side, he said:

“Thea, I always longed for a sister. I think I should have had a happier lot in life if my wish had not been denied.”

She gave him a frank, grateful smile, but could think of no words with which to answer. She did not want to be his sister, and to have him come to her some day to confide to her his love for some more fortunate woman whom he was going to make his wife. This thought rankled, and she sighed to herself:

“If only I knew that he would never marry—that life could go on always like this, I should not mind so much. I would try to be content. But I am afraid, afraid!”

She determined to turn the conversation from its sentimental turn at once, and by a little clever maneuvering soon had him engaged in a conversation descriptive of his foreign tour. Thea pretended so much interest that he presently promised to take her abroad next year if his mother would consent to go with them.

“I am quite sure you would enjoy it,” he said.

“But it would be tiresome to you. You have been through it all, and I would not like for you to make such a sacrifice to me.”

The blue eyes looked wistfully at him a moment, but the fond, reassuring glance they met in return made the lashes fall hastily to her cheeks.

“Do not call it a sacrifice, Sweetheart. It would be a pleasure to travel with you for a companion. I fancy that your interest in everything would make it doubly charming to me.”

Thea’s heart thrilled at the words. She thought, half bitterly, half with amusement:

“Really, I did not know that brothers ever made such charming speeches to their sisters. I know Emmie’s brothers were never very gallant to her. Come, I think I shall have a very agreeable brother, after all.”

But aloud she only said, gratefully:

“How kind you are to me! I wish I knew how to repay you, Mr. de Vere.”

Then after a moment, looking up at him eagerly, though shyly, she abruptly said:

“Will you tell me which you admire the more in woman—beauty or intellect?”

“What a strange question from a little girl like you!” he said, looking at her in surprise.

“Do you think so?” she flushed warmly. “Why, we used to discuss that question in Virginia—the boys and girls I knew.”

“And what did Frank and Tom say?”

“They preferred beauty,” she replied, in a low voice.

“As for me,” Norman said, riding close to her side, “I should prefer a combination of both.”

He was eagerly watching the lovely face where the beautiful flickering color came and went so rapidly under the trying sunlight of the clear, bright day. He fancied that a shade of disappointment came into the clear, blue eyes.

“I thought you would think so,” she said, timidly.

“Naturally,” he replied. “Why, Sweetheart, what would beauty be without mind? A lamp without a flame, a rose without fragrance.”

She turned to him a grave, almost sad face.

“But the boys used to say that brains and beauty were but seldom united,” she ventured.

“You should not have listened,” he replied, warmly. “It was a libel upon beauty. Where could one find a fairer face than yours, Sweetheart? Yet you are most fairly gifted in mind. You have talent. Your musical abilities are of a high order, and you told me, if you remember,” mischievously, “that you had a talent for millinery.”

“Miss Barnes, the lady I worked for at Louisa, said so,” eagerly. “But of course that is not exactly intellect. It was intellect we were talking of, you know.”

“Yes,” smilingly.

She rode on silently awhile, giving all her attention to the cream-white pony which was as sweetly docile as could be desired for a new beginner. They were outside the city now, going along a country-road luxuriant with the tropic vegetation of the South. Norman de Vere, watching the thoughtful face eagerly, fancied that some struggle was going on in her mind between timidity and doubt.

“What is it you wish to ask me, Sweetheart?” kindly.

“Oh! how did you know? Does my face tell secrets like that?” She looked surprised, rueful, then burst out: “Well, it was only this: Do you think verse-writing a sign of intellect?”

“Do you write verse, little sister?” laughingly.

“Answer me first,” she returned, saucily.

“Well, then, I can not say positively. I have read verse that was not poetry—nothing but laboriously constructed rhyme, with not a pretty conceit or fancy to pay one for reading it.”

“I dare say that is my kind of verse,” despondently.

“So you do write poetry?” eagerly, amusedly.

“No—rhymes—although they come to me very fast. At school I wrote lots of them.”

“You will show them to me, Sweetheart? I will tell you then whether you are a true poet or simply a rhymester.”

“I will show them to you on one condition, Mr. de Vere.”

“Well?”

“That you answer the question I asked you just now.”

“What was it?”

“Which do you prefer—beauty or intellect?”

“But I answered it.”

“No; you expressed a preference for a combination. I desire that you express a choice.”

Norman laughed at her anxiety, with a little inward wonder over it.

“I hardly know how to reply,” he said. “I own I am a beauty-worshiper; but then I admire intellect too, and I do not believe I could see any permanent charm in beauty unadorned by the graces of a superior mind.”

“Then you declare in favor of mind?”

“I suppose so, if you compel me to make a choice.”

“I thought you would,” she said, and a soft little sigh ended the words.

His keen ear caught it.

“Why did you sigh, Sweetheart?”

“Did I? Oh, I suppose I was wishing that I was very clever. But I am always wishing that, only I know I never can be. I am too fond of dancing and theaters, and all those giddy things that clever people scorn.”

“The cleverest people like those things just as well as you do, child, only they can find pleasure in other things, too, and so, I suppose, can you. You have not had many dissipations since you came to Jacksonville, yet you have seemed to be happy.”

“I have been. It is such a lovely place. I enjoy it so much. But I should have been content even if it had not been so charming. I try always to make my own sunshine,” she said, smiling.

“And while you are making your own you shed some on the paths of others. You have made my life brighter since you came, Sweetheart.”

“I am so glad,” she said, simply, and a brighter light came to the lustrous blue eyes, a warmer glow to the dimpled cheek. Unconsciously to himself, Norman de Vere’s words and glances were far warmer than those of a brother to a sister. Thea felt it, and thrilled at the consciousness. Perhaps he loved her better than he knew.

“Ah, if I were only clever!” she thought, eagerly. “I will study—I will learn more things than they taught at school. My teachers said I could become very clever if I chose.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

The next day Thea had another delightful canter with her guardian, and when they returned, he told her to bring her verses down to him as she had promised yesterday.

“I hoped you had forgotten,” Thea exclaimed, ruefully. Having spent hours over her portfolio last night, she had decided that the dozen or so poems she had picked out for his inspection were nothing but trash, and she regretted the promise she had made.

But Norman de Vere would not release her until she promised to bring him the portfolio at once.

“I am anticipating quite a treat,” he said, with a soupçon of sarcasm that brought the color rushing to her cheeks.

“Then you will be disappointed,” she answered, tartly, but she went obediently for the verses.

“But I can not stay to see you read them. There is company only just arrived, and your mother wants me in the drawing-room,” she said, glad of so good an excuse for getting away, for her fair cheeks tingled with bashfulness. Why, oh, why had she been so silly as to own to verse-making? She could fancy him laughing quietly to himself at her crudities. But the die was cast. She had blundered into this humiliation of her own accord in her eagerness to climb nearer to the height of his genius. She flung the portfolio down upon the table, and made a very undignified retreat in her haste to be gone.

The visitors waiting for her in the drawing-room were some acquaintances she had made on first coming to Verelands several months ago—two gay young girls, and their brother, an unexceptionable young man. They were wealthy, and of good family—old friends of Mrs. de Vere, who warmly seconded the invitation they extended to Thea to return with them for a week’s visit to their country home, something more than three miles away.

“There will be quite a party of us. Some of our schoolmates will arrive from the North this evening, and we shall have a gay week,” said Miss Diana Bentley, the elder of the two girls, a tall, handsome brunette.

“Say that you will come, Thea!” cried the younger, Nell, a girl of about the same age as Thea, and her good-looking young brother added, eagerly:

“We will not take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Thea looked at Mrs. de Vere, who said, kindly:

“Go, if you wish, dear. The old woman will try to do without you for a few days.”

“But my riding-lessons? You know I have just commenced learning,” Thea said, doubtfully.

“I will take pleasure in riding with you every day,” said Cameron Bentley, quickly.

He admired Thea very much, and was eager to have her at Orange Grove, his beautiful home. She flushed slightly under the thrilling glance of his dark eyes, then gave her consent to go.

It had occurred to her that here was a fortunate escape from the intolerable bashfulness that had overwhelmed her since she had thoughtlessly given her promise to let Norman de Vere read her verses.

“A whole week—he will have read and forgotten the trash by then,” she thought, with swift relief, and made ready gladly to return with the Bentleys to Orange Grove—Mrs. de Vere promising to pack her trunk and send it later in the day.

Norman de Vere, eagerly conning the papers she had left with him, was startled presently by a soft little tap at the door.

“Come in,” he said, and the door opened, admitting a lovely vision—Thea in a dress and hat of dark-blue velvet with pale-blue plumes sweeping her shoulders and mingling with the spun silk of her golden curls, her beautiful face bright, eager, smiling.

Norman’s heart leaped with a thrill that no sophistry could pronounce brotherly—a thrill that startled him with its keen pleasure.

“What, going out again—so soon? You said there was company!” he cried.

She came nearer and stood at the furthest corner of his writing-desk, her small, gray-gloved hand resting on the corner.

“Yes—the Bentleys,” she said. “They have come to take me to Orange Grove for a week. There is to be quite a gay party there. I expect I shall enjoy it very much.”

“No doubt,” he said with sudden stiffness. He had risen, and stood with one hand on the back of his chair, looking keenly into her face, which had gone crimson as she recognized her papers scattered about on his desk. “But,” he continued, reproachfully, “are you going to give up your riding-lessons so soon?”

“Oh, no! I spoke of that, and Cameron Bentley promised to take me every day.”

“Ah!” he laughed; but it was mirthless, and the tone was unconsciously bitter with which he added: “A most agreeable substitute for your elderly guardian, Sweetheart.”

“Oh, no; I do not think so,” Thea answered, sweetly. The frank, blue eyes looked at him a moment—almost tenderly, it seemed to him—then the long-fringed lashes fell, as she added: “I hope you will come to Orange Grove sometimes while I am there—if not, I must say good-bye for a week.”

“Good-bye, then,” he replied, coldly, it seemed to her.

With a rapid step he crossed the space that intervened between them and caught both her hands in his, and stooping down, would have pressed his lips to hers; but Thea swiftly drew back from him, exclaiming, saucily:

“No, no; you are not really my brother, you know. It is only make-believe.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, flushing hotly, and instantly releasing the little hands.

“I forgive you,” she answered, laughing lightly, and turning to go; but Norman followed her out into the hall.

“I will pay my respects to your friends,” he said, longing for a look at young Bentley, whom he remembered such a short while back as a boy. Now, doubtless, he was sprouting a young mustache, and aspiring to Thea West’s favor. There was Miss Bentley, too, a handsome girl of twenty-five, who was always so cordial when they met. Decidedly he ought to go in and speak to her a moment, and he was gratified at her eager pleasure when he entered.

“It is an honor we did not expect—to have you lay aside your pen to welcome us giddy girls,” she cried, brightly. “But perhaps you have come to scold us for taking Miss West away from her riding-lessons.”

“Not at all, since she has found a better teacher,” he replied, bowing to Cameron Bentley, and adding: “We shall miss her, of course, but old folks, like my mother and myself, must not stand in the way of her enjoyment.”

“Old folks? The idea!” Nell Bentley cried, boisterously, “Why, Diana has been dying to ask you to join our party, but was afraid, knowing you would decline.”

Miss Bentley colored slightly, but stood her ground, and turning to him, said:

“Will you join us? Since Nell has betrayed me, I will not deny that she has spoken the truth.”

“I shall be glad to look in now and then at Orange Grove,” he replied, courteously, without a sign of his exultation at receiving the invitation that would enable him to comply with Thea’s timid request.

The young ladies protested they would be delighted, but Mr. Cameron Bentley remained silent. He did not care to have Thea’s grave, attractive guardian at Orange Grove, lest he should spoil sport.

But in blissful unconsciousness of the young sprig’s disapprobation, Norman went out to hand them to their carriage, and to give Thea one last grave glance that somehow set her heart beating madly, so that she scarcely heard the gallantries of the young man at her side, for Thea knew quite well that there was more than the love of brother or guardian in Norman de Vere’s lingering look.

As for him, he went back to the library with the thought:

“Little coquette, she has Cameron Bentley in her toils now. Well, I shall see for myself how far she goes in her flirtations, in spite of her denials of them.”

With a frown he went back to his desk and resumed the perusal of Thea’s verses. The first one he took up had the suggestive heading:

“IN AUTUMN DAYS.

“My heart, ah! why regret

Sweet spring’s first violet

Dead underneath these drifts of red and gold,

Where golden-rod doth wave

O’er summer’s new-made grave

Deep down within the dark and frosty mold?

“Alas, alas! one knows

That with the fading rose

And with the rustling of the dead leaves down,

The splendor soon will fade

From mountain height and glade,

And all the earth lie withered, bare, and brown.

“So one would fain go back

Along the spring-time’s track

And bid the tender flowerets bloom again—

Recall the faded rose

From under wintery snows

To greet the patter of the summer rain.

“Poor heart, how vain thy dream!

As easy would it seem

In winter time dead summer to recall,

As in life’s autumn days

Retracing youthful ways

For him on whom the length’ning shadows fall!”

“A thoughtful rhyme!” Norman de Vere muttered, throwing it from him with an impatient sigh.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

It was one of the hardest tasks that Norman de Vere set himself to stay away two days from Orange Grove and the blue-eyed beauty who had beguiled the heart from his breast in such artless fashion.

He knew now, he owned it frankly to himself, that it was no brotherly love with which Thea West had inspired him. He who had thought his heart dead within his breast was in love now, ardently, romantically, as any boy of twenty, and the worst of it all was that he held his love as hopeless, deeming the disparity between them too great for him ever to win the girl’s heart.

Perhaps it was her absence that forced upon him a realization of the truth, perhaps the simple verses that somehow lingered in his mind, repeating themselves over and over in the solitude of the night:

“Poor heart, how vain thy dream!

As easy would it seem

In winter time dead summer to recall,

As in life’s autumn days

Retracing youthful ways

For him on whom life’s length’ning shadows fall!”

“Too true,” he murmured, sadly. “It would almost seem as if the girl wrote with a subtle prescience of this day. How strange the charm she has always had for me, even in her sweet childhood. She loved me then, too, but now I am too old. Sweetheart can not be more than eighteen, while I am thirty-five! Why should I dream of rivaling Cameron Bentley, who has youth, wealth, and good looks to recommend him to her favor?”

It was the first time that he had ever regretted the swift passage of the years that had changed him from an ardent, impetuous boy into a dreamy, thoughtful man. Now he realized in all its intensity the poet’s plaint:

“There are gains for all our losses,

There are balms for all our pains;

But when youth, the dream, departs,

It takes something from our hearts,

And it never comes again.”

“Ah, to be a boy again—to be a boy that I might dare to woo her for my own!” he sighed; and at length his passion drove him to Orange Grove, that he might see for himself how Cameron Bentley’s wooing sped.

He found Cameron, metaphorically, at her feet. She had other lovers, too, this dainty young ward of his. Half a score of young men staying at the house were ready to murder one another for her fair sake; but with wonderful cleverness she distributed her smiles impartially among them all, causing one jealous damsel to quote:

“Sister she’ll be to them all, and

Loving and faithful and true;

Rather inclined round her fingers to wind

About—say, a dozen or two.”

“I don’t think she means to flirt with anybody. See how she tries to be the same with all,” Nell Bentley replied, valiantly taking her favorite’s part; but she only got a shrug of the shoulders from the malicious New York belle.

Into this coterie of beauties and gallants Norman de Vere now intruded, and his fame, no less than his darkly handsome, melancholy face, secured for him the most flattering attention. But Miss Bentley at once took possession of him, and during his call—which was as long as conventionality would permit—he was not allowed so much as a minute’s quiet conversation with Thea. He spoke to her formally across the room, and had the pleasure of hearing that she was having a delightful time, and that the riding-lessons went on daily. Miss Bentley, who had long adored the handsome widower in secret, monopolized him entirely, and Cameron Bentley tried to do the same by Thea. So Norman went away disappointed, his chagrin hardly soothed by the fact that in spite of being “so old,” as he phrased it to himself, he had been lionized by the Bentleys and their guests and invited to come the next day. He could remember nothing very clearly, except that Thea had looked almost unpardonably young and happy, and that her dress of rich dark-green cashmere with plush trimmings was quite the most becoming he had ever seen her wear, setting off the gold of her hair till it seemed like living sunshine, and bringing out all the rose-leaf tints of her dazzling complexion at their best. She had not looked at him much, not daring to meet his eyes with the memory fresh in her mind of the verses she had been rash enough to permit him to read.

“No doubt he is laughing in his sleeve at me now. Of course they seemed wishy-washy trash to him,” she thought, ruefully; then a little later, jealously: “But he is not thinking of me. He is quite absorbed in Miss Bentley. She is handsome, and she likes him, I know. It was easy to find that out. What if it is a mutual affair?”

Her heart sunk, and the flushed cheeks grew a shade paler with fear.

When he was gone and Thea was alone in her room that night, she gave way to hysteric tears.

“He shall never call me his sister again. I will not bear it,” she vowed. “I will be all or nothing. What if he is ever so much older and richer and smarter than I am? Old men have married pretty, penniless girls before now. And I am pretty, they say. Other men admire me. Why not Norman de Vere, the man on whom I have set my heart?”

She flung herself impetuously down upon her knees, and lifting wet eyes, like violets drowned in summer rain, prayed passionately:

“Dear Heaven, only give me his love, I ask no other boon under the sun!”

The next morning Thea was more careful with her toilet than she had ever been before. Jealousy of the handsome Miss Bentley had suddenly forced her to place herself on the defensive. She felt that she could not give up her hope without an effort to win him, although she sighed:

“She has everything in her favor—wealth, family, culture, even age—for she is twenty-five, Nell says—while I, nameless, penniless, scarcely more than a child, have nothing but beauty and innocence on my side. Yet I love him with the true heart of a woman, and I can not content myself with that farce of sisterhood. Let it be all or nothing!”

If she chose to be wandering through the grounds that morning, no one could blame her, for she knew perfectly well that Miss Bentley would monopolize him when he entered the house.

But when she saw him dismount from the beautiful bay horse, fling the reins to a servant, and enter, a sudden shyness seized upon Thea, and she fled from the path down a secluded rose alley to a seat, with a wildly beating heart.

“It looked too much as if I were waiting for him. He would deem me forward,” she thought.

But Norman de Vere had caught the flutter of a white wool dress and golden curls. He followed where they led.

There was Thea palpitating on a garden-seat, looking adorable in a white cashmere dress trimmed in black velvet, a big black hat with nodding white plumes on her head, a bunch of roses at her waist.

She rose to her feet with a guilty blush. Oh, would he suspect that she had come here to waylay him? would he think her bold and unmaidenly?

“Why did you run out of the path when you saw me coming?” he cried. “Didn’t you care to see me, little sister?”

He had caught both her hands in his after his usual fashion, looking eagerly into the charming face. She tossed her head with a petulant motion.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that!” she cried.

“That—what?”

“Sister. It isn’t true, you know, and I—I—would not care to have it so. I never cared about brothers, anyway. Emmie’s brothers were not so nice to her, I’m sure. They liked other boys’ sisters best. Please, I don’t want to offend you, Mr. de Vere, but I’d rather be your little friend.”

He dropped the little hands and frowned.

“Very well, Thea,” he said, stiffly, displeasedly, not at all comprehending her eagerness to remove the least hint of a fraternal relation in her yearning to be more.

“Thea! You never called me that before. I—I like the old name best—from you,” she pleaded, with a swift, upward glance that made his heart beat madly.

“Little coquette! She will not even spare her elderly guardian,” he thought, half bitterly, then aloud: “Sweetheart, you seem in a capricious mood to-day. Why are you here alone? Where are all your lovers?”

“I was tired of everybody. I stole out to be alone.”

“And I am intruding on you. I beg your pardon. I will go,” turning from her hastily.

“Oh, please don’t!” She put an entreating little hand on his coat-sleeve, and he turned back.

“If you are not in a hurry, please stay awhile and tell me how dear Mrs. de Vere is. Miss Bentley would not give me a chance to ask you yesterday,” she said, sweetly.

He sat down by her on the low garden-seat, and there was silence for a minute between them. The southern air was soft and balmy, although it was January, and some long-stemmed roses nodded on tall bushes behind them, making a fitting background for her delicate, spirited beauty.

Finding that he did not speak, she said:

“Your mother is well, I hope?”

“Quite well. She sent her love.”

“You must give her mine in return. Does she miss me?”

“She did not say.”

CHAPTER XL.

Thea glanced anxiously at her guardian. He did not seem inclined to talk. Had she offended him by her boldness in asking him to stay longer with her when he was doubtless anxious to go to Miss Bentley? The color flamed hotly into her cheeks. “I—I—perhaps I am detaining you. Do not stay unless you wish,” she said, timidly.

“I am not in any hurry,” he answered, smiling down at her a grave, sweet smile that made her heart go pit-a-pat with pleasure. “Perhaps you wanted to ask me how I liked your poetry?” he said.

“Oh, no, no; I—I don’t want to hear. I knew it was nothing but trash. I’m sorry I let you see it!” the girl cried, depreciatingly.

“You should not say that. I found it very readable,” he answered.

“Thank you; but of course you say that out of kindness,” dimpling pensively.

“No; I mean it. I enjoyed reading some of the pretty trifles. You have decided poetical talent, still I was glad to find that you were not a genius.”

“Glad? Why?” reproachfully, with downcast eyes and a quivering lip.

“I should not like to see you aspiring to a literary career, with its heartaches and disappointments alternating with feverish triumphs. Woman should belong to the sweet fire-side of home, not to the critical public.”

The blue eyes dilated widely.

“You embraced a literary career,” she said.

“Yes, but it was for bread, not for fame.”

“But you are rich.”

“I have earned it all by my pen,” he answered; and again the violet eyes dilated widely.

“I did not know that—I thought you were always rich—that is, the Hintons said your wife was wealthy.”

It was the first time her pure young lips had ever referred to the wicked woman who had wrecked his life. She saw a burning flush creep up to his forehead, then fade into pallor.

“Oh, forgive me, I—I—spoke thoughtlessly,” faltered the girl.

“It does not matter. They told you the truth. I married a rich woman, but when we parted, her money went with her. I had to work for my mother.”

“And for me,” she said, very softly.

“No—not but that I should have been glad to do it, but my mother had a small income of her own. She insisted on dividing it with you.”

“I must love her more for her generosity,” Thea cried.

“And me less since you know that you owe me no obligation,” he said, coldly.

“You saved my life,” she answered, in a whisper so freighted with feeling that he could not reply to her.

It was not gratitude he wanted, it was love. Yet he could not tell her so. He was only her elderly guardian.

He glanced around at her and saw tears hanging on the thick fringe of her gold-brown lashes.

“Are you grieved, Sweetheart, because I expressed myself so plainly about your verses?” he asked.

“I thank you for your frankness, but I am grieved that I am not clever,” she said.

“Poor little one! Yet you can not expect to have the earth. When God made you so beautiful that it is a pleasure simply to look at you, He gave you your share of earthly favors.”

She brushed away the pearly tears with a tiny cobweb lace handkerchief and said, wistfully:

“I remember that you compared beauty without intellect to a lamp without a flame, a rose without fragrance.”

“I did not intend the comparison for you, Sweetheart, as, unfortunately for the peace of mankind, you have intellect enough to brighten the lamp and perfume the rose. I did not know you so yearned for the dignity of intellect, else I should have owned that I might find a publisher for your verses.”

“A publisher? But it might be more difficult to find readers and a niche in the temple of fame. I do not thirst for mediocrity,” she said, with a sidelong glance at his smiling face.

“You are right. And so many people arrive at nothing else, that I advise you not to attempt rivaling them. Keep your pretty verses for your friends’ reading. See, I carry some of them in my vest-pocket with which to refresh the dull prose of my thoughts.”

“Pray don’t!” she cried, as he began to unfold the paper.

“True genius is always modest,” Norman de Vere answered, laughingly; and he read aloud in tones so musical that they lent a new charm to Thea’s simple rhyme:

“BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

“Little school-girl at her books

From the window chilly looks

Out upon the sunny world,

Bends her head so richly curled,

Blushing with a thrill of bliss—

Daring youth has thrown a kiss!

“‘Ah,’ the maiden sighed, ‘how sweet

To be strolling down the street,

With a lover by my side,

Pledged to be his happy bride!’

Watchful teacher with a frown

Sternly draws the curtain down,

“Shuts the girl into the gloom

Of the quiet, studious room;

Rows of desks and dimpled faces,

Smiling in accustomed places,

Through the school the whisper ran:

‘Nellie flirted with a man!’

“Oh, what visions of romance

Through their giddy fancies dance!

And the world beyond the curtain

Glimmered dazzling, vague, uncertain.

Dreams of love and lovers blent

With each roguish glance they sent.

“‘Nellie, child, you know the rule;

Own before the listening school

Who’s that very rude young man?

I’ll reprove him if I can!’

Nellie tittered: ‘Please forgive him, miss,

’Twas—I—that—that—threw—the—first—kiss.’”

Both were laughing when he paused, but Thea was crimson, too.

“That silly thing!” she said, bashfully. “It was an impromptu at school. It really happened, you know. Nell Olney was the torment of the teachers, and the darling of the girls—the most arrant little flirt in Staunton. The girls said I should put it into rhyme, and I did on the moment. You know I told you they came easy.”

“It was very amusing,” Norman said, as he folded the paper again.

Then he sighed, he scarce knew why, unless it was at the vision he had conjured up of Thea with the rest in

“The gloom

Of the quiet, studious room,”

her golden head filled with

“Dreams of love and lovers blent.”

The school-girlish verses and the artless enjoyment with which she explained them made her seem younger and further away than ever. How beautiful, how charming she was. Did she realize her power, did she guess how madly his heart was beating, how he longed to take her in his arms and crush her against his breast in a passion of love? He must go, else presently she might be laughing at him as she had laughed at her other lovers.

He rose abruptly.

“I think I must be going.”

Thea rose, too, her smile growing less bright.

“I will go with you to the house,” she said.

“Is it necessary? I believe all I came for was to look after you, Sweetheart. Of course,” hurriedly, “my mother was anxious. I suppose I can go away now?”

“Certainly not”—the frank eyes dilated widely. “You promised Miss Bentley, you know, and she—all of us—put on our prettiest morning-dresses. You must go to her at once,” with pretty imperiousness.

But she stopped, plucked a rosebud from her belt, and put it in his button-hole.

“Wear my colors this once,” she said, with a daring that yet did not seem like boldness, only pretty child’s play.

“If I could believe she meant anything!” he thought, vaguely, as he walked by her side along the beautiful avenue shaded by orange-trees, whose globes of golden fruit hung pendant from the trees.

She walked on demurely, thinking daintily in verse:

“Ah, happy rose,

Blest that you rise and fall upon his breast,

Whisper him soft of love,

All earthly joys above,

Within my heart that glows

With such unrest!”

Suddenly he turned to her, saying:

“Have you had your fill of dancing, Sweetheart?”

“We dance every evening, but I am always ready for more,” she answered, smiling.

“I am thinking of giving a ball at Verelands when you come home.”

“Oh, how sweet!” Thea gave a little jump of delight. “May I tell the girls?”

“If you wish.”

Nell Bentley came out on the long piazza of the picturesque white house.

“Oh, there you are at last!” she exclaimed, vivaciously. “We thought you were never coming.”

“I stopped to talk with Sweetheart about a little plan of ours, Miss Nellie,” he said, taking her hand a moment and pressing it warmly.

“He is going to give us a ball at Verelands when I go home,” said Thea, joyously.

“Oh, glory!” cried Nell, impetuously. “Let us hurry in and tell them all!” and they entered the house, where Miss Bentley was waiting impatiently. She took possession of Norman de Vere for the remainder of his visit.

CHAPTER XLI.

Norman called at Orange Grove every day after that; but it was always the same. The handsome Miss Bentley persisted in appropriating his visit entirely to herself, and gave him no chance for any tender passages with Thea.

They even persuaded him to come sometimes in the evening when they had impromptu dancing, the girls taking turns at playing the piano. He was even beguiled into taking the floor himself now and then, and it was wonderful how much younger and blither it made him feel. Thea said, too:

“It pleases me to see you dance. I feel then that you do not look on amusements of that kind as being altogether frivolous and silly.”

After that she might have beguiled him into almost any boyish folly, so far was he carried away by her girlish spirits. It seemed to him that he retained just enough reason to prevent him from making open love to the little beauty.

“She has grown so frank and confiding that I must not drive her from me by showing her what is in my heart,” he thought, blindly, for Thea’s assertion that she did not desire to be called his sister had made him shy of asserting any unusual interest in one so capricious.

“I must keep my place as elderly guardian, and she will reward me with unlimited confidences and frankness,” he thought, bitterly.

Mrs. de Vere in the meanwhile was superintending arrangements for the grand ball that was to come off at Verelands. She thought she saw in this an augury that Norman was waking up to a better frame of mind from the torpor and world-weariness that had possessed him so long.

“Can there be a woman in the case?” thought the shrewd old lady.

Her thoughts flew to the woman who had been sleeping the last long sleep in Greenwood for two years.

“Poor Camille!” she murmured, pityingly. “If he ever marries again I trust his judgment of his second wife will be kinder than it was of his first.”

She was pleased at the thought that Norman contemplated a second marriage. She fell to wondering whether it was Thea West or Miss Bentley.

“Miss Bentley would be the most suitable certainly in point of age,” she mused. “But no one can tell. These old widowers are usually most anxious to secure a sixteen-year-old girl.”

A slight frown wrinkled her brow. She feared that happiness in marriage could not exist with so great disparity in age. When she thought of Norman marrying Thea West there came to her some suggestive lines:

“Thy life is spring, but autumn mine,

Thy hope all flowers, mine bitter fruit.”

But she did not speak to Norman of her hopes and fears, as she would have done in earlier days. He had always maintained something like reserve toward her since the long-past-time when she had blamed him for harshness toward his wife.

So she went on with alacrity superintending the arrangements at Verelands for the ball. In old times many splendid entertainments had been held within its walls, and she made up her mind that this should be second to none.

Thea must have a new dress, too, for the occasion, as it would be a sort of coming-out affair for her. Mrs. de Vere ordered for her a simple but effective costume—a white tulle bordered with narrow white satin ribbons, worn over a white silk slip, and plenty of lilies of the valley as garnitures.

“She will be the sweetest thing in the house,” she thought, proudly. “I never saw any one so perfectly lovely as this nameless girl. I suppose it is sure to be a match between her and Cameron Bentley.”

CHAPTER XLII.

But after the ball-tickets went out, and Thea had come home, and the entertainment was but three days off, a heavy shadow fell upon Verelands, and it dated from a call made by Mrs. Bentley upon Mrs. de Vere.

The portly, well-dressed lady had sent in her card to Mrs. de Vere without asking for Thea at all. They were together about an hour, and when the visitor went away, Mrs. de Vere went straight to the library, where her son was at work, with a gravity on her face that startled him.

She never intruded upon his study hours unless there was something very serious the matter. He knew now that something must be gravely wrong.

He threw down his pen, and hurried to place a chair.

“Mother!”

“Norman, I have had a great shock,” she said, sinking into a seat.

“What was it?”

“That old scandal has cropped up again—the slander I thought buried forever.”

“I do not understand you, mother;” but his handsome face grew pale.

“Mrs. Bentley has just been here, Norman. You know her son is madly in love with Thea West. He wishes to propose for her hand in marriage.”

“And asks for our consent first, good boy,” Norman said, with a ghastly smile.

“Why, it is not exactly that. He can not get his father’s consent until—until—” she faltered, and paused.

“What?” he asked, sharply.

“Until certain scandals have been cleared up—old scandals we thought dead, Norman. So Mrs. Bentley came herself to me. She is anxious Cameron should have Thea if everything is all right.”

“Well, what is wrong about it?” he asked, with bitter impatience.

“You remember poor Camille’s jealous charge, Norman—her ridiculous suspicion that Thea West was your own child? The malicious story has been revived with cruel additions. Anonymous letters have been circulated in Jacksonville, asserting the same story. Thea is declared to be your own illegitimate daughter, her mother a circus performer—a bareback rider—in a low hippodrome.”

Norman de Vere grew ghastly; a stifled imprecation escaped his lips.

“Mrs. Bentley thought,” continued his mother, “that perhaps you had some clew to Thea’s parentage which you could follow up so as to remove the stain upon her and satisfy the world. Unless this could be done, she and her husband would withhold their consent to Cameron speaking to Thea as he had planned to do at our ball.”

“Are they so sure of her consent?” he asked, scornfully.

“I suppose so. It would be a great match for Thea, you know, and if she has a spark of ambition she could not but accept him. Even outside of his gifts of good birth and wealth, the young man is personally very attractive. It would seem quite natural for Thea to love him.”

“Yes,” her son said, in a strange voice. He paused a minute, then added: “Does Sweetheart, poor child, know this miserable thing?”

“No.”

“Of course you told Mrs. Bentley that I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, of Sweetheart’s past—not even her name?”

“Yes.”

“And her answer?”

“She said it was most unfortunate, because the scandal was being circulated to so great an extent that it was beyond doubt the work of a most malicious enemy—one who hated you or Thea, or both. They were some women, she said, who had decided to drop Thea’s acquaintance—among them the young beauty from New York now visiting Orange Grove. She sent this morning a regret for the ball.”

“Miss Faris? Pshaw! that is the merest spite. She is in love with Cameron Bentley herself,” he said, contemptuously.

“I fancied so,” said his mother. “She is one of the most industrious in fanning the flame of scandal. She asserts that her mother knew Camille in New York, and that Camille told her that she left you forever because of your bringing your illegitimate child to Verelands.”

His face grew livid. He began to stride impatiently up and down the long apartment.

“A curse on their false tongues!” he muttered, hoarsely. “It is this Faris girl, then, most probably, who has revived that wicked falsehood out of jealous determination to oust a rival. But Cameron Bentley is less a man than I deemed him if he can turn to her even though he loses Thea.”

She sat wringing her hands in silent distress, while he continued his slow, thoughtful march up and down the floor, speaking no more until he heard her mutter half to herself:

“Poor little Sweetheart! It is hard to lose her happiness like this for a cruel lie.”

He turned upon her abruptly.

“Are you so sure she loves him?”

“No, I am not sure; but I was thinking how this bitter story will follow the poor child, until she is some day confronted with it. It will kill her, she is so proud, so high-spirited—without a suspicion of any shameful mystery attached to her origin only in the minds of the evil and malicious.”

He did not answer for many minutes, but, pausing at last in his weary tramp, turned on her his pale face and strangely gleaming dark eyes.

“Mother, I swear to you, upon my honor, that I see but one way to silence forever this foul slander upon my name, and to save Sweetheart from the agony of shame and grief you forebode.”

“Oh, Norman, if there is any sacrifice I can make to save her—”

“To make Sweetheart my wife, if she will have me,” he ended, in a voice shaken with emotion.

CHAPTER XLIII.

Two days of the most cruel unrest followed to Norman de Vere after that painful interview with his mother, for although he had fully resolved to ask Thea West to marry him, he could not bring himself to the point of a proposal. What if she should refuse, as it seemed almost certain she would do? He would be confronted again with the problem of her future.

And the girl was so young, so lovely, so utterly adorable, it seemed cruel that her life should be clouded by the shameful story that Camille’s relentless malice had sent ringing down the years to torture him when he had thought himself free of her forever. Dead and buried as she was, she was yet taking on him a most bitter vengeance for her slighted love.

But if Thea could only love him, the ban of Camille’s malice would be removed. He would devote his life to making her happy if she would consent to bind her fresh young life with his saddened, world-weary one. Perhaps the advantages he could give her—an unsullied name, riches, and a heart’s devotion, might be some compensation for the disparity in years that made him think Cameron Bentley or even Frank Hinton a more desirable parti than himself.

Meanwhile, the hours flew by, bringing the day of the ball, and he had not yet spoken to Thea, although he felt himself a coward for delaying.

“He either fears his fate too much

Or his desert is small

Who dares not put it to the touch

To win or lose it all.”

Thea, all unconscious of the fate that hung over her, was all excitement in the prospect of the ball. She did not see much of her guardian, for the house was topsy-turvy with the preparations, and he remained closely shut up in the library, except when he met her at meals. He had not asked Thea to resume her rides with him, and the brief spirit of hope and courage that had inspired her at Orange Grove died out again under what seemed the careless friendliness of his manner.

“I must give up the struggle,” she said, hopelessly. “I do not believe he will ever care for any one again. I need not regard Miss Bentley as a rival, either. He is too self absorbed to think tenderly of her or me. I fooled myself thinking there was anything in his manner to me to inspire hope. It was only a way he had of showing me just a little more than friendliness because—because—he saved my life. But as for love, it is like that pretty poem of Ella Wheeler Wilcox;” and with a sigh she repeated:

“‘You said good-night, and the spell was over—

Too warm for a friend and too cold for a lover—

There was nothing else to say.’”

It was still early in the afternoon when Thea laid out upon the bed all her pretty things to be ready for dressing early that evening. She lingered some time over the airy white robe, the snowy, embroidered hose and slippers, admiring the silken lilies of the valley that were to match the garniture of the dress. She practiced airily before the mirror some moments with the exquisite white fan, then it occurred to her that perhaps there was something she could do for Mrs. de Vere, her heart bubbling over with gratitude to the woman who was so generous and kind.

“No, there is nothing you can do,” said the good lady. “I advise you, though, my dear, to take your hat and go out for a stroll through the grounds that you may get up a perfect complexion for to-night.”

Thea laughed and obeyed, and Mrs. de Vere, looking after her, sighed.

“I wonder if she is going to be my daughter or not? I suppose Norman can not be so anxious over it as he pretended to me, or he would have spoken to her before now.”

CHAPTER XLIV.

Thea caught up a big black sun-hat trimmed with a long wreath of trailing grasses, and took her way to her favorite resort—the river that flowed through the grounds at Verelands.

It was an ideal day, she thought, as she skipped gayly along. The air was sweet and warm, the sun shone brightly on the flowers that seemed to nod a fragrant greeting to the lovely girl as she passed. Something of the sunshine and warmth of the day seemed to shine into her heart and dispel the hovering shadows of unrest and hopeless love.

“Oh, why should I be sad?” she cried. “One can not have everything one wants, and this beautiful old world is bright enough of itself to fill one’s heart with gladness!”

Then she started back in bashful surprise, for just before her she saw her tall, handsome guardian. He was standing on the bank of the river, where some cypress-trees grew thickly, forming a deep shade. His hat lay on the ground, and his well-shaped head, with its cluster of wavy black hair, leaned back against a tree-trunk, his downcast eyes, infinitely grave and sad, fixed upon the now shallow river that went whispering and sighing along.

Some bitter retrospection had driven him forth to the fatal spot where so many years ago his love and faith in his beautiful wife had died so ghastly a death. Only a moment ago it had seemed to him he could see her there at his feet groveling, seeking for the fatal red roses, the witnesses of her terrible crime.

He had turned sick and faint again with the hideous memory; he had leaned his head back against the tree and half shut his eyes, and then he had heard a girl’s soft voice murmuring some indistinct words to herself. He turned his head and saw Thea close to him, and it rushed over him as a happy augury that she should come to him here, bringing the sunlight of her presence into the gloom that hung forever over this fatal spot.

“Oh!” she cried, starting back as their eyes met.

“Oh!” he echoed, smiling, and, stooping, recovered his hat. “If you are out for a walk, may I join you?” he asked.

She nodded assent, and he walked on by her side out of the shadow of the cypresses into the sunlight of the narrow by-path.

“Mrs. de Vere sent me out into the air to get up a fine complexion for the ball,” she said, smiling up into his grave, dark face, with a secret wonder over the shadow that lay in his eyes.

But he smiled back at her even though it cost him an effort, and replied:

“My mother was cruel to the young men who will be at the ball to try to add another charm to your perfection. Does she think

“‘To gild refined gold?

To paint the lily?’”

There came to her again the suggestive lines:

“Too warm for a friend and too cold for a lover;”

and she sighed even while she said, demurely:

“Thank you.”

“You were talking to yourself as you came up to me,” he said. “Is that a habit of yours?”

“Yes, but I am heartily ashamed of it,” blushing.

“I wish I could hear you sometimes when alone. I should like to know some of your secret thoughts, Little Sweetheart.”

“For instance?” she asked, encouragingly.

“How do you like Verelands?”

“It is the most charming home in the world.”

“And its master?”

The swift color rushed to her cheek, but she answered, simply and gravely:

“My best friend!”

“And something else that perhaps you have never guessed, Sweetheart.”

She started and looked up at him, wondering at the strong emotion in his voice. Their eyes met, and he said, huskily:

“Your lover.”

He stopped then, carried away by a swift rush of emotion. Catching her hands in his, as he had done several times before under the stress of strong feeling, he asked:

“Do you comprehend me, Sweetheart? I love you, not as I pretended—with a brother’s love—but with the truest and deepest passion my heart has ever known. Can you love me in return? Will you be my wife?”

He felt the trembling of the graceful form as he held tight to the little hands. Her face drooped, and a wave of roseate color swept from chin to brow. Thea could scarcely look at him, but it was impossible for her to speak, so she lifted her downcast lids, and gave him a swift, quickly withdrawn glance so full of exquisite joy and love that he could not doubt the story told him by those deep violet eyes.

With a thrill of rapture he drew his little love close to his breast, and pressed a lover’s passionate kiss on her yielding and responsive lips.

Faint with excess of joy, she lay still in his passionate clasp. Oh, the sweetness of that moment! Could she ever forget it? There rushed over her all the love songs, all the poetry she had ever read; but it seemed to the girl that all were tame in their descriptions of happy love. Perhaps it was beyond description. She felt quite sure that she herself could never have found words strong enough in which to describe the indescribable rapture of that moment when she leaned, blushing and palpitating, upon her lover’s breast, with his lips on hers, and his arms clasping her so close, so tight, while between passionate kisses he called her, “Love, darling, wife!”

CHAPTER XLV.

Thea was dressing for the ball. It took her a long, long time, she stopped so often to dream of her new-found happiness, and to thrill anew at the memory of the looks of love and the passionate caresses Norman had given to her, his girlish little love.

“Oh, how good he is to me! I will try to make him very, very happy,” she thought; and in her delirium of love and rapture would have made slow work with her toilet if thoughtful Mrs. de Vere had not sent her maid to help her and come herself at the last to see how it progressed.

She sent the maid out, saying that there was no more to do, and then she took the beautiful creature in her arms and kissed her tenderly.

“So you are going to be my daughter,” she said, fondly. “Norman has told me. I hope you will be very happy, dear. My son has but one fault; he has a jealous temperament, and that caused all his trouble with poor Camille. You must guard against coquetry, Sweetheart; he will never be able to bear it,” she said, with a sigh; and she honestly believed what she said.

In her mind Camille had been a martyr.

“I have never flirted, dear Mrs. de Vere, and I shall be most careful not to do anything to vex him,” cried happy Thea, in eager earnest.

“That is right,” approvingly. “You will be on your guard to-night, love. Of course you will have many admirers. You can not help it, you are so lovely in tulle and lilies of the valley. It will be white satin and orange-blossoms soon, for I know Norman will insist on an early marriage. But, as I was saying, be careful to treat all alike. If any one proposes to you, tell him frankly you are engaged to my son. It is better to have that understood at once. You need not say it is a new thing; if they understand the engagement has existed some time, it does not matter, my dear,” anxiously.

“But no one is going to propose to me to-night. I am not vain enough to fancy two men proposing to me in one day,” laughed the happy girl; but the event justified Mrs. de Vere’s hint.

When the ball was at its height, Cameron Bentley managed to catch Thea alone for a few moments in a flowery alcove, and declared his love on the spot in an incoherent fashion that went very well with a certain dogged, harassed expression he had worn all the evening.

“I’m going to be quite frank with you, my darling,” he hurried on, not waiting for her to reply. “I’ve had a little tiff with the governor over this. He wanted me to wait till something definite could be learned about you—your origin, you know, Thea. And he is so deuced proud, he threw out hints of disinheritance if I disobeyed him and spoke to you before he found out. You won’t mind, will you? I know you won’t if you love me, and the governor will be sure to come round soon. Even if he didn’t, I believe my mother would help us; she’s so fond of me she couldn’t hold out long. I’ve my law practice, anyway, you know—enough for love in a cottage.”

“Is it your father you’re talking about, Mr. Bentley, please?” Thea faltered, miserably.

Oh, what had she done to bring this down upon her head?

“Yes, the governor. You don’t mind him, do you, Thea? He will come round all right, I know. You do like me, don’t you? You will have me? I love you so madly—have loved you ever since the first time I saw you.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” cried Thea.

She pulled away her hands when he tried to clasp them, and tears came into her blue eyes.

“Sorry about the governor? Oh, that doesn’t matter, Thea. He will certainly come round, I tell you!” the young man cried, feverishly, eagerly.

“Oh, I don’t mean him—it’s you!” she cried, tearfully. “I’m so sorry you love me. Like that, too, to run such risks for my sake—poverty and—everything. And I can’t have you, you know. I’m engaged to Mr. de Vere.”

He recoiled as if she had struck him; his dark eyes caught a haggard, hunted look.

“You are jesting!” he cried.

“I am not. I am going to marry Mr. de Vere,” she said, proudly.

“That old man! Old enough to be your father! And broke his first wife’s heart, too! You can’t pretend you love him!” in impatient anger.

“I worship him!” she answered, defiantly. “I do not thank you for calling him old, either. He is only eighteen years older than I am, and I don’t want him a day younger. I think him grand, magnificent!”

“Thea, for God’s sake, throw him over and take me! For all his fame he will not make you happy. He married his first wife for money, and then broke her heart.”

“But I have no money. He is going to marry me for love,” she replied, with pretty triumph; then, indignantly, “Mr. Bentley, is it gentlemanly to censure your host under his own roof?”

“I am not accountable. You have driven me mad!” he answered, hoarsely. “Good heavens, Thea West, you must be the cruelest coquette in the world. Every one thought you would be only too glad to marry me. You certainly seemed fond of me. You know it.”

“It is false. I treated you as I did all the rest. I hope I am kind to every one; but I was in love with my guardian all the time, and—and—I won’t stay to hear another word!” Thea panted, turning quickly to leave him.

“You shall repent your cruelty, by Heaven!” the young man cried, madly. He detained her a moment, catching her hand and pressing his burning lips upon it, then rushed from the room and the house, mad with disappointment and despair.

Even Thea’s own great happiness could not make her enjoy the ball after that. She was no longer the careless child who had laughed at the devotion of her earlier lovers. She knew what love was like now—all its rapture, all its pain, and she could sympathize with Cameron Bentley in his bitter disappointment. She forgave him the unjust reproaches he had uttered because she knew that he was suffering, and she paid no heed to his parting threat. But the memory of his haggard, despairing looks did not leave her until her blue eyes closed wearily in slumber after the ball was over—the ball that, in spite of Cameron Bentley, had been the very happiest of her young life, for her betrothed husband had been near her constantly, and his pride in her was so unmistakable that no one could doubt his happiness in the betrothal which was duly announced by his mother, and which certainly created a great sensation. It was the theme of the evening, and effectively refuted the malicious slander which had been circulating the past week in social circles, and of which almost every one was cognizant except Thea herself, who, in her airy tulle robe and lilies of the valley, looked angelically fair and peaceful.

The Bentleys had been present with all of their guests except the obdurate Miss Faris, but they left rather early because they learned that Cameron had already gone, and, they feared, in despair over the announcement of Thea’s engagement to her guardian. Now, when too late, they regretted their harshness in forbidding Cameron’s proposal to Thea, for the betrothal to Norman put an effectual damper on malicious reports, and they reflected that if Cameron had spoken first he might have won the coveted prize.

Mad with reckless despair at his disappointment, the young man had hurried home, and to drown thought, indulged heavily in drink.

Locking himself into his room, he spent the night hours in a wild bacchanalia of drink and despair, until the early hours of the morning, when a loud pistol-shot startled every one from slumber and brought them rushing to the scene. The door was burst open, and Cameron was found senseless in a pool of blood on the floor, his right hand grasping a smoking pistol. He had aimed for his heart, but his unsteady hand had slipped aside, and he had only succeeded in giving himself a serious but not fatal wound.

When the news of the attempted suicide came to Verelands, Thea was dismayed.

“I believe I will make a vow never to speak to a young man again!” she exclaimed, tearfully.

“You might do something more sensible than that—marry me soon, and you will no longer be a temptation to young men who go crazy over a pair of blue eyes,” said Norman de Vere.

She blushed, and trilled saucily:

“‘I’m ow’re young to marry yet.’”

“If you put off the wedding-day long, I shall be getting gray. You would not like that,” he answered, getting in return the sweetest, shyest look of love that seemed to bid defiance to the frosty encroachments of age.

But by and by she found that he was quite in earnest in pleading for an early marriage. He did not want to seem selfish, but he knew in his heart that it would be better to marry Thea as soon as possible, and take her away from Verelands, lest some echo of the vile rumors that had been circulating should reach her ears and sully her pure spirit with their venom.

“Mother, what is to hinder your taking Sweetheart to New York at once and ordering the wedding things for a month hence?” he asked; and Mrs. de Vere replied that it would please her very much to do so.

“The wedding and traveling-dress after all will be the most we will have to buy there, for if you go abroad on your wedding-tour, Sweetheart can get lots of pretty things in Paris,” she said.

“Paris? Oh!” cried the girl, in a rapture of pleasure.

“Then you will like to go abroad?” her lover asked, smiling; and she clapped her pretty hands in childish delight, and offered no objections to being married in a month. She said, naïvely, no one would think of falling in love with her for her eyes and curls when she was a married woman, and though Norman smiled at that, he did not contradict her assertion.

Then Mrs. de Vere decided that she would call upon the Bentleys at once to express her sympathy in their trouble. Thea need not go, she thought, as the girl had owned frankly to all that had passed between herself and Cameron last night.

“They would rather not see you, I know, for it is natural they should feel some little resentment against you,” she said.

“But, dear Mrs. de Vere, I am not to blame. I never gave him any encouragement,” opening her blue eyes reproachfully.

“The Bentleys will believe the reverse for awhile, of course, but when Cameron gets well they will get over their nonsense, especially as you will be married and gone.”

So Mrs. de Vere went alone to Orange Grove, where she had the satisfaction of learning that Cameron’s wound was by no means as serious as supposed, and that if all went well he would be out again in a few weeks.

“Miss Faris is playing her part very skillfully, and if Cameron is as fickle as he is reckless, it is likely that she will catch his heart in the rebound. So do not worry yourself, dear, over the fate of this desperate youth,” she said, consolingly, to Thea.

CHAPTER XLVI.

Thea could not help writing a surreptitious little note of farewell to her dear friend Nellie Bentley:

“DEAR NELLIE,—I hope you are not mad with me about Cameron. They say he shot himself on my account. Oh, Nellie, please don’t think I led him on, for I never thought of such a thing. You know we were all just sociable together, but I didn’t try to make him love me. I liked him ever so much as a friend, but I was desperately in love with my dear guardian all the time. And now I am to marry him, you know, and I am so happy I can not describe my feelings. I hope dear Cameron will soon be well again, and that he will forget his fancy for me, and marry some lovely girl like that Miss Faris, who likes him that way, I feel certain—only don’t tell her I said so, for she might get mad. To-morrow I am going to New York with Mrs. de Vere to order my wedding-dress. Only think of it—and I not eighteen, probably! But I am to be married in a month, and we will go to Paris on our wedding-tour. I shall bring you a souvenir, Nellie. And, oh! I hope that everything will blow over in a month, and that your mamma will let you be my bride-maid. I will write to you again from New York, and I will never forget the lovely week I spent at Orange Grove. I would send my love to everybody, only I am afraid they are a little vexed with me. A dozen kisses. Your loving

“THEA.”

It was arranged at first that Norman was to remain at Verelands; but he suddenly discovered that he would like to go to New York, too, on alleged business with his publisher. It was a most flimsy excuse, but it served his purpose, and the next day Verelands was shut up and Norman accompanied Thea, his mother, and her maid northward for the all-important purpose of choosing the bridal robe for his beautiful young love.

“There is one thing you must let me do—that is, invite the Hintons to my wedding. I want to make friends with everybody, now that I am so happy,” coaxed Thea, on her journey.

“They would only accuse you of more inveterate flirting than ever since you have captured such an old fellow as I am,” Norman de Vere returned, laughingly.

“You shall not call yourself old. You seem no older to me than other men—only wiser and handsomer,” answered his frank Sweetheart, and his face glowed with pleasure.

It did indeed seem to him that he had grown younger since Thea West had come back to Verelands in all the charm of her young beauty. Could any boy love her more ardently, or with more keen appreciation of her charms than he did? His heart answered no, and he began to realize that the feeling he had had for queenly, capricious, tormenting Camille had not borne comparison with this later, deeper love.

“She is all the world to me. Pray Heaven her love may make up to me in sunshine for all the shadows of my past,” he thought many times in that happy month, when he laid aside his pen and gave himself up to the pleasure of escorting Thea daily about the modern Babylon, that charmed and frightened the country-bred girl all in one breath, it was so stupendous, and its rush and roar so dreadful to her unaccustomed ears.

“I should feel frightened at even finding myself alone in those busy streets. I believe I should wail aloud like a lost child in mere terror,” she said to him once, with a shiver; and the day came when, all alone in his cruel despair, he thought of her words with a sort of terror, wondering if she had found the reality grievous as the anticipation.

CHAPTER XLVII.

But that happy month came to an end at last, to be followed by still happier ones, for now it was sweet Thea’s bridal-eve, and she was going across the sea with the husband of her choice.

Mrs. de Vere had wished for the wedding to be on as grand a scale as the ball had been, but out of delicacy to Cameron Bentley, who was not yet out of his room, it was arranged more quietly. There was a marriage at church, with cards for the most intimate friends of the family, and a wedding-breakfast for the same. There were many floral decorations, as became the wedding of so fair and youthful a bride, and, to crown the happiness of the generous-hearted girl, all the Hintons had been bidden to the wedding, and two had come—Tom, all curiosity and eagerness over the grand marriage of his former friend, and Emmie, ashamed and repentant over her cruel treatment of Thea, and eager to be forgiven for her folly. Frank had gone to the far West to practice medicine in a rising town, and Mrs. de Vere, who was going to stay at Verelands, made the brother and sister promise to spend a month with her before returning to their Virginia home.

Reader, if we could say farewell here and leave our lovely heroine to her happiness, her heart beating high with hope and love, and the orange-blossoms wreathing her innocent brow, how sweet the task.

But the pen that has tried to trace the story of her sweet young life to her marriage-day must falter not yet until the dark shadows that fell from a sky that was seemingly all sunshine have been recorded too on the page of romance.

When the steamer “City of New York” left her moorings, there leaned against the rail among the excited passengers two figures noticeable for manly grace and feminine beauty. Norman de Vere and his beautiful bride Thea in a lovely steamer costume of Russia blue, her gold curls streaming on the breeze like sunshine, her blue eyes beaming with shy happiness. No wonder that every eye rested on her with wonder and admiration, and that even the listless, haughty old Englishman, past sixty years old, started and moved nearer to the handsome pair, putting up his eyeglass to scan them the better.

“Jove! what an out-and-out beauty! A real English face, too—pink and white, with the loveliest shadings. Who can she be? Heavens!”

His eyes had wandered to her male companion.

Lord Stuart, for it was no other, had recognized in the darkly handsome, beardless face of Thea’s companion an old acquaintance, Norman de Vere.

With a grim smile the old nobleman watched the pair, drawing very correct conclusions.

“A wedding-tour! He has married again? Camille, then, that creature of ice and fire, of jealousy and treachery, of love and hate, must be dead at last. Peace to her wicked soul!”

He watched the wedded pair with musing, thoughtful eyes, while his mind went back over the long years to the time when he had been Camille de Vere’s adoring slave, and plotted treachery against the princely looking man yonder, whose face in repose showed in its gravity faint traces yet of the storm through which his soul had passed.

“There was more in him than I thought, dupe of Camille that I was!” he muttered. “She was only playing me off to make her value greater in his eyes, for she loved him, as I soon proved to my chagrin. Well, she was not worthy of either—certainly not of this man who has risen like a phenix from his ashes, and made himself a name that rings from one continent to another! I wonder if I dare resume the old acquaintance?”

CHAPTER XLVIII.

Lord Stuart was most anxious to approach Norman de Vere when he found out for certain that the beautiful young girl was his bride. If Camille was indeed dead, he wanted to pay her memory the only tribute he could under the circumstances—the assurance that her husband’s suspicions of her virtue were unfounded.

But they had been several days out before he had the slightest opportunity to carry out his desire, for Norman and his young bride were inseparable, and so entirely absorbed in each other that they seemed to have neither eyes nor ears for any one else. At length Thea was attacked by the fell demon of seasickness, and was forced to keep her state-room for twenty-four hours, and the first time that Norman came on deck alone the nobleman hastened to speak to him.

It was a most embarrassing moment. Lord Stuart, though he had plenty of nerve and sang-froid, never could recall to himself in exactly what words he had made his peace with the man he had sought to wrong in the long ago. He remembered that it had been uphill work at first, and that it was only when he had frankly told his story and sworn to Camille’s purity that the younger man had taken his hand and forgiven him.

“Camille has been dead two years,” he said. “She had many faults. I thank you for proving her innocent of one;” and he sighed as he thought of the beautiful, erring woman who had loved him so madly, and whose mysterious sin he had punished by putting her away from him forever.

He was half tempted for a moment to confess the truth to Lord Stuart, to tell him of Camille’s terrible sin, and to ask him if he knew what she had in common with Robert Lacy, his dead valet, that she should have murdered him; but a strange reluctance deterred him. Once he had loved Camille, and despite the persecution he had suffered at her hands, he could not bear to utter a harsh word against her now. Believing himself the only person alive who knew of her guilt, he could not betray her now, so he shut his lips over the unspoken words, and so passed the opportunity for a confidence between the two men that might have warded off the bitter sorrow that came to Norman later.

Lord Stuart gazed curiously at him, and the impulse to betray all that he knew of the dead woman passed from his mind.

“He does not suspect her. Why should I speak, now that she is dead and can do no more harm? Let him think as kindly of her as he can,” was his thought; and dismissing Camille from the conversation, he congratulated Norman on the wondrously beautiful bride he had won.

“It is the loveliest face I ever saw, and the complexion is quite English. That pleases me, of course, for, although I admire your American beauties exceedingly, I am quite partial to English red and white,” he added, smiling.

“I am glad that Thea compares favorably with your English beauties,” Norman said, carelessly. “But she is pure American. Her whole life has been spent in Virginia and Florida.”

Then a sudden flush stained his cheek. He remembered suddenly that Thea was at least four years old when he found her, and that those four years of her life were a complete blank to him. From whence she came he had no idea.

But he could not explain this to Lord Stuart. Their slight acquaintance did not warrant such confidence and familiarity. He remained silent a moment, then said, as though in dismissal of the subject:

“My wife has been my ward from her childhood. When I was abroad with my mother she was at school in Virginia.”

CHAPTER XLIX.

Lord Stuart could hardly understand the strange interest he took in Norman de Vere’s lovely young wife. She was beautiful, but he had seen many beautiful women without feeling much interest in them. He was past sixty now, and the interest he took in women was cynical rather than romantic. Since the time when Camille de Vere’s charms had made him a captive for a brief space of time, he had felt no touch of the tender passion.

But the lovely face and dark-blue eyes of Norman de Vere’s girl-bride haunted him with strange persistency, and he caught himself longing to know her, wondering if Norman would present him when Thea came on deck again. He did not dare to ask the favor, remembering that he had not been quite guiltless in the affair with Camille, but had actually wished to part her from her boy-husband, and marry her himself.

It was no such impulse that stirred him now in thinking of the fair young girl who had taken the place of fair but faulty Camille in Norman’s heart. If he had had a daughter, Lord Stuart would have felt much the same toward her as he did toward Thea.

When she came on deck again, her beautiful face a little pale from her experience of seasickness, he was standing near her steamer-chair, and Norman, after a moment’s hesitation, presented him to his wife.

Lord Stuart felt an odd thrill of pleasure when Thea allowed him to touch her dimpled white hand. He pressed it gently, and murmured his pride and pleasure at knowing her, while she responded in shy yet gracious terms.

In truth, the young girl was somehow as much attracted by the old nobleman as he had been by her. There was something so kind and friendly in his glance and smile, and his manners were so genial, that she liked him at once. The two immediately became friends, and whether Norman liked it or not, he gave no sign of displeasure, and resolved not to dampen his darling’s pleasure by telling her of that long-past time when he and Lord Stuart had been the most bitter foes. He murmured to himself:

“The past is in the eternal past,

Our heads will soon lie low, Lorena,

Life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.”

Lord Stuart had been too wise to confess all his folly. Not even Norman would ever know that for a brief while he had adored Camille and hated her boy-husband. Enough to own that they had amused themselves by a flirtation that, while harmless in the eyes of the blasé world, had seemed culpable in the eyes of the hot-headed boy. It was all so long ago that Norman could not refuse to look at it more leniently now—could not throw the shadow of that past across the sunshine of Thea’s present.

Ah, how happy the young bride was in those golden honeymoon days when the blue of the sky was mirrored in the blue of the sea by day, and by night the stars. Although it was February the weather was balmy as May. Nature seemed to smile on Thea. People said afterward that it was a charming voyage, there were so many pleasant people on board, and such a fair young bride, whose handsome husband, the celebrated author, seemed to worship her. Nothing unpleasant occurred during the whole week. The young people were sociable, the elders complaisant. They enlivened the trip by amateur theatricals and Mrs. Jarley’s wax-works. On Sunday they had a sermon in the cabin from an eminent preacher who was bound for the Holy Land, and every day the kindly friendship between the De Veres and Lord Stuart grew more genial. He was determined that they should like him—determined to drive away the bitter memories of the past by more agreeable impressions, and he knew that it was all for the sake of the charming girl in whose voice and smile lurked such a spell of subtle fascination.

“Mrs. de Vere, I want you to know my sister, Lady Moreland,” he said to her on the last day of the voyage. “I think you will like her very much. She is a widow, and she lives with me at my home in Devonshire. When the season in London begins she comes up and occupies my town house and entertains for me.”

“So you have no wife?” Thea said, almost pityingly.

“No; and Edith has no husband. She has been a widow eighteen years.”

“Has she any children?”

“None. We have only each other. We are the last of our family, and, poor girl! she is often lonely, for I am somewhat of a wanderer, and I have been away from her now six months. I wish she would marry again.”

“Do you think she will?” Thea asked him.

“No,” he answered, and a faint sigh escaped him. “Her heart is buried in her husband’s grave.”

Norman came up at that moment, and Lord Stuart said:

“I have been telling Mrs. de Vere about my sister, trying to awaken such an interest in my relative that she will accept an invitation to visit her in May, when she comes up to our London house for the season.”

Norman smiled, and glanced at Thea, whose blue eyes were full of tender interest.

“She is a widow, and her heart is buried in her husband’s grave. Is it not sad?” she said, sweetly.

“You would think so if you knew her,” said Lord Stuart. “She is not forty yet, though she has been a widow eighteen years, and she is lovely still. It is her own fault that she has never married a second time, for she has had many suitors. But she is romantic enough to suit even you, Mrs. de Vere, and I want you to promise me you will visit us in London.”

“I shall be glad,” she answered.

CHAPTER L.

It was in Italy, two months later, that a letter came to the happy bride, reminding her of her promise to go to Lord Stuart’s London house in May.

“My sister has fallen in love with my description of you, Mrs. de Vere, and as she already knows your gifted husband through his clever books, she is most anxious to meet you both, and prides herself on the opportunity of presenting in society this year an author and a beauty. You will not have the heart to disappoint her, I know, so promise us that you will come by the middle of May,” he wrote; and Thea looked questioningly at her husband.

“Shall we go?”

“I thought, my darling, that you had already promised Lord Stuart?”

“So I did—but”—with a swift, passionate glance under the long fringe of her thick lashes—“we have been so happy alone together. Will it be so when we go to London? Will society be as pleasant as this?”

She glanced about her at their pretty private parlor, where they had spent so many happy evenings together, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” then she flung her white arms about his neck and gave him an impulsive kiss.

Norman caught her to his breast in a passionate embrace.

“Oh, my little love, how happy you make me!” he whispered in the deep tones of strong emotion; and for a little while Lord Stuart’s letter was quite forgotten in the love-making that ensued.

When the subject came up again, they decided to accept the invitation.

“I dare say you will enjoy it very much. Beautiful young women always do,” Norman said, smiling. “You will have a chance to air your new Paris dresses that have never been worn yet; and, chère petite, you will need a maid.”

“Oh, dear, no; that will be quite unnecessary,” she protested; but her husband gently but firmly overruled the objections she had always raised to a maid.

“We will set about securing one at once,” he said; and Thea gave way gracefully. Of course he knew best.

A clever, elderly woman was secured, English instead of French, for Norman had always detested French maids since the days of Finette Du Val. With something like a sigh for the past happy days, Thea turned her face to the future, and in a few more days found herself clinging bashfully to her husband’s arm and receiving the cordial greetings of Lord Stuart and his widowed sister in their beautiful home.

She had looked forward with eager interest to the meeting with Lord Stuart’s sister, who had been romantic enough to mourn her dead husband for eighteen years. To the young bride who loved her husband with passionate devotion such constancy appeared most charming. She was quite sure that she should do the same if she were to lose her dear Norman, if indeed she did not die outright of grief.

Poor Thea, poor, happy, loving child! it seemed to her so easy to die if bereft of that which made life worth living. She did not realize the bitter contrasts of life:

“We pray for death,

But death comes not at will.”

She had been so much interested in Lord Stuart’s description of his sister that it did not seem strange to her that she thrilled and trembled when she stood at last in Lady Edith’s presence, and felt the touch of her soft, white hand, and heard her low, sweet voice speaking to her in the kindest accents, as if she quite understood the pretty girlish shyness of her guest.

Thea gained courage from those gentle tones and looked up at Lady Edith.

She saw a woman of medium height and size, exquisitely formed, and with such a lovely, pensive face that it seemed to beguile the young girl’s heart from her breast. Dark-blue eyes, shining chestnut braids, and delicate, high-bred features combined to make the young widow rarely lovely still, though past the prime of youth. Her dress was some soft shining arrangement of black and white, showing that she still wore mourning in a slight degree for her loved and lost. This lovely, winning woman welcomed Thea with a sweet cordiality that made them friends at once.

When the husband and wife had gone to their rooms to dress for dinner, Lady Edith turned to her brother with tears in her lovely eyes.

“How beautiful she is!” she cried. “I am in love with her already. Do you know, brother, that she reminds me strongly of my poor dead Arthur?”

“Is it that?” he exclaimed. “Why, now I know what it is that drew me to Thea de Vere from the first. She has a look of poor Arthur.”

“The same bright smile, and an indefinable something about her whole face and manner,” sighed Lady Edith. She remained quite silent a few moments, then murmured, in a musing tone: “My little darling, if she had lived, would have looked like this young girl—the same blue eyes and dazzling golden curls.”

Meanwhile, Norman de Vere was saying to his fair young bride:

“It will not be necessary, my darling, to confide to these English people the story of your past—that is, of the strange way in which you came into my guardianship.”

“Oh, Norman, are you ashamed of the mystery that surrounds my birth?” she cried, startled.

“Not in the least, my darling wife; but English people of rank lay so much stress upon birth and position, and it would seem strange to them that I could never trace your family. I have told our host that you were my ward from early childhood, and that is enough for any one to know,” said Norman, who had a pride equal to any one’s, only he did not realize it.

Thea had just come in to him from the hands of her maid. She looked lovely in a dinner-dress of blue and white, with ornaments of pearl.

“Sweetheart, how lovely you are, and how young and childish you appear by my side! I hope people will not begin to call you an old man’s darling,” Norman said, drawing her within the circle of his arm before the tall mirror and gazing critically upon the reflection therein—the handsome man in manhood’s early prime, and the lovely golden-haired girl whose head just reached his broad shoulder.

“You shall not call yourself old,” she cried, caressing him in her pretty, tender fashion. “How do you like my Worth dress?” she continued, gayly.

“It is adorable!” he replied; but he was looking at her face, not the dainty creation of blue and white.

“Adorable is not exactly the term to apply to a dress, but I will excuse you, as I know it is becoming, and perhaps that makes me adorable.” Thea laughed saucily; then she pushed her white hand through his arm and drew him to the door.

“Let us go down to the drawing-room,” she said. “I am anxious to meet that sweet lady again. I have fallen in love with her at sight.”

“She is very charming, certainly,” he agreed. Then he laughed. “But I suppose I must not fall in love with her, too, or my little wife will be jealous.”

“Jealous of sweet Lady Edith—no, never!” the girl cried, impulsively, her young heart thrilling with affection for the sweet, pensive-faced woman who but a few hours before had been a stranger to her save in name. But to Thea it almost seemed as if she had known Lady Edith years and years.

CHAPTER LI.

“I am tired, Norman, and my head aches. I will not go to the opera to-night,” Thea said, languidly, laying her flushed face down on her husband’s shoulder.

Three weeks had passed since their coming to London, and Thea had tasted all the sweetness and triumph of a triumphal entrance upon society, which had crowned her in her first week with the laurels of belleship. Her husband’s name was already known in London through his popular books, and the brilliant social world immediately made a pet of his lovely girl-bride. Her sparkling beauty, her naïveté, her frank enjoyment of everything created a decided sensation, and Lady Edith’s daily mail was crowded with invitations for herself and guests.

“I have not gone so much in society for years,” she said, in her sweet, gentle fashion. “But it is a pleasure to chaperon you, my dear, you enjoy it so much, and I receive so many compliments on introducing you.” Then she sighed. “Ah, Thea, I might have been chaperoning a daughter of my own now if she had lived.”

“You had a daughter?” Thea cried, in surprise.

“Yes, a little angel. But she died when she was four years old. Oh, Thea, I can not talk to you of her; it is too painful,” the beautiful woman cried, bursting into tears.

Thea’s heart thrilled with passionate pity and tenderness. She put her arms about the drooping figure, and kissed the tear-wet face, whispering of her love and sympathy, until at last Lady Edith ceased her sobbing and murmured:

“If she had lived, she would have been like you, darling Thea. She had the same blue eyes and curling golden hair. I hope you will come to us some time in Devonshire, and I will show you her portrait.”

That night Thea told her husband of Lady Edith’s sorrow.

“I love her more and more,” she said. “This sorrow draws me nearer to her, because it makes me think of my own dear mother who lost me in my childhood by a fate more sad than death.”

It was not often that Thea referred to the mystery of her past, but of late her thoughts had dwelt more frequently upon it. She wondered if her parents were yet alive—if they missed and mourned the child so strangely lost.

“If I could find my mother, I would like for her to resemble sweet Lady Edith,” she thought sometimes when she found a minute’s quiet in the whirl of gayety in which she was plunged—ball, opera, reception succeeding one another in bewildering rapidity.

But suddenly it all came to an end. In her tulle gowns and bare throat and arms the beautiful girl caught cold in damp, foggy London, and that evening when she laid her fair head on Norman’s shoulder, with the plaintive words, “I am tired—my head aches,” was the beginning of weeks of illness and pain when Thea lay, hot and feverish and sometimes delirious, on her bed, while Lady Edith, giving up society entirely, nursed her with all a mother’s devotion.

When the young wife began to get better the clever physician ordered her husband to take her back to Italy to recuperate.

“She has had quite enough of dancing and flirting and damp, muggy air for the present; now she must have some months of rest and quiet,” he said, in his autocratic way that nobody dreamed of disputing—least of all Norman de Vere, to whom he had revealed a fact that made the strong man’s pulses beat high with joy, while it increased, if possible, his love and devotion for his beautiful bride. The hope that Camille had disappointed long ago was to be realized at last. There would be a child to perpetuate the name of De Vere.

Lady Edith wept quietly at the news.

“It recalls old days to me,” she said, pathetically.

CHAPTER LII.

Norman de Vere lost no time writing his mother the joyful news about Thea. He knew that it would make her very happy.

He was not disappointed, for soon there came a letter from her breathing all her pleasure at the good news, and expressing her hope that they would come home soon, so that she could give her darling Thea a mother’s care.

“I should like to go,” Thea said, thinking longingly of beautiful Verelands. Since she had left London and Lady Edith she had grown homesick.

“Are you tired of Italy?” Norman asked, in some surprise.

“No, I am not tired; only when one is sick one misses home,” she said. “And your dear mother, she must be lonely without us.”

“That is true,” he said, grateful for her thought of his mother. “Well, when you get stronger, darling, we will go home.”

So in six months after their marriage they turned their faces homeward. They stayed two days more in London, for the purpose of bidding Lord Stuart and his sister farewell, and Thea made them promise to visit her the next year. Lady Edith wept at parting, the girl had intwined herself so fondly around her heart.

“But we shall meet again, although I have to cross the seas to find you, my dearest,” she cried, tenderly; and Thea answered, earnestly:

“But for that hope I could not bear to be parted from you.”

She meant every word, for her heart clung with strange tenderness to the gentle, lovely woman, and it was with a bitter pang that she drew herself at last from the tender clasping arms and prepared to go with her husband.

Lord Stuart, too, parted from her with genuine regret.

“It almost seems as if you belonged to us by ties of blood, you have grown so dear,” he said; and he begged Norman to let her accept a parting gift from him—a diamond necklace of great value that had once belonged to his mother.

Norman was touched by the kindness and affection of these new friends, but he did not wonder at it. Thea was so beautiful and winning it would have seemed more strange if they had not loved her, he thought.

But at last they had parted, and the homeward journey was accomplished. Mrs. de Vere had come to New York to meet their steamer. She was too impatient to remain at home.

She showered Thea with caresses and praises.

“You are more lovely than ever,” she said, “and you have made me so happy I have nothing left to wish for in the world.”

They remained in New York several days, and the old lady, in spite of her happiness, did not forget her dead daughter-in-law. She ordered a beautiful bouquet, and drove alone to Greenwood to lay it on Camille’s grave.

“I would have gone with you if I had known,” Thea said, when she told her where she had been.

“I would have asked you, dear, only I knew Norman would not like it.”

“Not like it? But will he not go there himself?” Thea asked, a slight flush rising to her fair brow.

“No; I do not believe that he will. He was most unreasonably harsh toward poor Camille. They were separated through his jealousy, you know, dear, and no harm was ever really proved against her, but he never forgave her—does not even forgive her in her grave, I fear. But there, I ought not to be talking with you, child, about Norman’s first wife. He would not like it, I am sure, so do not tell him I went to Camille’s grave. Poor soul! I could not slight her memory.”

“You were fond of her?” Thea asked, timidly.

“Yes; but not so much as I am of you, Sweetheart. She was a little strange at times, and so fond of Norman that I fancy she was jealous even of his love for his mother. But naturally I forgave her that. I think if Heaven had blessed her as it has you, dear, that no trouble would have come between them. But it chafed her that no child came, and she threw herself into the whirl of society. She was too fond of admiration. My dear, never forget that your husband is a passionately jealous man. Never trifle with his heart.”

“I will not,” Thea promised; and after the old lady went out she sat a long time thinking compassionately of the woman who had been Norman’s wife long years ago, and who now lay dead, so bitterly hated still that he would not visit her grave.

Norman had gone to see his publisher about a book he was just bringing out, so Thea had several hours of solitude in which to brood over what her mother-in-law had most unwisely told her. She could not help feeling sad over it.

“I can not bear to think that my darling husband was hard and unjust to that dead woman. He seems to me so good and noble and tender that I can not realize him otherwise. But it must have been that jealousy drove him mad,” she sighed; and into her young heart came the most intense pity for Camille, whom he had put away so cruelly out of his heart and life.

“And she lived under that heavy cross for years. How did she bear it? If it had been me, I should have died, I think, in the very hour of our parting,” sighed Thea, who fancied that any great grief had power to kill.

She did not tell her husband that his mother had carried flowers to his wife’s grave, but she never forgot it. It kept Camille’s memory alive in her thoughts; it invested it with a certain tender and sacred air. She grew to look at the subject as her mother-in-law had represented it to her, deeming Camille little less than a martyr.

They went home the next day, and Thea was so weary from her long journey that she was ill for several days. The old doctor shook his wise head, and declared that she must be kept very quiet this fall—she would not be able to bear any great bustle or excitement.

So several months passed away quietly but happily at Verelands. Norman was utterly devoted to his young wife—utterly happy in her love, that was so true and steadfast, not stormy and capricious as Camille’s had been. He felt that he had never known happiness before in its truest sense.

One of the things that consoled Thea most when she returned home was to hear that Cameron Bentley had engaged himself to Miss Faris, the New York beauty. She did not know that it had been done through pique, not love, to make the world think he had got over the past.

When Nellie, who had been faithful to Thea through everything, came to see her, she told her that Cameron was spending the winter in New York to be near his lady-love.

“He is quite ashamed now of his attempt at suicide, and will stay away from Jacksonville until people begin to forget it,” his sister said, frankly.

But when Diana came she was more reserved, and did not mention her brother. She held a secret resentment against Thea, not only because, as she phrased it, she had “made a fool of Cam,” but because she had married Norman de Vere, the man on whom she had set her heart.

But beautiful Sweetheart, unconscious of the ill-will of any one on earth, was the happiest wife in the world—and very soon the happiest mother, for when the church-bells rang on Christmas morning Norman held in his arms his Christmas gift—a beautiful baby—his blue-eyed son.

CHAPTER LIII.

“Baby darling, you are one year old to-day, and only see what Santa Claus has brought you—gifts splendid enough for a little prince!” cried Thea, kneeling down on the nursery floor in her white cashmere morning-dress, to clasp the little toddling boy in her eager arms.

He sprung eagerly to her breast, and when Norman de Vere entered a minute later, he found them thus—Thea on a rug upon the floor, her little son in her arms, their faces so close together that the rich gold of her curls blended with the fairer gold of the baby’s lying in silken curls all over his shapely head. The child’s beauty was cherubic, and while he had hair and eyes like his mother, he had the proud De Vere features, making him strangely like his father in spite of the fact that his eyes were blue, his hair golden, and his skin the loveliest white and red. Alan Arthur they had named him—the Alan for Norman’s father, the brave soldier who had died in battle, and the Arthur was for Lady Edith’s dead husband. She had written and asked that his second name should be Arthur, and promised to come to the christening of the child, but the sudden illness of her brother had prevented the journey, and she had not come yet, although her husband’s namesake was a year old. But she had not forgotten, and many rich gifts had come across the sea to her husband’s namesake from both her and Lord Stuart.

Thea was right in thinking that her boy had gifts splendid enough for a prince, for the Christmas-tree standing over against the window was laden with costly things enough to gladden the heart of a little king. Many had come from friends in the city and many from across the sea. It made the girlish mother very proud and happy to know that her boy was held in so much esteem, and as she clasped and kissed him she whispered to him in the most approved baby-talk, that it was no wonder people fell in love with him—he was so sweet and lovely they simply could not help it.

Norman laughed gayly at her maternal vanity, as he knelt down and took mother and child into his strong, loving embrace, and so his mother found them when she, too, came in to see how Master Alan liked his Christmas-tree.

Baby did not know how to appreciate anything yet. When they put anything into his dimpled little hands, he poked it into his mouth like a little pig. Thea vowed in despair that he would have to be quite five years old before she could allow him to have half of his beautiful playthings, lest he should choke himself to death.

“How strange, dear, it seems to see your child sitting there with its toys at play,” cried grandmamma, smilingly. “Why, it seems but yesterday that you were a child at play yourself, and Norman bringing you new toys every day. On a shelf in my closet now there is a great box of your broken dolls and playthings.”

“Oh, I must look at them some time,” Thea cried, with almost childish delight at the thought; and the very next day she had her maid lug in the big box to her room and leave it on the floor. Alan was out in the grounds with his nurse, Norman was at his desk in the library, Mrs. de Vere was directing the maids about some housework. Thea thought it would be a good time to look over the store of toys Norman had given her. Norman—yes, that was the charm—had loved her in her innocent childhood—had selected these toys for her with his own hands. There was a thought of him in every headless doll, every piece of battered doll furniture, every dog’s-eared book with gayly painted pictures, and the fond heart thrilled with tender thoughts of him.

“My own, own love, my darling who loves me so!” murmured the beautiful red lips; and pausing for a moment in a happy dream, she absently turned the leaves of a torn picture-book.

Ah, what was that that fell out from between the leaves?—a crumpled letter, a little pair of stub-pointed scissors.

Thea started, and a strange light came into her eyes.

As though she had held the book of her life in her hands and the warm leaves had fluttered apart at the opening pages, the past had rushed over her mind, so slight are the tokens needed to revive a sleeping memory.

Thea felt herself again a child, so vivid was her recollection of the moment when she had picked up from the floor the crumpled letter Norman had cast aside, and hidden it with the scissors in the book for future clipping. Then, child-like, she had forgotten all about it.

“What is it, anyway?” she thought, idly straightening the sheet out on her knee and regarding the delicate feminine letters with curious eyes.

No thought came to the happy young wife that it could be wrong to read the letter tossed aside so carelessly and forgotten so long. She saw that the heading was simply “My husband,” but for the moment no thought came to her of Norman’s first wife. She had read more than half, before, with a startled cry, she glanced at the end of the letter and read there the name Camille.

But she could not pause now. She read on with dilated eyes until she had mastered the whole of Camille’s cruel defiance. Her jealous, angry spirit had not spared her husband the bitterest taunts. Let him but dare, she wrote, institute proceedings for a divorce, and she would tell the whole world what a monster he was, bringing under her roof his illegitimate child and trying to deceive her and the world with the story that it was a stranger whom he had saved in a railway wreck.

CHAPTER LIV.

Thea sat staring at that cruel letter like one dazed. Her cheeks went pale, then crimson, with an overpowering sense of shame.

Hitherto she had cherished a profound pity for the unhappy woman who, having been fortunate enough to win Norman de Vere’s heart, had been too weak to hold it; now, a burning indignation against the dead woman heaved in her breast. How had she dared wound him with that false and hateful accusation—he, her hero, her king?

“Oh, my love, my darling, you bore this for my sake! I understand now why there was no divorce,” she murmured; and her beautiful eyes filled with tears—the hot tears of a woman’s love and sorrow—although she looked scarcely more than a child sitting there with the box of toys, her long curls, still worn child-fashion, falling about her shoulders like a veil of sunshine.

“How could she wound him so?” the young wife sobbed, in bitterest indignation. “She did not love him; hers was a selfish passion—not true, self-sacrificing love. Ah! now I no longer pity her. She was not worthy of my Norman. Oh, Heaven help us—my child and me—to make him so happy that he will wholly forget her and the cruel stabs she dealt his generous nature.”

There came a light tap upon the door. It was her mother-in-law’s light step outside.

Thea pushed the old letter under the full draperies of her dress, and called out:

“Come in.”

Mrs. de Vere’s sweet old face, framed in waves of snowy hair, took on an expression of solicitude as she saw Thea’s tear-wet face.

“Oh, my dear! what is it?” Then, as she saw the scattered toys: “What, you have been weeping over the old playthings? Would you like to be a child again, my daughter?”

“No, no; it is not that, dear mother!” Thea cried, hastily. She stood a moment irresolute, with her little hand under the folds of her dress; then, going closer to Mrs. de Vere, she said, faintly: “I will tell you the truth. While looking through my old picture-books I came across a letter that I found on the floor and put away in my childish days—to destroy, I suppose, as my little scissors were with it. Then I must have forgotten it, and it remained there until now, when I read it, and—and—it gave me the—heartache,” sighing.

“A letter?” Mrs. de Vere said, uncomprehendingly.

“Here it is; but I suppose you read it long ago, mother;” and Thea put the letter in her mother-in-law’s hand, and turning away began to walk nervously up and down the floor.

Mrs. de Vere read it, and the past rushed over her mind.

“I remember this,” she said. “Norman was so angry he threw it down upon the floor. When we looked for it we thought you had cut it up, there were so many bits of paper on the floor.”

“I think I cut the envelope into paper dolls,” said Thea.

“I wish it had been the letter,” sighed the old lady.

“It was true, then? My husband’s first wife was wicked enough to doubt her husband’s honor,” Thea cried, vehemently.

“She was unreasonably jealous, dear. Judge her as lightly as you can. She is not here to defend herself,” the old lady said, solemnly; then added: “Let me destroy the letter, Sweetheart. I should not like for my son to see it again, or even to know of your reading it.”

Thea paused in her restless walk, and dashing the tears from her eyes, cried, pleadingly:

“Only tell me this: was that the reason why I was sent away from Verelands in my childhood to be reared by strangers?”

“Yes, that was the reason,” reluctantly. “Norman feared that his wife’s malice might cast a blot on your future if we kept you. You are not angry with him, dear?”

“It is the only grudge I ever had against my husband, and now that I understand, I love him more devotedly than ever.”

“That is right. He is worthy of it all, dear. He worships you and your child, Thea.”

“I know—Heaven bless him and make us always worthy of his devotion,” she answered, with a sort of solemnity; then, clasping her jeweled hands together, she cried, feverishly: “Oh, I would give the world to find out my origin, just for my dear husband’s sake!”

“Try to be content. He could not love you more if you were a king’s daughter, my child, nor less if you belonged to the most lowly family.”

Thea sighed, for she knew that her husband was keenly sensitive to the mystery of her origin. She remembered that he did not care for strangers to know her story.

“And now,” she thought, sadly, “he will be more sensitive than ever for the sake of our little child. It was noble in him to marry me and lift me to his own proud position in life, and I wish he could be rewarded by finding out that I belong to a family equal to his own.”

“Now dry your eyes, my dear, and do not suffer yourself to brood over this discovery that you have made,” Mrs. de Vere cried, soothingly. “After all, it is so far back in the past that it can trouble Norman no more. He has doubtless forgotten all about it; and though he was very unhappy for a time, that is all over now, and you have made up for it all by your love.”

“If I did not believe that, I should almost die of despair!” Thea cried, with a sort of hysterical excitement; and she mentally resolved that she would try to make Norman forget all the sadness of his past in the sunshine of her love.

“He may have loved her well, but he loves me, too, and I have one more claim upon his heart—I have borne him a beautiful child,” she thought, triumphantly; and so she washed away the bitter stains of tears from her cheeks and made herself as lovely as possible in her eager desire to make up to Norman for the sadness of his past.

CHAPTER LV.

“There is something wrong about the publication of my new book, dear, and my publisher has telegraphed me to come immediately to New York,” Norman said the next day to his wife, handing her the telegram to read.

“Must you go?”

“I suppose so. Can you come with me?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Thea, my love!” remonstrated Mrs. de Vere, who was at the window in an easy-chair knitting silken hose for Master Alan.

Thea looked at her in some surprise.

“Why not, mother?” she asked.

“You forget how cold it is at the North now. How could you take your nursing baby there?” said grandmamma.

“That is true. I did not think,” Thea cried, penitently, then her smile faded. “But how could I let Norman go without me?”

“And how could I leave you?” cried the lover-husband, fondly; and the dark eyes dwelt on the blue ones with passionate tenderness.

“Alan takes precedence of everybody else,” grandmamma announced, peremptorily.

“Leave him at home with a wet-nurse,” said Norman.

“Oh, I couldn’t! What, be parted from my darling! It would break his little heart,” cried the young mother; and after an excited discussion and floods of tears Master Alan’s interests won the day against his loving parents. Thea, frightened by the idea of croup, dared not take her darling from his Southern home to the wintery North, and could not bear to leave him behind. So Norman must go alone—the first parting from his wife since their marriage.

“It will break my heart!” Thea cried, forlornly. “I hate that publishing. Why should he drag you away from your home just now, and Christmas barely over. You will not get home before New Year’s.”

“I am afraid I can not, but I will not stay a week if I can help it. Try to be as happy as you can, my darling, without me,” he said, folding her closely to his heart, with bitter reluctance to leave her even for an hour, so dear had she grown.

But the summons was imperative. A few hours more and he was on his way, leaving behind him a weeping little wife who felt indeed as if she were heart-broken. But for Baby Alan she must have been inconsolable. A heavy cloud had settled on her spirits, and for the remainder of the day she moped miserably about the house. As evening fell the gloom became almost insupportable.

“How sad and dreary everything seems without him!” sighed the devoted young wife; and she took refuge in the nursery with her child, giving leave to the nurse to attend a negro dance in the neighborhood with the other servants.

“My little darling, you may be just as cross and naughty as you please. The more trouble I have with you, the less time I shall have to think of your dear absent papa,” she cried, as she hung over the lace-draped crib where he lay, so bright, so beautiful, that she covered his sweet, laughing face with eager kisses.

But just because she wanted something to distract her thoughts, Alan was on his good behavior. He responded sleepily to her fond blandishments, and shut his white lids fast in happy slumber just before his fond grandmamma came tiptoeing in for a good-night kiss.

“Little darling, how sweet and lovely he is!” she cried, kissing his dimpled white fists. “Are you going to sit up for the nurse, Thea?”

“Perhaps—I don’t know. But there—of course not; it will be too late. I shall just take baby to bed with me,” Thea answered, with an irrepressible sigh.

“I wish now that you had kept nurse home. I have been sent for to see a dying woman to-night. But of course I shall not go till the servants come back; I could not leave you all alone.”

“A dying woman?”

“Yes; a poor negro girl who was chamber-maid at Verelands for many years. She sent a boy here just now to ask me to come—said she had a dying confession to make to me, although I can’t guess what Nance can have to say to me. She never had any secrets that I know of—certainly none that could interest me.”

“But she will be looking for you. It is dreadful to disappoint a dying person—even a poor negro,” Thea said, with a sort of awe, and added: “I—I—wish now we had not let our maids go to that concert to-night. We should not then have been so utterly alone, but”—with a slight shudder—“go, dear mother. I will stay alone. I will have Alan, my little man, for company.”

“Leave you alone here? No, indeed, although of course you would be safe enough. I have been at Verelands alone many a time at night. But it would be too lonely for you, my dear, and Norman would not like it if I left you here,” cried the kind old lady whose standard of right was almost wholly what Norman liked or disliked. Yet she was most anxious to go to Nance, having a keen, womanly curiosity over what the woman had to confess.

But she was too loyal to Thea to even desire to gratify her curiosity at the expense of the girl’s comfort. She turned toward the door, saying, mildly:

“I will go and tell the boy he must go and bring Nurse Mary from the dance to stay with you, then I will go to Nance just for a few minutes, if you do not mind, dear.”

But Thea was marshaling all her courage to the rescue.

“There would be so much time wasted waiting here for Mary to come, and if the woman is dying, there is not a minute to lose,” she said. “Mother, put on your bonnet and go with the boy, and you can send Mary to me as you go along. It is not quite a mile, I think. I can stay alone that little while.”

“You would really not be afraid, my dear?”

“Certainly not. But if I should feel lonely, I can wake baby and play with him.”

“That would spoil him, and he would expect it to-morrow night,” said oracular grandmamma.

“I will read, then,” said Thea.

She recommenced her persuasions, and as a result she presently had the old lady going docilely away with the messenger to poor Nance’s bedside, leaving her locked securely into the large, lonely house, its only occupant save the tiny sleeping babe.

Thea quickly came back along the silent hall and shut herself into the nursery.

“I hope nurse will not be long,” she murmured, beginning to walk restlessly up and down the floor. “Of course, I am not exactly afraid, but it seems so very still and lonely, and—I miss Norman so very much. I wonder how far he is on his way by now? It is just seven hours and a half since he went. Baby, baby, I wish you would wake up and talk to me! Of course, you couldn’t say anything but papa and mamma and gee-gee and boo, but even that would be cheering now.”

She leaned over the foot of the crib and pinched one of Alan’s soft, rosy toes, eager for him to wake, and even scream if he chose.

“I certainly am not afraid, but I feel foolishly nervous and blue. I wish nurse would hurry. What can that dying woman want with mother? Ugh! it makes one shiver to think of death in this great, lonely house; but there is nothing to harm one here—nothing.” Yet she grew pale as a mouse nibbled behind the wainscot, and cried out: “Oh, how can Alan sleep so when I pull his toes so hard? Can it be that Mary dosed him with paregoric to make him rest while she was gone? Oh, I almost wish he would wake and scream with the colic! It would be better than this.”

But Alan only kicked when she pinched his toes, and slept on more soundly than ever, confirming her in her theory of the paregoric.

“I’ll discharge her to-morrow,” Thea thought, indignantly, throwing herself into a chair. “Oh, I won’t be so nervous and silly,” she went on, vexedly. “I know there’s nothing to make cold chills run down my back this way. I’ll think about something pleasant—about Norman. I’ll compose some poetry on his absence.”

She flung herself into a chair at a little table where there was a pencil and a pad of writing-paper, and putting her golden head on one side with a pretty, bird-like motion, began to think in rhyme:

“’Tis midnight, my darling—the house is so lonely.”

“If it is not midnight, it might almost be, it is so dismal,” soliloquized Thea, with a sigh, as she jotted down the first line and proceeded:

“All, all are asleep but me.

I waken to weep—”

“That is not very accurate, as I have not been asleep yet, but it is poetical license,” murmured Thea, as she scribbled some more words:

—“Ah, beloved, if only,

If only I were with thee!”

The tears rushed to the blue eyes, and a smothered sob came from her throat, so passionately real was her aspiration. A moment’s pause, and the little pencil went on:

“But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,

The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay!

Come back to me, my darling, my eager heart cries,

And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”

“The last four lines are true, anyhow,” sobbed Thea, forlornly. She laid her fair head down on the table a moment in silence, thinking surely it must be time for the nurse now, although barely fifteen minutes have elapsed since she had been left alone.

But no sound broke the stillness, save the torturing gnawing of a miserable mouse in the wainscot, and Thea’s mind wandered a minute from her own poor attempt at poetry to the glorious laureate:

“All day within the dreary house

The doors upon their hinges creaked;

The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

Behind the moldering wainscot shrieked,

Or from the crevice peered about.

Old faces glimmered through the doors,

Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

Old voices called her from without,

She only said: ‘My life is dreary,’

‘He cometh not,’ she said.”

Thea lifted her head, shook the golden curls back from her face, and sighed.

“I wish those terribly real lines had not come to my mind just now. ‘Old faces!’ What if they were to glimmer through that door now? That dying woman, Nance, she used to be here. What if her departing spirit chose to haunt the scene of its former life by ghostly rappings such as I have heard the old Virginia darkies whisper about in twilight hours? Ugh!” shuddering, “that dead woman, too—Norman’s first wife, who hated me so bitterly in my childhood—I hope her phantom footsteps will never tread these ‘upper floors.’ I am afraid of ‘old voices’ and ‘old footsteps’ to-night. I never was so nervous in all my life before. I can’t finish my verses with those cold chills running down my spine and my curls rising on end with terror that has no reason for it.”

She thrust the scribbled lines carelessly into a drawer of the table, and running to the crib, laid her pale, cold cheek down by the warm, rosy baby one, shutting her eyes and whimpering, distressfully:

“Alan, Alan, wake, dear, and protect your poor silly little mamma. I am frightened, but I do not know why. Surely there is nothing near to harm me, and nurse must surely be coming in a minute—Ah!” with sudden gladness, “I hear her now.”

CHAPTER LVI.

It was quite true that a footstep had paused outside the nursery-door. Thea’s quick ear had detected it, and she waited eagerly for the entrance of the nurse, as she supposed it to be, but a hand turned the knob, and as the door swung lightly ajar two women crossed the threshold and advanced into the room.

Thea turned her face listlessly a moment on the pillow and stared at the intruders, then sprung to her feet with a startled cry.

The nurse had not returned. Two strange white faces were there instead of Mary’s familiar black one. Their eyes swept Thea’s face and the room with a sort of insolent contempt.

A thrill of indescribable terror went through the girl’s supple frame, and just then the foremost woman spoke. She pointed a slender gloved hand at the crib, and asked, sharply, angrily:

“Whose child is that?”

“It is mine,” Thea answered, with such pride in her tone and cresting her golden head with so queenly an air that the woman lifted her hand with a gesture of threatening, as if to strike her down at her feet.

Thea saw it, but she did not falter. A sudden courage had come to her in this moment which she subtly felt to be full of some unexplained peril to herself.

She gazed fixedly at the foremost woman, a tall, graceful creature, clothed in soft, lusterless silk, with a bonnet of shining jet set lightly on a head of beautiful wavy red hair. The handsome face beneath was no longer young, but Thea thought it looked like the faces of women she had seen in Paris, enameled and made up to be beautiful forever by the artistes in that profession. But the great reddish-hazel eyes had a fire all their own, and they glared upon the beautiful young wife as if they would destroy her with their baleful light.

“The child is yours?” she uttered, in a low and hissing voice. “And you?”

“I am Mrs. de Vere,” was the proud reply.

“Norman de Vere’s wife?”

“Yes.”

The handsome, stately woman threw back her haughty head with an insolent movement that made the jets in her bonnet glitter.

“Ha! ha!” she laughed, scornfully; and the creature behind her, yellow-faced and with beady black eyes, evidently her maid, echoed her insolent mirth: “Ha! ha!”

Thea’s lovely face crimsoned with anger, and she asked, haughtily:

“Who are you, madame, and why have you entered my house in this bold manner?”

The woman came a step nearer, and held out to her a slip of cardboard.

“Read!” she said, imperatively; and, without touching it, Thea obeyed. On the white card was written, in the same small, feminine characters as the letter she had found among her toys but yesterday, a name:

“CAMILLE DE VERE.”

One moment Thea gazed in awful, statue-like quiet at the fatal card, then, with a cry of fear, she fled toward Alan’s crib for protection. She believed that she was gazing upon a ghost.

But how horribly real it all seemed—the two women, their faces, their voices. A shuddering horror overpowered her, and with the echo of her startled cry in their ears they saw her slip down senseless at their feet.

But baby Alan slept on peacefully in the soft, downy nest, his round cheeks softly flushed, the gold rings lying in shining disorder on the noble white brow, heedless of the hapless mother lying there upon the floor a crumpled heap of pale-blue cashmere and golden curls while her enemies bent gloatingly above her, noting with fierce loathing every young and tender charm.

“I could kill her, Finette,” Camille breathed fiercely, her fingers working with convulsive eagerness, her throat swelling.

“Hush, miladi! Life will be more cruel to her than death. And how young she is! Think how long she will have to live to bear her deep disgrace!”

She unstoppered the silver vinaigrette that swung from her belt, and held it to Thea’s nostrils. A minute more and the girl sighed faintly, then the blue eyes flared wide open upon Finette’s curious face.

“You are better, miss?” she cried, pertly. “Oh, no; don’t faint again. You took us for ghosts, I know, but that was a mistake. There’s been several mistakes, you see, and one of them was made by Mr. Norman de Vere when he thought his first wife was dead and took a second.”

Thea lay there, too dazed and weak to lift a finger, her blue eyes fixed intently on the woman’s malicious face. Over her shoulder she could see the face of the scornful woman who claimed to be Camille de Vere.

“Hush, Finette; you forestall my triumph!” cried that derisive voice. Her hazel eyes blazed. “Listen, you nameless foundling!” she went on, sharply, her very voice a sword. “I am Camille de Vere, Norman de Vere’s legal wife. I was never dead, as he believed. It was a plot to deceive him that I might punish him for all I suffered at his hands. Well, I am avenged! You, girl, have never been his wife for an hour, and that child there—ha! ha! ha!—is illegitimate!”

Those words—those bitter, taunting words—seemed to sting Thea into new life. She sprung unsteadily to her feet, and leaning over the crib, flung one arm protectingly about her son, and lifted her face, deathly white, but all alive and quivering with the blue fire of her eyes, to the face of her foe.

“You speak falsely!” she cried, with passionate indignation. “You are an impostor, and I command you to leave the house at once!”

Camilla laughed in cool derision.

“It is you who will have to go. I have come to stay,” she said. “Finette, go prepare my old rooms for me, while I talk to this creature who has usurped my place almost two years. When I have finished explaining matters to her, I think she will be glad to take her illegitimate child in her arms and go and hide their shame in the river.”

CHAPTER LVII.

Finette Du Val did not take kindly to the command of her mistress that she should leave the room. She had counted on the rare treat to her malicious mind of seeing Norman de Vere’s two wives pitted against each other in deadly warfare.

So when Camille bid her go and prepare her rooms, she stood silently and pretended not to hear.

Camille waited a moment, then turned on her furiously and repeated the command, adding, stormily:

“How dare you pretend not to hear? Go this instant!”

Finette frowned, but she went—went outside the door at least, and leaving it just the least bit ajar, knelt down and peeped through the crevice she had thus made.

Then Camille turned back to the girl she hated, crying, with blazing eyes:

“Perhaps you think my husband married you for love, girl?”

Thea had sunk helplessly into a low chair beside the baby. She did not know whether the woman before her was Norman’s first wife or not, and she did not know how to get rid of her, but she hoped that the nurse would come in at any minute and then she could send for her mother-in-law. She determined not to bandy words with the angry creature.

Lifting her golden head with a proud air that belied the terrible sinking at her heart, she said, defiantly:

“Madame, you have forced yourself into Verelands without an invitation, and you persist in remaining against my command that you go. Therefore you can not expect to be treated with the courtesy due to a welcome guest. I decline, therefore, to reply to any questions you may impertinently ask, and from this moment ignore your undesired presence.”

“Ma foi! but that was queenly,” muttered the eavesdropper at the door, forced into unwilling recognition of the young wife’s dignity.

Camille drew her breath hard. She realized, too, that Thea had the advantage of her; but after a moment she gave vent to a forced laugh.

“Oh, very well; sit there dumb, if you choose,” she said, airily. “Your silence will in nowise alter the unpleasant facts I am here to tell you.”

Thea did not answer—did not deign to look at her. She sat silent and pale, her blue eyes resting on Alan’s lovely, sleeping face, one slender hand—the one that wore the wedding-ring—wandering softly through the golden rings of baby’s hair. She was saying to herself over and over that it was all a lie—the woman was an impostor, bent most probably on blackmail. She had read of such things in sensational newspapers.

Camille resumed, angrily:

“As I was saying, you imagine that my husband married you for love. You never made a worse mistake in your life. He gave you the shelter of his name to save you from disgrace, because that old scandal of long ago had cropped up and was in everybody’s mouth. If he had not married you when he did, and so given the lie to that report, the people who had been kind enough to notice you at first would have given you the cold shoulder very soon, because it had come to be believed that you were Norman de Vere’s illegitimate child.”

She saw Thea start as if she had stabbed her to the heart; but the pale, tightly shut lips did not open to utter a word. The girl was proud enough, if need be, to die of her inward wound in silence.

Camille laughed mockingly as she saw what a wound she had given her foe, and resumed:

“He did not tell you the truth, of course; he pitied you too much; but it was hard for him to give up his attitude of brother and guardian to you and make you his wife to satisfy a carping world. It would have pleased him better if you had married Cameron Bentley. But the Bentleys were too proud; they informed him frankly that their son could never address you on that subject until he brought proof of your parentage and refuted the slander against you. Already it was working in people’s minds. Miss Faris and many others sent regrets for your coming-out ball, because they did not choose to associate with you. The suspicion that had caused Norman de Vere’s wife to leave him had taken root in the minds of others, too. To save himself he would not have made the sacrifice he did; but to save you, feeling that you had a claim on his pity, he married you. But he never loved you—never—save as one loves a pretty child or a favorite sister. All the love he was capable of he lavished on me. When I left him, I believe his heart died.”

She stopped with a sort of hysteric gasp; but the silent, statue-like form before her made no sign, although every bitter word had sunk into her heart.

Camille could not tell how deeply she had hurt her victim, so quiet was Thea under the rain of bitter words, but she went on angrily, scathingly:

“Perhaps you do not believe me. Very well, ask others. Ask Mrs. Bentley if she ever heard a word of Norman’s marrying you until immediately after the embarrassing affair of her son. Ask your mother-in-law the same. Ask Norman himself. Why, if he ever had a thought of courting any one after my supposed death, it was Diana Bentley, who is much more suitable to him than a girl like you, young enough to be his daughter.”

“While you, madame,” muttered the unsuspected listener at the door, “are almost old enough to be his mother.”

Camille remembered it but too well, and the sting of her deadly hate went all the deeper for that.

How dared the girl yonder be so young, so happy, filling her old place in Norman’s heart, the mother of his beautiful child, while she, growing old ungracefully, painted, made up by art, was remembered only with scorn and loathing.

“Well, I have come to take my revenge at last,” she went on. “I knew when he married you, but I also knew he did not love you. I waited my time to strike. I thought he might learn to love you a little, especially if you bore him a child. Perhaps he did, men are such fools. So now I can wound him worse by the child’s illegitimacy than by your dishonor.”

How gloatingly the words rolled off the painted lips, how exultantly the hazel eyes flashed! But Thea did not look at her, although her heart quailed before the horror of what she had heard.

“My God, can this horrible thing be true?” she asked herself, in dumb agony; and the heavy eyes fixed on the child’s sleeping face seemed to see in fancy on the smooth white brow the dark brand of a terrible dishonor.

It was too much. She could not maintain the icy front of scorn and incredulity she was trying to wear before her bitter foe. She knew that her lips were writhing with pain, and suddenly dropped her face down upon the arm that was outstretched toward the child. The quick movement sent all her beautiful veil of golden hair like a mantle over the graceful, slender form, as if trying to hide her from the angry, burning gaze of Camille, who laughed in insolent triumph when she realized her victory.

“You begin to realize the truth—ha! ha!” she cried. “Ah! now I am repaid for all my scheming and plotting. You are in my power at last. Do you know what pains I took to get you there? I sent a fraudulent telegram to Norman de Vere, and got him out of the way. I sent that message to Mrs. de Vere from Nance, who is no more dying than you are, but your credulous mother-in-law is locked up tight and fast in a negro cabin, from which she will not escape while you remain at Verelands. Of course that will not be long. Your pride will not permit you to remain here to meet my husband when he returns to find that I am alive. Were I in your place, I would take my child in my arms and seek refuge from my deep disgrace in the river.”

She hoped that Thea would take her at her word. It would be a glorious revenge upon the man who had put her away from him with such scathing scorn, but Thea did not answer her. She remained silent, with her convulsed face hidden on her arm.

“You have no right in this house—neither you nor the child—and I command you to go away at once—at once! You hear? I have come to stay, and it would not be pleasant to my husband to return and find his two wives under the same roof. I am going to my rooms now. When I come down-stairs in the morning, I hope that I shall find you gone peaceably away. If you are still here, I shall thrust you forth with my own hands!” stormed the heartless woman; but as she elicited no answer from Thea she turned away after one scathing look of unquenchable hate, and left the room, stumbling over Finette in the hall, and immediately flying into a gust of passion at her disobedience.

“Miladi, I think you ought to try to keep the one friend you have left,” the woman answered, sullenly. “You need not think you will conquer that young girl easily. She has ten times the dignity that you have. She heard all those cruel things with the silence and dignity of a dethroned queen. It is no wonder Mr. de Vere loves her. I think if her parentage could be traced it would be found she had descended from noble blood. I dare say she is kinder to her servants than you to yours. Oh, you don’t like for me to praise her? Well, then, don’t be so ready with your ill words if you don’t want me to turn traitor.”

CHAPTER LVIII.

Norman de Vere had two surprises when he arrived at New York.

The first one was that he found out that there was an unexplainable mystery about the telegram he had received summoning him to a conference with his publisher over his new book. None had been sent, and the book was going on all right.

The second was that he met at his hotel Lord Stuart and his sister, who had arrived only the day before from England.

“We were on our way to Jacksonville to surprise you,” they said; and when he explained what had brought him to New York, they agreed with him that it was very strange.

“It does not appear to have been simply a mistake—it is too pointed. It seems like a practical joke, and a most cruel one,” Norman said, with bitter anger, thinking how hard it had been for him to part with his beautiful young wife.

A fierce resentment arose within him against the author of the cruel joke, and he resolved that the guilty party should be well punished if ever found out.

“It is all the more annoying to me that Sweetheart was so unwilling that I should come,” he said; and lovely Lady Edith gave a violent start, and echoed, with paling lips:

“Sweetheart!”

“It is my pet name for my wife,” Norman explained, flushing slightly, and she answered, more calmly:

“Ah, yes!”

But the fair face had grown paler than usual, and there was a shadow of pain in the sweet blue eyes. To herself she murmured, sorrowfully:

“Sweetheart! How the word carried me back to the past. Oh, my little one, my baby angel, how my heart yearns for you still.”

Norman resumed, hastily:

“Within an hour I shall start on my return South. I am most restless and uneasy. A foreboding of evil haunts me, and I shall not feel satisfied until I am at Verelands and find my dear ones safe and well. May I hope that you will bear me company on my journey?”

Lady Edith looked very eager, but her brother was compelled to own that he was too weary from the tempestuous ocean voyage they had had to start for the South yet. He had been severely ill some months ago, and had never quite recovered his strength since. He thought it was best for him to remain in New York to rest a few days.

“If Edith’s impatience to see Mrs. de Vere will brook the delay,” he said, with an affectionate glance at the young widow.

“I will wait for you, of course, dear brother,” she said with sweet patience; and after Norman had reiterated many times the pleasure with which they would be received at Verelands, he was compelled to say good-bye and leave them.

“Be sure to keep our coming a profound secret from your sweet Thea. I want to surprise the darling,” Lady Edith cried, gayly; and Norman promised not to tell.

After he had gone, Lord Stuart and his sister talked of him some time. Lady Edith thought him one of the grandest men she had ever met, and her brother agreed with her fully. They talked over the story of his early life which Lord Stuart had confided to her in the most of its details, and both rejoiced that success and happiness had come to him at last.

“No one has deserved it more,” said Lord Stuart, doing justice at last to the man whom he had once despised and underrated, and sincerely glad that Norman had found so lovely and loving a bride to make up to him for the sorrows the capricious and guilty Camille had brought upon his life.

Lady Edith felt that three days would be long to linger in New York, when she was so eager to meet again the winning girl who had stolen into her inmost heart, and whose little child bore the name of the dead husband she had loved so dearly; but she did not utter her impatience aloud.

She had a sweet and docile nature that clung most tenderly to her elder brother in his weakness, and not for worlds would she have hinted to him that she was impatient at their enforced delay on account of his weariness.

It seemed strange to her at times that her heart dwelt so devotedly on the lovely girl-wife, but when she questioned herself for the reason, she said to herself that it was partly because of the girl’s wonderful grace and charm, and half because of the strange chance likeness to the baronet, her dead husband. He had been a blonde, with hair almost as golden as Thea de Vere’s, and eyes of deepest violet. His early death and the long, long illness of Lady Edith that followed it had left ineffaceable traces on heart and brain. Her tender eyes had grown used to tears, and her heart to the echo of the poet’s plaint:

“So tired, so tired, my heart and I!

It was not thus in that old time

When he sat with me ’neath the lime,

To watch the sunset from the sky.

‘Dear love, you’re looking tired,’ he said;

I, smiling at him, shook my head—

’Tis now we’re tired, my heart and I!

“So tired, so tired, my heart and I!

Though now none takes me in his arm

To fold me close and kiss me warm,

Till each quick breath end in a sigh

Of happy languor. Now, alone,

We lean upon this grave-yard stone,

Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I!”

“I can wait yet a little longer,” Lady Edith sighed to herself; but the time seemed long in spite of her resolve at patience. She spent the next three days in seeing the sights of the city, but Thea was always in her thoughts—Thea, and the blue-eyed, golden-haired baby, Arthur’s namesake. How she longed to take them both in her arms and lavish on them the pent-up love of her hungry heart!

“It almost seems as if they belonged to me,” she thought, smilingly.

CHAPTER LIX.

Despite his stay of but a few hours in New York and his hasty journey there and back, it was almost a week between the going and coming of Norman de Vere, and his heart was full of anxiety as he dismissed the hack he had hired at the station and walked up the broad steps of his home just as the soft shadows of twilight were settling over the beautiful Southland where his lot was cast.

“On breezy pinion mournful eve came singing

Over the silent hills, and to the glades

And violet beds a stream of odors bringing,

And waking music in the forest shades.

“A lovely length of moonlit waters lightly

Broke into sudden brightness on the strand,

While through the sky’s soft fleecy fretwork brightly

The stars looked out upon the stilly land.”

Although he had been tormented all the way by a foreboding of indefinable evil, a moment of calm, of almost relief came to him as he paused on the long piazza and ran his hurried gaze over the front of the house. He saw that lights glimmered through all the windows as usual, and it somehow reassured his mind.

“There can be nothing wrong. It was only my foolish fancy,” he muttered; and opened the door with his night-key, anxious to surprise his darling. “She will not be expecting me until to-morrow,” he murmured, and thrilled at the thought of clasping her in another moment to his wildly throbbing heart. “Oh, my love, my darling, how happy she will be! how she will spring to my arms and clasp her warm white arms about my neck!” he thought, with the rapture of a lover, as he mounted the steps, and meeting no one, sought the nursery. She would be there at this moment before she went to dress for dinner—there in some pretty, charming déshabille—with their child whom she worshiped with such fond maternal love.

With an eager smile upon his proud, handsome lips, Norman de Vere turned the door-knob and entered the room.

Then he started back in surprise.

Blank silence and darkness greeted him, and a deadly chill struck to his heart.

“Oh, Heaven! not dead—my little Alan dead!” he groaned, in sudden anguish; but it lasted only a moment, for another thought came to him.

“Sweetheart, dear baby that she is, has converted her own room into a nursery in my absence, that she may have her little idol always with her. I shall find them there.”

And turning from the dreary darkened room, he went along the hall with rapid steps to the suite of rooms that had once been occupied by the beautiful Camille, and later on had been refitted and refurnished for Sweetheart when she became his happy bride.

In the subdued light that filtered softly through frosted gas-globes in the hall, he paused, and bending down, listened at her door for the sound of voices.

A low, smothered murmur greeted his ears, and he could no longer restrain his impatience. He opened the door, and stepped quickly over the threshold.

And to the day of his death he always wondered why the sight that met his eyes did not strike him dead as swiftly as if it had been a bolt of the most terrible lightning.

There in Sweetheart’s sacred boudoir, from among the dainty furnishings of blue and gold framed to shrine her fair and youthful beauty, there glared upon him two darker faces, both distorted by fiendish triumph—the face of Camille, beautiful still in an artificial way, breathing, living, and behind her Finette—the artful maid.

CHAPTER LX.

Camille began to tremble with nervous excitement when she beheld the man she had wronged so cruelly, but she rose immediately and made a step toward him, crying out in a tone that was half pleading, half defiant:

“Norman, I have come back, you see. I could not bear my life away from you any longer.”

He clutched the back of a chair for support, and stood like a statue gazing at her with dark, despairing eyes, dazed by the suddenness of the blow that had fallen upon him. This was Camille, he knew, although more than four years ago he had gazed on her dead face, as he thought, and looked down upon a new-made grave where he believed she slept in peace after her stormy life.

He realized now that he had been fooled, duped—that a clever plot had been devised to ward off the divorce with which he had threatened Camille. She was here again, intent on dashing from his lips the cup of happiness—eager to make of his life a hell equal to that of her own.

For a moment he could not speak. A strong despair seized upon him; he could only stand and stare in abhorrence and disgust at the two women before him.

Camille waited a moment, then moved a little nearer to him. Her hazel eyes began to glow with passion, and her old alluring beauty seemed to return in the tender smile that parted the rich red lips. Her white plush dress, falling in long, straight lines about her and trailing far behind upon the floor, lent her a statuesque grace as she extended her round, white arms with a yearning cry:

“Oh, Norman, say that you are glad to have me back! You loved me once, and the old love can not all be gone. You must have felt a pang when you thought me dead, knowing how madly I had loved you in the old days when you loved me, too. Oh, forgive the past! I have suffered so much I have surely atoned for everything. Oh, pity me—love me—take me back to your heart!”

When she advanced toward him, he recoiled in disgust, when she flung herself on her knees and clasped his feet in her mad longing to regain her old power over him, he spurned her firmly though not rudely, and made a gesture to Finette.

“Take her away!”

“Monsieur, you are cruel!” the maid cried, malevolently.

“Obey me!” he repeated, sternly; and the fire in his eyes cowed her so that she dared not refuse. She bent over Camille, who was taking refuge in hysterics as usual, and putting her arms about her, drew her gently to a sofa, begging her to be calm.

Camille lay still for a moment, her hand over her eyes, breathing heavily, and Norman turned to Finette.

“Fiend!” he said, hoarsely, “you have been the prime mover in this hellish plot, by which I was made to believe yonder woman dead. But you shall no longer escape punishment for your wickedness. I will denounce you both to the authorities, and you will find that Nemesis has overtaken your wrong-doing at last!”

Finette looked at him, a little startled by the threat, but answered, recklessly:

“I have done no more than my mistress bid me. Her will has always been my law.”

“Do not think to place her between us as a shield for your wickedness, cowardly wretch! I shall spare neither of you now, and my vengeance will recoil in most terrible fashion upon your heads!”

A stifled shriek came from the sofa. Camille glared in fury at him.

“You can not divorce me!” she cried, exultantly. “You have no cause. I can prove by Finette that I have been willing and anxious to return to you ever since you sent me away, but you would not permit it. I will fight the application for divorce every step. I will hold you apart forever from the doll-faced girl that stole your heart from me!”

She laughed aloud at the spasm of bitter agony that convulsed his features at the thought of Sweetheart and of all the woe this fiendish woman had brought on her and little Alan, her darling. At the echo of her fiendish merriment the last vestige of pity faded from his heart and left in its place only a keen thirst for revenge upon the demoniac creature who had so cruelly desolated his life even while with the most noble forbearance he had kept his lips sealed upon the hideous secret of her crime.

He glanced at Finette, who stood apart, angry, yet alarmed in spite of herself at his strange threats; then he answered Camille in low, hoarse accents of determination:

“I shall make no application for a divorce. The dark secret of your past, which I have mercifully kept so long, shall now be given to the world, and to the verdict of a jury I look for final release from the fetters that cursed my boyhood and manhood—the fetters of a mature siren whose smiles hid a shameful past. But the veil shall be torn away at last, and the world shall know you as you are, murderess! The vengeance I scorned to take for myself, I take for my outraged wife and child!”

Camille cowered under the flash of his eyes, but she did not yet believe he would betray her crime to the world.

“Wife and child!” she uttered, scornfully; and some epithets fell from her lips that made him turn deathly white with fury.

“Were you a man, you should not live to repeat those words!” he warned her, bitterly; and then he turned to Finette, who, ever since the utterance of that word murderess by his lips, had stood quaking with fear and astonishment. “Where are they—my wife and child?” he asked, sternly.

“They went away the morning after we came,” sullenly.

“After you two had poured your poisonous story into her ears?”

“After my mistress had told her the plain truth—that you never loved her, and only married her to quiet the scandalous story that she was your illegitimate child!” defiantly.

“My God!” he groaned, and for a minute she feared he would murder her, so terrible was his aspect.

But he controlled himself with an effort, and asked:

“Where did they go?”

“I do not know.”

“But my mother accompanied them?” he went on.

“They went alone. Mrs. de Vere was not here when we came. She has never returned.”

“And the fraudulent telegram that summoned me to New York?” he said, beginning now to understand the whole diabolical plan.

“I sent it,” Camille answered, lifting her head with a gesture of triumph. “I planned everything. I got you out of the way so that I would have no trouble in getting the girl’s ear. After she heard all I had to tell, she was glad to go. I told her I had come to stay, as I mean to do. I shall never allow you to drive me from Verelands again.”

“I shall leave you in full possession for a short time,” he replied, with so strange and meaning a smile that she trembled in spite of her bravado.

“But he would not dare,” she thought, uneasily.

“If you will tell me now what device you used to lure my mother away from her home that night, I will go in search of her at once and leave you to the enjoyment of your triumph,” he said, icily.

“I got Nance to send for her to come to her death-bed. With all an old woman’s curiosity, she went, and once there she fell sick and had to remain a few days to recuperate,” Camille answered, with heartless mirth.

Her last coup had failed. He despised her as heartily as ever; he would never be lured by her siren wiles again. Her love turned at last to hate. She became reckless.

“I have triumphed over you completely!” she cried out, wildly. “You have forever lost the girl for whose love you deserted me. You will never see her face again. Doubtless she and her nameless brat are at this moment lying at the bottom of the river!”

He did not look back at her, for he was already crossing the threshold; but with that awful taunt ringing in his ears he staggered from her presence, leaving her to the mingled sweet and bitter of her triumph and defeat.

Camille flung her arms over her head with a piercing shriek of rage that died into silence a minute later, for she had grown rigid and unconscious. It required all Finette’s art to bring her out of that long, death-like swoon.

She was lying, white and exhausted, when Finette bent over her with menacing eyes.

“He called you murderess. What did he mean?” she asked, sharply.

Camille cowered, and protested that the maid had not understood Norman; he had uttered no such word.

“I do not believe you. I heard him distinctly. Come, I thought I knew the worst of you, but I did not believe you were as bad as that. I understand much now that used to puzzle me. I have a mind to leave you forever.”

“‘Rats always desert a sinking ship!’” Camille quoted, scornfully.

“And very sensible in them, too,” Finette muttered. She rose suddenly to her feet. “I’ll follow their example, and let you go to the gallows by yourself, miladi,” she said, heartlessly.

But Camille clutched her skirts with a shriek, as she turned to go.

“Stay with me, Finette, and I will make you rich,” she cried, pleadingly. “You shall have another one of those uncut gems—that great emerald that cost me many thousands. Only stay with me! You are the only friend I have in the wide world!” hysterically.

“You may thank your own folly for that,” the maid said, bluntly. “You are a she-devil, if ever I saw one, and I don’t know as even that emerald will tempt me to stay long with you unless you try to be more agreeable,” insolently.

CHAPTER LXI.

Yes, Sweetheart had gone away from Verelands, where she had been so unutterably happy, and where such blighting sorrow and disgrace had fallen upon her life.

She had not waited to be thrust out-of-doors by the hands of her vindictive foe; she had gone herself, creeping forth with bowed head and unsteady steps at the earliest dawn of day. In her arms she carried her sleeping child; but she did not go to the river, as Camille ardently hoped she would; and the fear of such a tragedy was soon dissipated in Norman’s mind by the reception of a letter which Sweetheart had left for him with one of the servants—a letter scrawled in a trembling hand, barely like her own, so terrible was her agitation. Sweetheart had written it upon her knees, being so weak that she could not sit upright to pen the incoherent lines to the man of whom she was taking so bitter a farewell. In it she had inclosed her unfinished verses, and Norman read them through a mist of tears, the bitterest he had ever shed in his shadowed life.

“This is what I was writing, when she—your wife, whom we thought dead—came back and set the seal of shame and despair on the short story of my life:

“’Tis midnight, my darling, the house is so lonely—

All, all are asleep but me;

I waken to weep, ah, beloved, if only—

If only I were with thee!

But the swift hours are bearing thee further away,

The swift hours whose flight my poor heart can not stay;

Come back to me, darling, my eager heart cries,

And the bitter tears rush from my heart to my eyes.”

“You see, Norman, I was feeling very, very unhappy over your absence. It must have been a presentiment of evil. When she first said that she was your wife, I could not believe it. But when Nurse Mary came home from the party, I told her all. She had seen your wife when she lived at Verelands long ago. She went upstairs and looked at the two women, and she came back to me weeping. She had recognized them both. There was no longer any doubt, no longer any hope for me.

“So I am going away, Norman, but do not add to your troubles the fear lest I shall drown myself, as your wife advised me to do. I am quite wretched enough to do it, but you will have sorrow enough to bear without that. And I can not throw away my life, because you saved it, and I hold it sacred to you. But you will never see me again. I shall go far away with my child, and live out my unhappy life in silence and obscurity. I have given trouble enough to that poor creature upstairs. Be kind to her, Norman, for the loss of your love seems to have driven her mad.

“Oh, how good you have been to me, Norman! She told me all. Even in my babyhood it was my fate to come between your heart and hers. How could she believe that cruel story, and you so noble and so good? But it was her jealous nature. For me, I could not see a fault in you if the whole world bore witness. I have loved you and believed in you always. My heart went to you the first time I saw you on that mysterious journey when you saved my life. It never left you. It remains with you now, while I go out of your life forever. May it be a talisman to guard you from all evil.

“I have no fault to find with you, Norman, although you did not marry me for love, but to shield me from a hideous slander. It was very noble in you, and you carried out the farce of love so well I never knew the difference. I shall try to cheat my heart with the fancy that you did learn to love me a little—at least, after Baby Alan came, of whom you were so proud, and now, alas! poor little one.

“Farewell, Norman. Perhaps you may learn to forgive her and love her again. I shall pray always for your happiness, but you must forget poor

“SWEETHEART.”

“My God, I must find her! She can not go out of my life like this, my love—my wife in the sight of Heaven, whatever man’s laws may say to the contrary! Our child, our darling, puts a holier seal on our marriage—makes it more binding than the irksome time that bound me to that fiend Camille,” the stricken man raved aloud in his agony of despair.

CHAPTER LXII.

If Norman believes that the spell of his love is strong enough to trace Sweetheart in her flight, he is mistaken. Days elapse, and he has not found the first clew. If she has left the city, he can not ascertain by what route, and if she is still in Jacksonville, she is hidden so cleverly that a private detective can not find her out. She is quite gone out of her husband’s life—gone as mysteriously as she had come into it first sixteen years ago a little golden-haired fairy.

A chill runs over him as the fact strikes him. There had always been a mystery about Sweetheart’s origin. Would the same mystery follow her disappearance? Beautiful and gifted beyond most mortals, was she some fairy changeling lent him awhile to brighten his life, then snatched away forever to her immortal sphere? He had never been accounted superstitious, but a thrill of fear ran over him as he recalled a pretty Shetland fairy-tale he had often read, wherein the fairy bride, won at first from the sea, had deserted her husband and returned to her home among the coral caves:

“Days of delight

Among my gorgeous coral halls,

Where never a child’s footstep falls,

Never is heard one loving voice,

But all is mirth and mad rejoice.”

He swept his white hand wearily across his brow as if to clear away these mists of fancy.

“Sweetheart, you never would have deserted me!” he cried, in his anguish. “Oh, my love, my love, come back to me!”

But, although the search for Sweetheart baffled every one who undertook it, Norman was more fortunate as regarded his mother. He found her where Camille had declared she was—at the cabin of Nance, the whilom chamber-maid at Verelands. The negro girl had degenerated into a thriftless, lazy sloven, much addicted to drink, and sprung eagerly at any chance that offered money without work, so she accepted Camille’s golden bribe, even though it was offered for the injury of the old mistress who had in past days been most generous and kind to her servant. But Nance had all the proverbial ingratitude of the negro race, and did not hesitate to bind the aristocratic lady tightly down upon a low cot-bed, where, after placing a sufficient quantity of water and coarse food within easy reach, she left her to her fate, locking the doors of the cabin and beating a hasty retreat to another city—for she well knew that, when this outrage was discovered, her punishment would be little short of lynching.

Here, after she had been imprisoned for a week, Norman de Vere found his beloved and revered mother ill unto death with fever and raving in delirium. Too low to be removed, he had to fit the cabin up as comfortably as possible for transient occupancy. Here he remained with some trusty servants in the squalid negro cabin, nursing his mother, while up at Verelands, his beautiful home, the fiendish Camille held complete sway, and the city rang with the story of the wicked revenge she had taken on her husband for his obstinacy in refusing to forgive her for a harmless flirtation. There were many who condemned her, but a few people sympathized with her, saying that Norman had been too hard upon her and deserved his punishment. A few people even called out of curiosity, but Finette sent them curtly away with the excuse that her mistress was ill and could see no one. This was not a falsehood, for Camille really lay upon Sweetheart’s pretty bed from day to day, raging, raving in alternate hatred and despair, realizing, after her long plotting for vengeance, that her triumph had left her ruined life waste and empty as before of the one blessing she had craved so madly—the love of the man whom she had turned against her by her terrible crime. Finette was changing daily, too. Her once cringing manner had turned to insolence, and she affected to tremble every time the door-bell rang, vowing that she listened daily for the officers to come and arrest her mistress for the murder with which Norman de Vere had charged her. In vain Camille protested her innocence, for her scared eyes betrayed her guilt. She had seen the murdered Robert Lacy so often in her dreams that she began to fancy he haunted her, and could not bear for the maid to leave her alone for a minute in the beautiful room where she had once been so wildly happy, but which now seemed peopled with fiends from Hades, grinning at her from over one another’s shoulders.

Lying there, watched by the sullen, insolent creature who had aided and abetted her in all of her cruel, wicked schemes for the sake of the golden bribe she offered, what visions came to Camille, the proud beauty whose unbridled passions had made shipwreck of her life! Visions of the past and of the glorious opportunities for happiness she had wasted and flung into the yawning pit of sin. Beautiful, rich, madly beloved—she had been all these, yet now she lay shivering, terrified, friendless, waiting, fearing, dreading the—prison cell.

Yes, she could think of nothing else but Norman’s mad threat that now he would betray the dark secret kept so long, and so free himself from the incubus she had made of herself, and punish her for the sorrow she had brought upon those dearer to him than his own life.

“Will he do it? Can he doom me to the gallows-tree?” the half-mad creature asked herself hourly; and as each day rolled away she began to feel more secure. “He can not do it, much as he hates me. I know he could not harm me, even for her sake. The past makes me sacred in his eyes still,” she began to think with keen triumph in her power.

CHAPTER LXIII.

In the trouble that had fallen upon him, Norman de Vere quite forgot Lord Stuart and his sister, the guests whom he was soon to receive at Verelands, or he would have written to them of all that had happened during his trip to New York and since his return to Jacksonville.

But, half crazed with trouble and anxiety, the young man could remember nothing except that his dear mother lay upon a sick, perhaps death-bed, and that his darling wife and child had gone into a most impenetrable exile, hounded from home and love by the most fiendish plot the brain of a wicked woman ever devised. While duty held him chained to his mother’s side, he had committed to a clever detective the task of tracing Sweetheart, and every moment a prayer went up from his heart that she might soon be found. That she could no longer be his—that Camille’s life had thrust their lives apart—he realized, but that a home must be provided for Sweetheart and the child, he felt imperatively necessary. If Heaven spared his mother’s life, she would go and live with them, he knew, and for himself nothing remained but to denounce Camille for the murder of Robert Lacy—to denounce her and doom her to the solitude of the prison cell. The murder had been committed so long ago that she would not be hung for it, he knew. Time, and the fact that she was a woman, would both be in her favor. Southern juries were chivalrous, too. He recalled all this with satisfaction, for bitterly as Camille had wronged him and his, the man’s heart shrunk at thought of the vengeance he must take on the fair, faulty creature who had once been his wife, for whom he had felt a boy’s delirious passion.

“But I can not spare her if I would, for she has rushed madly, recklessly upon her fate. For Sweetheart’s sake, for our child’s sake, this guilty woman must be placed behind prison bars. Then the law will free me forever from her hated claim, and the marriage ceremony shall make Sweetheart once more my own,” he thought. But while his mother lay ill he made no effort to molest Camille in her triumphant occupation of Verelands. His anxiety over his loved ones tortured him too cruelly.

Meantime, the days rolled by, and Lord Stuart and Lady Edith Moreland left New York for Jacksonville. They did not think it necessary to write or telegraph to their friends, still carrying out their fancy for surprising Sweetheart.

Lady Edith was as eager and joyous as a child when they took a carriage at the station to drive to Verelands.

“Dear child, I know she will be so happy to see me again!” she exclaimed, excitedly; and her brother looked in surprise and delight at her charming, animated face, which was flushed to a soft, roseate color, while her dark-blue eyes sparkled with feeling.

“You look like a girl again, Edith,” he said, admiringly.

“Nonsense!” she laughed. Then she added, with a pensive glance: “Why, I am old enough to be Thea’s mother and her child’s grandmother. I wish I were!” and tears sprung to her gentle eyes.

“You will have to adopt them as such,” Lord Stuart said, lightly; but he put his arm around her, and soothed her tenderly as though she were a child, and presently their carriage was stopping at the white gates of beautiful Verelands.

“Just a few more minutes, and I shall see her. Oh, what happiness!” Lady Edith cried, with the eagerness of a child.

“If she should be out calling or driving, I do not see how you could bear the shock of disappointment, Edith,” her brother said, good-humoredly.

“Alan Arthur would be at home anyhow, so I should amuse myself with him till his pretty mamma returned,” she replied, gayly, as he handed her out of the carriage; and they entered the white gates, within which they were destined to meet such a terrible disappointment.

CHAPTER LXIV.

“There is nobody at home, sir, but Mrs. de Vere. She is ill, and will see no one,” said the tidy negro girl who answered the bell.

“She will see us, for we have come from England to see her,” Lady Edith exclaimed, impetuously; while she wondered why every one had gone away and left her dear Thea ill and alone.

“Yes, she will see us when she knows our names,” said Lord Stuart, putting two cards into her hand with a silver coin that made her show all her fine white teeth in a grin of delight.

“I’ll ask Mrs. de Vere’s maid. She is the mistress here, it seems,” said the girl, in a tone of discontent. Then she ushered them into a pretty reception-room. “You can wait here till I find out,” she said.

When they were alone, Lady Edith looked at her brother with questioning eyes.

“Is it not strange for Mr. de Vere and his mother to leave Thea alone and sick?” she asked.

“I do not understand it,” he replied; and a cloud of anxiety came over his face.

He thought of the false telegram that had summoned Norman de Vere to New York. What if he had never returned? What if there were foul play somewhere?

He waited most impatiently a few minutes, then the door unclosed, and a woman appeared on the threshold.

Lord Stuart gave a violent start, for time had scarcely touched Finette, and in the creature before him he at once recognized Camille’s maid. He could not repress a slight shudder of disgust when her snaky black eyes, after sweeping curiously over his sister, fixed themselves upon him.

“My lord,” she began, with a cringing movement of her supple frame, “my mistress is sick. She sees no one, but”—with a courtesy to Lady Edith—“she will see you in her boudoir a few moments if the lady will excuse her.”

Lady Edith rose quickly, but Finette made her a gesture to sit down again.

“My lady, it is not you she consents to receive, it is Lord Stuart,” she said, flippantly; and Lady Edith sunk back in her chair with a low cry of wounded pride.

Lord Stuart went to her, and with a rare impulse of tenderness kissed the lovely, disappointed face.

“There is some mistake,” he whispered, soothingly. “It will be explained, I am sure, as soon as I see Thea. Will you wait here for me a little while?”

“Yes,” she replied; but as soon as she was left alone she burst into the bitterest sobs.

Her loving nature was cruelly wounded by this cold and strange reception, after all her affectionate anticipations of the joyful welcome she would have from Thea.

Meanwhile, Lord Stuart was following Finette to the boudoir, thinking how unseemly it appeared that the first wife’s maid should be here in attendance on Thea.

“I should not like it myself,” he thought; and just then Finette flung open the boudoir door.

He entered, and found himself in an exquisite apartment, whose prevailing color was a rich azure. The rich hue and fragrance of flowers greeted him on every side, but the apartment was untenanted, and Finette said, apologetically:

“My mistress will be with you in a few moments.”

Then she disappeared into an inner room, and he waited most impatiently for Thea to enter, wondering why she had declined to see his sister with himself.

“It is perplexing—nay, more, it is positively discourteous to treat Edith like this, after the devotion with which my sister nursed her through her long illness in London,” he thought, with rising indignation that grew stronger every moment he waited, for Camille was tardy. Her maid had to make some changes in her toilet before Camille would consent to enter the presence of her old lover.

But at last the rich silken négligée was adjusted to her fancy, and with a throbbing heart and nervous step Camille entered and bowed to her guest.

CHAPTER LXV.

Lord Stuart grasped the back of a chair to steady himself, and stared aghast.

“My lord, I am very happy to meet you. You see I have come back to my own,” said Camille, with her old dazzling smile and radiant glance that he so well remembered.

She had advanced to the center of the beautiful apartment, and was holding out her white, ringed hand to him, but he did not appear to notice it. He only gasped as if she had thrown ice-water over him.

“Are you ill, my lord?” she continued, in her most gracious manner. “Pray be seated. I will ring for wine.”

But he put up his hand with a gesture of dissent, and his pale lips gasped a feeble negative.

Camille’s smile began to fade.

“I do not understand. Has the mere sight of an old friend so overcome you?” she asked, with a little of her old coquetry; and, going nearer, she laid her white hand on his arm, but he shrunk in horror from her light touch.

“I—I—thought—you—dead!” he managed to mutter, in disconnected words; and she removed her hand from his arm and fell back a pace from him.

“You thought me dead? Ah, then, you did not come here to see me?” bitterly.

“Certainly not,” he answered, regaining himself in a measure, though he was still ghastly white and trembling.

“I thought you dead four years ago. Norman de Vere had married again. It was to see his second wife that I came to Verelands.”

“His second wife? What was she to you or your sister?” Camille asked, with a sneer.

“A dear and valued friend,” he replied, gazing at her with eyes of steady scorn that made her burst out angrily:

“The poor foundling creature, basely born, no doubt, was fortunate in finding nobly born friends like Lady Moreland and Lord Stuart?”

“I do not understand your allusions,” Lord Stuart said, icily.

“Do you not?” she asked, in wonder. She gazed steadily at him, then said, eagerly: “Lord Stuart, possibly you do not know the whole story of my bitter wrongs at the hands of my faithless husband. Will you not sit down and let me tell you all?”

He was about to refuse, but with her eager white hands she pushed him gently into a chair.

“Do not refuse,” she pleaded. “Once you were a very good friend of mine. Why not now? God knows I have suffered enough at my husband’s hands through your admiration for you to make me the small atonement of pitying me, of sympathizing with me in this hour.”

She flung herself into a chair opposite to him, and hurried into what she called the relation of her wrongs, and the first complaint began with the bringing of Little Sweetheart to Verelands.

“Of course I was wrong in believing the child his own, as he proved my suspicions false by marrying the girl afterward,” she admitted. “But do you not think with me, Lord Stuart, that he should have taken the child away when I requested, nay, commanded it?”

“You must excuse me for not passing judgment upon the master of Verelands under his own roof. That would be discourteous,” he said; but she noticed that he was very curious over the things she told him. He did not disdain to ask questions, and he extracted from her all the information she could impart regarding the origin of Sweetheart.

“Norman believed that the woman on the train with the child was her mother,” said Camille. “But the child, when asked, denied it. She said the woman’s name was Mattie. My own theory, Lord Stuart, was that the woman was some circus creature, and that the child had been trained to act upon the stage. She was pert and precocious for one of her age.”

When the subject of Sweetheart had been exhausted, she took up her innocent flirtation with himself.

“For these simple faults I was driven like a criminal from his heart and home,” she cried, bitterly. “Can you wonder, Lord Stuart, that, driven to madness by his scorn, I planned and carried out such a bitter revenge upon my cruel husband?”

He looked at her inquiringly; and with fiendish joy that made her appear most revolting to him, she told him all that she had done—how a pauper’s dead body had been palmed off on Norman de Vere as her own, and how in the hour of his most exquisite happiness she had struck the full cup of happiness from his lips, and driven the girl he loved away with her child into exile and misery.

He listened without one word of reply. Bad as he knew her to be, he could scarcely credit this crowning act of fiendishness.

As soon as she paused he arose.

“Can you tell me where to find Mr. de Vere?” he asked.

“I can not,” she answered, stiffly, although she knew perfectly well through her spy, Finette, where he was. But she saw, with bitter mortification, that Lord Stuart’s sympathies were not with her, but had gone out silently to the noble man of whose life she had made such a foot-ball of fate. “You take his part against me!” she said, with flashing eyes and her most regal air.

He was going to the door; but he turned back, very pale and moved, and gazed steadfastly into her excited face.

“I take your part against yourself,” he answered, gravely. “I would save you from the fate you are bringing down upon yourself, because—well, because I loved you once, although I am ashamed of it now. But, Camille, if you stay on here at Verelands, this horrible vengeance of which you boast is going to recoil in terrible disaster on your own head. Be warned in time. Tell the truth, and crave Norman de Vere’s pardon for your wickedness. If you will not do that, go away far from here and hide yourself as far as possible from the storm of disgrace that is going to break on your head.”

A tremor ran over her at the earnestness with which he spoke, but she laughed aloud with the recklessness of a desperate woman.

“I shall never leave Verelands again, and I defy the disasters you predict, Lord Stuart,” she replied, daringly.

He did not reply. He simply bowed and hastened from her presence, drawing a breath of relief at his escape.

“Oh, brother, how strange you look! What is it?” Lady Edith cried, starting up anxiously to meet him.

“It is nothing,” he said, drawing his arm about the trembling figure. “I told you,” he added, “that there was some mistake. Mr. de Vere and his wife are both away from home, Edith.”

“But the girl said that Thea was sick.”

“She said that Mrs. de Vere was sick. It was the elder lady.”

“Norman’s mother?”

“Yes. Heaven forgive me, but she must not know yet,” he added to himself.

“But where are they gone? It is rather strange; for he knew we were coming!” cried poor Lady Edith, in disappointment and distress.

“It was a compulsory trip, Edith—something connected with that fraudulent telegram, you know,” evasively. “But, my dear, as Mrs. de Vere is so ill, I think I will take you to a hotel for the present.”

“Yes, yes, that will be better,” she assented, with a sigh of the most bitter disappointment.

She rose obediently and went away with him to the carriage, which was still waiting for them at the gate, with the prim English maid in it wondering if her mistress was ever going to summon her into the house, or if she were making a ceremonious call only at the handsome Southern mansion.

Lord Stuart put his sister into the carriage, gave the driver his order for a hotel, and then they drove away from Verelands, Lord Stuart, pale and excited, his sister pensive and tearful over the bitter disappointment of finding her beloved Thea away from her home.

CHAPTER LXVI.

Lord Stuart saw his sister comfortably settled in the best suite of rooms at the Hôtel Français, then he set himself to work to find out the whereabouts of Norman de Vere.

It was an easy task, for the city was ringing with the story of the scandalous happenings at Verelands, and in a short time Lord Stuart was driving out to the negro cabin on the suburbs, where the ill, perhaps dying mother lay amid her humble surroundings, attended by her faithful maid and her half-distracted son.

The meeting between Lord Stuart and the author took place in the tidy but bare little kitchen, the only other room being the one where the invalid lay. It was a sad and sympathetic meeting, for Lord Stuart was awed by Norman’s changed and haggard looks. His face was pale and wan, his beautiful dark eyes heavy with watching and unshed tears, his sensitive lips trembled with grief, and silver threads shone in the wavy locks that a month ago were dark as the raven’s wing.

Lord Stuart pressed his cold, nervous hand with the warmth of a brother.

“Be of good cheer, my friend. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’” he said, hopefully.

“You do not know all,” Norman answered, despairingly.

“Yes; I have been to Verelands. I have seen Camille, and heard the whole story from her lips.”

They sat down together and talked as old friends, sadly, earnestly. Norman told him that his mother was so ill that her death might be expected at any time.

“Doctor Hall has told me that the crisis of her disease will come to-night,” he said. “A few hours now will decide her fate. Oh, my God! if my poor mother dies of the treatment received at the hands of that remorseless fiend, I believe that I shall go mad with the horror of it.”

“We will hope and pray for the best,” Lord Stuart said, deeply moved, and added: “I will come and watch with you to-night.”

By degrees Lord Stuart brought the conversation around to the story Camille had told him of Sweetheart’s origin. He induced Norman to repeat the whole story to him.

“Have you kept the clothing the child wore when you saved her life?” he asked, eagerly.

“Yes; every little garment is in a trunk at Verelands, together with a water-colored photograph I had taken of her a few days after I took charge of her. I kept the things in the hope that they might some day assist in establishing her identity.”

“I hope you will not believe me idly curious if I ask you to show me those garments and that picture at some future day,” Lord Stuart said, in a strange voice.

Norman promised to gratify his curiosity without thinking that there was anything significant in it, so fully was his mind absorbed in his trouble; and presently Lord Stuart took leave, promising to return that night and watch with Norman through the crisis that the physician had predicted as imminent.

Then he returned to the hotel to his sister, having decided that it would be better to confide to her some of the facts he had learned, smoothing them over as best he could, lest her grief over poor Thea’s trouble should prostrate her upon a sick-bed, and so hinder him from assisting Norman in his troubles.

Lady Edith was cruelly shocked, but she bore it more bravely than he had expected.

“Dear brother, there is something in your face that tells me you are hopeful,” she cried, eagerly, through her starting tears.

“Yes, I am hopeful,” he answered, firmly. “All is not so dark as it appears, Edith, and if Norman’s mother only gets well, and we can find our precious runaways, I shall do all I can to help our noble friend unravel the web of fate that wicked Camille has woven around him. There are some precious threads in my grasp, but I must not tell you more just now. Only be brave and patient, my sister, and keep in your mind the old adage: ‘The darkest hour is just before the dawn.’”

CHAPTER LXVII.

Lord Stuart went back to the cabin that night to share Norman’s vigil, and when he stood by the bedside of Mrs. de Vere, and saw what an awful change had come over the once handsome, noble-looking woman, his heart sunk with dread. The gray shadow of death seemed already settling upon her terribly wasted features. He did not believe that she could possibly live through the impending crisis.

“She will die to-night, and another crime will lie at the door of that beautiful fiend,” he thought, with burning indignation against heartless Camille.

They had been sitting quietly for more than an hour, watching the invalid, who lay in a stupor almost as deep as death, when Lord Stuart’s ear caught the sound of a light tapping at the kitchen door. He rose softly and went out, anxious that Norman should not be disturbed, and found a messenger boy with a telegram for Norman de Vere.

Lord Stuart took the telegram and turned into the quiet kitchen. A thought had come to him of the fraudulent one that had summoned Norman de Vere to New York in order that his relentless foe might desolate his home.

“Perhaps this is some more of her cruel work. She would drag the son by a deep-laid scheme from the bedside of his dying mother,” he thought, angrily. “But I will foil her plan. For my friend’s sake, I will read the telegram and decide whether he shall see it to-night or not.”

He tore off the yellow envelope and read the telegram, which was dated from a distant Western town. His eyes dilated at these startling words:

“I have found your wife and child here by a strange chance. Thea is dangerously ill and unable to explain. For God’s sake, what does it mean? Come instantly.

“FRANK HINTON.”

“Great Heaven! is there any truth in this, or is it a device of Camille to lure Norman away?” Lord Stuart muttered, in an agony of indecision as he thrust the telegram in his vest-pocket, and stood thinking, wondering whether he ought to tell Norman or not. “He would be wild to go, but he could not forsake his dying mother, and his mind must not be tortured by this miserable uncertainty. It is I who must go upon this wild-goose chase, as the Americans say of an uncertainty. Then if it turns out another scheme of Camille, she will have been baffled in her malice,” he decided; and, going back into the sick-room where Norman sat with heavy, miserable eyes fixed on his mother’s pallid, wasted features, he touched him on the arm.

“Can you forgive me for deserting you in this terrible hour? I have been suddenly summoned away on a matter of the most urgent importance to me,” he whispered, with an agitated face.

“Go, my friend,” Norman answered, huskily; “I shall not be alone. The nurse will be here, and Doctor Hall has promised to return before midnight.”

Then Lord Stuart spent a few solemn minutes by Mrs. de Vere’s bedside, taking, as he believed, a silent last farewell of a noble woman soon to be removed from earth, and whispering a few hopeful words to his stricken friend, he hurried away, hoping that he would be able to catch a midnight train for the West.

He went back to his hotel and explained to his sister what had happened, and he was not much surprised when she begged that he would take her with him on the quest for Thea.

“But, Edith, it may prove a fruitless journey—it may be one of that false woman’s schemes,” he said.

“I will go with you on the bare chance that it is true, for if Thea is sick she will need my care,” she replied.

“It is noble of you, Edith, to cling to that poor girl still, even when the most blighting disgrace and misery have fallen to her lot,” her brother said, watching her keenly.

“I love her all the more dearly for her unmerited misfortunes,” Lady Edith cried, impetuously. “Oh, brother, do you not think we might take her back to England with us until Norman is free to marry her again? We might comfort the poor, unhappy child.”

“We will see,” said Lord Stuart, kindly. “But if you mean to go with me, hurry and get ready, my dear. You need only take one trunk and your maid.”

CHAPTER LXVIII.

Poor Thea! Her one thought and desire, after learning the bitter truth that her husband’s first wife lived to triumph over her, was to get away as far as possible from the husband with whom she had been so wildly happy, but whom to meet again would be the bitterest misery.

She made the nurse pack a hand-satchel with some changes of clothing for herself and the baby, and at day-dawn, after a night of the bitterest despair, she made her way to a railroad station, where she bought a ticket for the West, determined to hide herself forever from all who had ever known her until death put an end to her pain.

She had several hundred dollars in her little purse—for Norman kept her always generously supplied with money—and she thought that she could find work before that was gone.

So the train rushed on and on for three weary days and nights, and when she came at last to the busy, bustling town which she had chosen at hap-hazard as her destination, the girl was so ill that she staggered as she walked to the carriage with the heavy child in her arms, and could barely falter out her desire to be taken to a quiet and respectable hotel.

Thea did not know what had put the name of that town in her mind. She thought she had chosen it at hap-hazard; but in reality it was the place where Frank Hinton had settled to practice medicine, and a beneficent fate had suggested it to her mind in that dark hour when everything had seemed dazed and gloomy before her vision. If she had dreamed of Frank being there, she would never have ventured near; but it was her good angel that led her to that spot, for within a few hours after her arrival at the hotel she grew so much worse that fever and delirium set in, and the alarmed landlady sent off in haste for the nearest physician, who proved to be Frank Hinton.

When Frank saw his old love—sweet Thea, whom he had never been able to banish from his heart—he was almost overcome with surprise and agitation. He stood for a few moments almost dazed as he watched the lovely, fever-flushed face and violet eyes glittering in delirium as she tossed her white arms in the air, raving wildly of her love and sorrow. Then he turned to the observant landlady, who had taken the fretful child in her arms, and said, huskily:

“This lady is an old friend of mine. I knew her in Virginia years ago. Her husband is rich and of high standing, and I can not understand why his wife is here like this. I will telegraph to him, and we must have two good nurses—one for the child and one for her, for she has brain fever.”

“A nurse for the lady, if you like, sir; but, good land! there’s a dozen idle women in this house that will like nothing better than to nurse the little darling till his pretty mamma gets well,” cried the fat, bustling landlady. She laid one of her plump hands compassionately on the shower of golden tresses floating over the pillow. “Brain fever! Oh, you don’t mean to say that you’ll cut off these pretty curls?”

“Not if I can help it,” was the answer; and poor Frank vowed to himself that he would save all that golden glory for Norman de Vere, if he could, and that he would give all his time and care to saving the life of the sweet young girl who had once been like a little sister to him.

And this is how the telegram was sent by him to Norman de Vere, and so skillfully did he attend upon Thea that in a few days she began to show a marked change for the better, regained her senses, and recognized Dr. Hinton as he lingered beside her. Then Lord Stuart and his sister arrived, and Thea was so glad at seeing all these dear friends about her again that she wept for joy, and although she declared that she wanted to die, her strong constitution triumphed over her, and she began to convalesce very fast.

CHAPTER LXIX.

Lord Stuart was overjoyed at the success of his journey. He lost no time in writing to Norman de Vere.

But he did not tell Norman that he had found Thea and her baby. He had a little plan of his own, and wanted to carry it out in his own fashion.

He wrote simply to Norman that he had a clew to Thea’s whereabouts, and that he was following it up closely, accompanied by his sister. He felt almost certain that he should find the missing ones, and he begged Norman to reply to him immediately, letting him hear from his mother, over whom, Lord Stuart added, he felt a strong anxiety.

“Yet I am almost certain that she is dead ere this,” he decided, thinking of the awfully corpse-like face upon which he had looked just before starting West.

To his astonishment and delight, the letter that came in due course of time conveyed the joyful information that the sick woman had rallied, and was in a fair way to recover.

“With Heaven’s blessing, she will be restored to us; but she is very weak yet. I dare not leave her to less loving care than mine, or I would hasten to join you in the search for my darlings. God bless you and your noble sister, and give success to your mission. I can not describe to you the eagerness I feel to join you, but my duty will hold me here until my mother is stronger,” Norman wrote; and Lord Stuart’s heart thrilled with pleasure at the thought of the happiness soon coming to the man now crushed with grief and despair.

“He little dreams of the charming surprise I have in store for him,” he murmured, with dim eyes, for pure tears of joy had arisen at the thought of the good he was going to accomplish and the happiness he would bring to the crushed and bleeding hearts of those he loved.

No purer pleasure ever comes to the human heart than by the accomplishment of a good deed, and Lord Stuart was tasting this in eager anticipation.

Thea was now convalescing rapidly, and he gave her the letter to read. She kissed it and shed bitter tears over it.

“You should not have written that about me. We can never be anything to each other again,” she said, piteously.

“Nonsense! there is a way to get rid of that wicked woman, and you and Norman will soon be all in all to each other again,” he said, cheerily; but Thea shook her golden head despondently.

“So you do not believe my prophecies?” he laughed, going down upon his knees before her as she sat among the pillows of the invalid-chair. He put his hands gently on either side of her head and made her look at him. “I want to tell you,” he exclaimed, “that the day you made my acquaintance on the steamer bound for Europe was one of the brightest, most fortunate days of your life. I am going to turn into a fairy godfather, and transmute all your sorrows into joys by a touch of my magic wand. So you will please get strong as soon as you can, for I am anxious to take you back to Jacksonville as soon as you can travel.”

“You are jesting,” faltered the beautiful girl.

“Not so; I mean every word. You must put perfect faith in me, Thea, and all will come out right,” he replied, reassuringly; and the confidence of his tone made her heart bound with new hope.

Dr. Hinton came in at that moment, and Lord Stuart immediately asked him how soon Thea would be able to travel.

“In a week,” was the confident answer; and then Lord Stuart fell to laying his plans for their return.

He had taken Dr. Hinton partly into his confidence, and in the days that followed he hinted so strongly at a dramatic dénouement of Thea’s sorrows that he finally persuaded the young man to return with them for a brief visit South.

“Oh, I am so glad you will go with us!” cried Thea, joyfully. “I want you to fall in love with my dear friend, Nellie Bentley. She would make you a charming wife, Frank.”

Poor Frank thought within himself that if he could find any woman fair enough to drive Thea’s image from his sore heart, he would be only too glad to find her, so he made up his mind to return South with them and to woo Thea’s friend for his bride, if she was as charming as she was represented.

Lady Edith was quietly happy in the companionship of her dear Thea and the beautiful boy, her dead husband’s namesake. She spent hours amusing him and petting him, never seeming so happy as when she had him in her arms.

One day, when they were all sitting quietly in Thea’s room, and Lady Edith had Alan in her arms, caressing him tenderly, her brother exclaimed:

“Edith, the sight of you with Thea’s child in your arms brings vividly back to me the days of long ago, before your little girl died, when you used to hold her that way and sing to her so sweetly in the twilight.”

Lady Edith started, and a long, deep sigh broke from her as she clasped the blue-eyed boy more tightly to her breast.

“Do you remember the pretty songs you used to sing then? I wish you would sing one now for little Alan,” continued Lord Stuart.

“I will try,” Lady Edith answered; but her sweet voice trembled and she sighed deeply. At last she began to sing falteringly, and Thea, who had been half sunk in painful reverie, gave a violent start as the words fell on her ear:

“‘Little Sweetheart, come and kiss me,

Just once more before I go;

Tell me that your heart will miss me

As I wander to and fro.

Let me feel the tender pressing

Of your ruby lips to mine,

With your dimpled hands caressing,

And your snowy arms intwine.

“‘Ah, Little Sweetheart, come and kiss me,

Come and whisper sweet and low;

Tell me that your heart will miss me

As I wander to and fro.

“‘Little Sweetheart, come and kiss me,

We may never meet again;

We may never roam together

Down the dear old shady lane.

Future years may bring us sorrow

That our hearts but little know;

Still of care we should not borrow—

Come and kiss me ere I go.

“‘Ah, Little Sweetheart, come and kiss me,

Whisper to me sweet and low;

Tell me that your heart will miss me

As I wander to and fro.’”

Lord Stuart’s eyes had never left Thea’s pale, startled face although he pretended to be looking over an evening paper. He saw that the lovely girl was struggling with some deep, overmastering agitation. Her lips were parted eagerly, her cheeks pale, her dilated blue eyes were fixed on Lady Edith with an expression of wistful yearning, and the small white hands clasped each other tightly upon her knee.

Lady Edith did not see the uncontrollable emotion of her young friend. She was singing with her eyes closed, but tears were stealing down her pale cheeks. She held little Alan tightly clasped to her breast, and perhaps in fancy she was back in the long ago, clasping to her heart the child long dead. Her brother, watching her with deep emotion, felt that it was so.

Once Thea started from her chair with outstretched arms and a yearning gesture, as if she would throw herself at the singer’s feet; but she caught Lord Stuart’s glance and shrunk back.

“What is it, dear child?” he whispered, drawing near.

She clung to him with both hands, and her face seemed irradiated with supernal light, it grew so tender.

“Her face, her voice, her song—they are like my lost mother’s. They go to my heart!” she murmured.

Then the half smile faded, and she sunk back into her chair, weeping silently. She had suddenly remembered Norman’s sensitive shrinking from the thought of strangers knowing her sad story. She must not confide to Lord Stuart her bitter cause for tears.

CHAPTER LXX.

It was February now, and a month had passed since Camille had returned to Verelands, bringing trouble and sorrow in her train. She was there still, and she began to believe that she was quite safe in her wickedness, as Norman de Vere had not yet betrayed her to the law for the murder of Robert Lacy.

“He will not do it, because the old love makes me sacred in his eyes,” she thought, triumphantly, little dreaming that it was for his mother’s sake Norman kept silence. He was only waiting until she should be strong enough to bear the news that Camille, in whom she had always believed, whose part she had always taken, was a cruel murderess.

“I would have spared her still, as I have spared her all these years, if she had let me—but she has been merciless!” he thought, remembering all that his darlings had suffered at her vindictive hands; and he knew that the time of her betrayal must come soon, for to-day his mother was strong enough to be removed from the cabin to Verelands.

Norman had not intended to take his mother back to Verelands until his enemy had left it; but a letter from Lord Stuart had changed his mind about the matter.

Lord Stuart had begged in a most impressive manner that Norman and his mother would be at Verelands on a certain day, when he also, with his sister, would arrive to make their anticipated visit.

“I have found Thea and little Alan,” he wrote. “They are both well, and longing for the day when they will be restored to your heart. I have met Doctor Frank Hinton, an old friend of yours, here, too, and I took the liberty of inviting him to Jacksonville. Poor fellow, he is very sad. His mother died lately, and his father is in ill-health. His brother and sister are married, and he feels almost forsaken in spite of his fine practice here; so I thought it would cheer him a bit to bring him with us. I shall bring other guests, too, that I hope may not be unwelcome. I hope you will receive us in your drawing-room, and if your enemy insists on receiving us also, permit her to have her way. I will soon find a way to make Verelands uncomfortable for her, and she will be glad to depart. As a last request, will you kindly have ready the little garments worn by Little Sweetheart when you found her? Perhaps I may throw some light on the mystery of her origin.”

Norman had read that letter over and over, each time with a wildly throbbing heart, for it seemed to him as if Lord Stuart must hold in his hands the threads of some mystery that only he could unravel. Hope began to sing her sweet pæans of joy again in his soul, and he grew eagerly impatient as the time drew near for the coming of the party from the West.

Camille and her maid were in a flurry of nervous excitement after the arrival of Norman and his mother. They scarcely knew what to think—whether the arrival was a portent of good or ill to themselves.

Camille was rather inclined to believe that Norman, weary of the conflict in which she always came off triumphant, had at last capitulated to the force of circumstances.

“He gives up the contest. Fate and a woman’s cunning have been too strong for him,” she declared, maliciously; and she sent Finette to her mother-in-law’s room to inquire if she might come in and congratulate her on her recovery.

“Her son was with her, and he said his mother begged leave to decline the honor,” reported Finette, on returning.

“N’importe! They can not stay under the same roof with me long and carry such stiff necks. Their very return to Verelands, under the circumstances of the case, shows that they have found out that conciliation is their best policy,” declared Camille, undaunted. “Pour me out some wine to brace my nerves, Finette, and then dress me handsomely in velvet and diamonds. I am going down to sit in the drawing-room, as it is very probable that my humbled husband will seek an interview with me soon,” she declared, as she tossed off the glass of wine with the air of one habituated to its use.

CHAPTER LXXI.

Camille had been in the drawing-room but a few minutes, when the door-bell rang loudly, and sent a nervous tremor through her whole frame.

“Some callers,” she thought, wondering why that strange presentiment of evil trembled along her nerves. She shook it off, congratulating herself that the drawing-room was well lighted and her costume elegant.

“I may as well receive them, for I must soon take my old place in society,” she decided, as she heard a bustle in the hall, and knew that the visitors were being admitted.

Norman de Vere and his mother had come down into the hall a few moments before, and had been waiting most impatiently the signal to enter the grand drawing-room. At the ringing of the door-bell he gave his mother his arm, and with a stately step led her into the presence of Camille; but ere the astonished woman could utter a word, the door opened again, admitting visitors, at sight of whom Norman uttered a cry of joy and sprung forward. He had caught sight of Thea on Lord Stuart’s arm, and no power on earth but death could have hindered him from catching her in his arms and straining her to his heart in a passionate embrace.

“Oh, my love, my darling, my wife!” he cried, wildly—but Lord Stuart gently but firmly put them apart.

“Here is little Alan, my friend; give him your caresses just now,” he said, as he placed the half-fainting Thea in a seat, and taking Baby Alan from his sister, placed him in Norman’s arms. Then he greeted Norman’s mother, and presented his sister and Dr. Hinton.

Camille stood like a statue, with dilated eyes gazing at the scene before her. There was no greeting for her. No one seemed to see her as she stood a little apart in her dark trailing velvet and glittering diamonds, tall and elegant, with an angry sneer upon her thin lips.

Suddenly a hand touched her shoulder. She glanced around and saw Finette close by her side.

“Miladi, I slipped in behind them. I thought you might need me,” whispered the curious maid.

Camille did not reply. Lord Stuart had begun to speak, and she inclined her head to listen.

“Mr. de Vere, will you show me now the clothes worn by Little Sweetheart when you saved her life in the railway wreck many years ago?” he asked.

Then every one saw that Mrs. de Vere, the elder, had been carrying all the time a small bundle which she now began to unroll, while Lord Stuart, taking his sister’s hand, led her forward.

“Look at these things, my dear, and see if you recognize any of them,” he said, in a voice of tender emotion.

Lady Edith uttered a startled cry and slipped down upon her knees before the gentle, white-haired lady, beginning to touch the pretty embroidered robes with shaking fingers.

“Oh, brother, brother! these are the garments I embroidered for my darling little daughter!” she faltered, “and—oh, Heaven! here is her picture!” kissing it with despairing love. “Brother, brother! what does it mean? Oh, my lost Little Sweetheart! my angel!” she wept, wildly.

He stooped and lifted her up so that he could hold the half-fainting form in his arms.

“My darling, forgive me for deceiving you all these years,” he cried. “It was done to save your life and your reason, for when you lay ill so long and your little child was stolen from you, all efforts at its recovery proving vain, we were afraid to tell you the dreadful truth. We believed it better to pretend that the child had died and gone to join its father in a better world than for you to know that it was in the power of a wicked woman who stole it for purposes of revenge. I have tried to trace the child for years, and at last, by a fortunate accident, I found that our sweet Thea here was your missing child. Go to her, my darling.” But Thea, with a rapturous cry, bounded forward, and mother and child wept wildly in each other’s arms.

CHAPTER LXXII.

Camille made a step forward, and was about to make an angry speech, but Finette restrained her.

“Wait—listen!” muttered the curious French woman.

Lord Stuart, after a minute’s silence, because of the lump that seemed to be swelling in his throat, turned again to his friends, and said, proudly:

“Yes, Thea is my sister’s only child, my own dear niece, and her beautiful little boy yonder will, as next of kin to me, inherit my title and estates at my death. I am very proud of it, for if we had not found Thea and her child, I should have been succeeded by a very distant relative, a soldier in India, whom I have never seen.”

Camille was again about to interrupt him with an angry taunt concerning the stain upon little Alan’s birth, but the curious Finette again restrained her.

“Let us hear it all, then storm at them as much as you please,” she said; and Lord Stuart continued:

“I will briefly explain, my friends, the circumstances of Thea’s loss, or perhaps I should call her Edith, as she was named for her mother, and Sweetheart was the pet name she bore all the time. Sir Harry Moreland, my sister’s young husband, died of a fever when they had been married but a few years. It was a love-match, for Arthur, though well born, was poor, and his death almost broke his young wife’s heart. Long months of illness followed, and our physician ordered her to Italy. It was thought best to leave Sweetheart at our country home in Devonshire to insure perfect quiet and rest to her nervous mother. But, unfortunately, my sister had employed as a nursery governess a young girl called Mattie Steyne, who, unknown to us, had once loved Sir Arthur Moreland, and fancied herself bound to punish Lady Edith for winning the heart she had coveted. I think long brooding over her loss had turned the girl’s brain, for she stole Sweetheart in Edith’s absence, and left behind her a most cruel letter, avowing her hatred for her rival, and stating that she would keep her dead love’s child away from her forever. She almost succeeded in doing so, for we never learned that she had left Europe with the child, although I have had a detective on the case for years. If this lady”—he bowed for the first time toward angry Camille—“had not told me, a few weeks ago, the story of little Sweetheart, it is probable that I never should have suspected her identity with my stolen niece.”

How angry Camille grew as she listened to those words, and realized that her vindictive spite had recoiled upon herself! Finette could restrain her no longer; she cried out, malevolently:

“Boast as you will, Lord Stuart, her relationship to you can not alter the fact of the deep disgrace that lies upon her and her child—a disgrace that will prevent his inheriting your title and estates, since he is illegitimate. Ha! ha!” with a sneering laugh.

He turned to her with a strange smile.

“‘Those laugh best who laugh last,’” he answered. “I have another little story to tell here to-night, madame. Pray be seated, and listen.”

A storm of angry, defiant words burst from her writhing lips, and he turned from her to the maid.

“If you can induce your mistress to sit down and listen to me, it will be to her interest and yours,” he said; and Finette drew forward a chair and resolutely pushed her mistress into it.

“Sit still and listen, or he will think you are afraid to hear him,” she whispered, menacingly; and Camille, who was more than half afraid of her clever maid, whimpered rebelliously a moment, then sat still, sweeping the company over with mad, defiant eyes, and longing to tear from Norman’s arms the beautiful child he was holding so tenderly.

“Once upon a time,” began Lord Stuart, “a beautiful young heiress in San Francisco ran away with a handsome book-agent and married him. He took her to his home in California, a lonely mountain retreat frequented by cut-throats and desperadoes of the worst class, and she very soon discovered that she had linked her fate with that of a handsome villain whose trade was stealing horses. She upbraided him, and he struck her, arousing the worst passions of her vindictive nature. She sought out the Vigilantes, an organization then existing in California—it was more than twenty-five years ago, my friends—and they swung Robert Lacy up to a tree without giving him time to utter a prayer. I was in at the death, as they called it, and when they all slunk away from the scene of the murder—the heartless wife among the rest—I cut the man down and had the happiness of restoring him to life. He swore eternal gratitude, and I brought him away with me. For years he was my faithful, devoted valet; but he swore to me many a time that he carried a knife for his false wife’s heart, and that he would murder her on sight. But I did not think it was likely that he would ever meet her, for I supposed she had returned to her rich father and resumed her maiden name of Acton.”

“I will hear no more!” Camille shrieked, hysterically; but Finette put her hand rudely over her lips.

“You shall hear it all!” she said, resolutely.

“There is little more to tell,” said Lord Stuart. “Robert Lacy did find his wife again, and in the struggle that ensued between them, she murdered him and flung his body into the river that skirts the lawn at Verelands.”

“It is false!” Camille groaned, hoarsely; but he paid no attention to her denials—he went on with his story:

“I was a witness to Camille Lacy’s terrible crime, for I had sent Robert to carry her some flowers, and I hung about the grounds like a foolish, romantic lover, so I saw it all; and because I had, in my madness, loved that woman, not knowing her wicked nature, I stole silently away from the scene, and did not betray her sin, leaving vengeance to Heaven.”

CHAPTER LXXIII.

Lord Stuart went up to Norman de Vere, and said gravely:

“Do you understand what I have been saying?”

“I have heard every word,” Norman answered; but he had a dazed look, as if his joy was too sudden and too great for comprehension.

Lord Stuart gravely said:

“When you married the woman who called herself Miss Acton, she had a husband already living, so her marriage to you was void in law, and your marriage with my niece was, therefore, lawful. Sweetheart is your wife still, and your boy has no stain on his name to prevent him from inheriting honors from an ancestry that was noble on both sides.”

“My God, it is true; I thank Thee!” Norman cried, fervently.

He was hastening toward Sweetheart, but when he saw her resting with her golden head on her mother’s breast, he drew back, feeling that the scene was too holy and sacred to be disturbed even by a husband’s yearning love.

“You understand now, Norman, that I was moved by interest for yourself when I let you think you had cause to be jealous of me. I did not want to betray her sin if I could avoid it, but I did not mean that you should ever live with her again,” Lord Stuart added.

Norman stood perfectly silent. He said to himself that now he need never betray what he knew of Camille’s sin. He was glad of it. The man’s noble heart was fain to shield her for the old love’s sake. Retribution had overtaken her in her guilty, shameless career. Needless for him to lift his hand to cast a single stone. She was crouching in her chair, terrified and shame-stricken for once, forgetting all her passionate defiance, livid with the thought that Lord Stuart knew all her sin, all her shame. Oh, why had she not taken his kind advice long ago? Why had she brazened it out like this?

“What are they going to do with me, Finette?” she asked, in a hollow, frightened tone.

“Put you in prison, I suppose. I am sure you deserve it,” was the sullen reply.

Lord Stuart heard the faltering question and the insolent reply. He turned to Camille.

“I think you will go quietly away, so that the law will not touch you. Am I right?” he said.

“Yes, I will go,” she said, with a shudder. “Come, Finette, you must pack my things.”

She dragged herself up from her chair and made an unsteady movement toward the door, cowed at last by the fate that lowered above her head. To be shut up alone in prison, away from Finette, the only friend she had left on earth; to see night and day the mocking face of her murdered husband grinning in the awful solitude—why, it was too horrible to contemplate. She was ready to crawl in the dust at Lord Stuart’s feet to avoid her threatening fate.

“I will go,” she muttered, abjectly again, as she strove to move; but just then she caught sight of something that still had power to turn the blood in her veins to liquid fire.

Thea had lifted her golden head at last from her mother’s breast, and Norman, who had watched most eagerly for that moment, had hastened to infold his darling in his yearning arms.

Camille’s abject submission gave way at that torturing sight. She forgot everything but her rage at the reunion of those two she had tried most eagerly and wickedly to put asunder. She threw up her arms, and, with maddening shrieks, fell writhing upon the floor.

Dr. Hinton hastened to her assistance, and said, a minute later:

“It is an attack of hysteria. I think, if you will all adjourn to the library, I can assist her maid to bring her around quicker.”

They went gladly enough, and presently Camille was far enough recovered to go upstairs to dress for her final departure from Verelands.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Upstairs, as Finette hurriedly flung the rich robes of her mistress into the trunks, bitter recriminations passed between mistress and servant.

“Do you think I’m going to follow the likes of you, bad as I am?” snarled the maid.

“You are no better than I am. Remember that you ran away from Paris because you poisoned your husband!” Camille sneered, and the woman grew livid.

“How do you know?” she questioned, with a start of fear.

“I know many things more with which to refresh your memory, if you persist in your insolence,” Camille retorted, angrily; and a sullen silence ensued, at which the proud mistress began to be frightened.

What if Finette were to desert her now, when, by her wicked madness, she had alienated every living soul from her? when she was alone in the world but for this creature who had aided and abetted her in all of her wicked schemes, helping her to make shipwreck of her soul for the sake of the gold with which she could reward her confederate?

In abject terms she begged her servant not to forsake her, promising that they should sail at once for France, or anywhere that the woman wished, living together on equal terms, sharing alike in her wealth.

“No longer my servant, but my companion, my only friend!” she wailed, abjectly, and Finette sullenly assented to her proposal.

Presently the trunks of finery were all packed and corded, ready to be sent for, and the two women in their traveling-dresses moved cringingly down the stairway, Camille carrying on her arm the hand-satchel in which were deposited the wealth of splendid unset jewels that now represented her fortune.

At the threshold of the door over which she had passed as a serpent, leaving a trail of venom on all it touched, she paused and looked back with a muttered curse toward the library whence came the murmur of happy voices.

“Curse them! I hope I may find a chance to pay them back yet!” she hissed, malevolently, as she followed Finette down the steps to the broad, white-graveled path between the orange-trees. The rising moon threw a broad white light over everything, and for a minute the maid stopped short.

“How happy they are at getting rid of us!” she ejaculated. “Listen to their happy laughter, miladi. You will never hear it again.”

Camille paused and turned her head toward the sound of the happy voices that floated through the open library window, and then a most horrible thing happened.

Finette Du Val, the treacherous maid, as if moved by some irresistible impulse or meditated villainy, suddenly snatched a shining dagger from her belt and plunged it to the hilt in Camille’s back. As she shrieked and fell, the murderess tore the satchel of jewels from her grasp, and fled wildly from the scene of her hideous crime.

The sound of Camille’s agonized shrieks floated into the window, where they were all talking so happily after their deliverance from danger and sorrow. Dr. Hinton ran out hastily, but the rest waited. They thought Camille was only in hysterics again.

Dr. Hinton bent over her, and saw the great pool of blood on the white gravel.

“My God!” he cried, in horror; and a weak voice moaned:

“Finette Du Val, the evil genius of my life, has robbed and murdered me. She has taken my satchel of unset jewels, my whole fortune, and fled!”

“Horrible!” cried the young man; and his shrill cry brought all the others rushing out.

At his hasty explanation some ran in search of the murderess, some remained to help him carry Camille into the house, but after a brief examination Dr. Hinton decided that it could not be done.

“She has but a few minutes to live,” he said; and Thea, who was gazing, half fainting, on the dreadful sight, suddenly fell down upon her knees. It seemed to her too dreadful for Camille to die thus with her proud head low in the dust which her dainty feet had spurned in happier days. She slipped her fair arm gently under the fallen head, and while she was trying to whisper a prayer for the dying, Camille’s soul went away in one long, sighing groan to its judgment.

Her cruel murderess succeeded in getting away safely with her booty, and for a few years led a life of dissolute splendor in her beloved Paris, but at length she was seen and recognized by one who had known her in former days, and she was immediately arrested for poisoning her husband just before she had entered the service of Camille Acton, or Lacy, as her real name was. The woman’s guilt was so clearly proven that she suffered capital punishment for the murder of her husband, and so Camille’s dreadful death was well avenged.

When Norman de Vere, at Verelands, read the story of her punishment, his feet strayed to a nameless grave in the churchyard which his dear old mother, in the kindness of her heart, often adorned with flowers, and with his eyes on the low, green mound, he whispered:

“Poor Camille! your death is at least avenged. May Heaven rest your soul!”

Verelands was never a very happy place to them after the white gravel before the door had soaked up Camille’s life-blood. Even Norman’s mother was glad to forsake it for some years after Camille was buried, and to go abroad with the rest to Lord Stuart’s beautiful English estate, where it seemed only right and proper that the De Veres should spend half their time at least, since their eldest son, the noble little Alan Arthur, must some day reign there in his uncle’s stead, a noble lord, who inherited a noble soul from his father, as well as beauty and high estate from his sweet mother our Little Sweetheart.

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THE HART SERIES

Laura Jean Libbey     Miss Caroline Hart     Mrs. E. Burke Collins      Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller     Charlotte M. Braeme     Barbara Howard     Lucy Randall Comfort      Mary E. Bryan     Marie Corelli

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Caroline Hart.

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The Woman Who Came Between

Caroline Hart.

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Aleta’s Terrible Secret

Laura Jean Libbey.

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Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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A Handsome Engineer’s Flirtation

Laura J. Libbey.

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Caroline Hart.

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Was She Sweetheart or Wife

Laura Jean Libbey.

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Nameless Bess

Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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That Awful Scar

Caroline Hart.

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Flora Garland’s Courtship

Laura Jean Libbey.

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Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Married at Sight

Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Her Right to Love

Caroline Hart.

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The Loan of a Lover

Laura Jean Libbey.

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The Game of Love

Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Vendetta

Marie Corelli.

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The Girl He Forsook

Laura Jean Libbey.

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Redeemed by Love

Caroline Hart.

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A Wasted Love

Caroline Hart.

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A Dangerous Flirtation

Laura Jean Libbey.

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A Haunted Life

Caroline Hart.

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Garnetta, the Silver King’s Daughter

L. J. Libbey.

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Marie Corelli.

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Charles Garvice.

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A Hidden Terror

Caroline Hart.

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Flora Temple

Laura Jean Libbey.

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Claribel’s Love Story

Charlotte M. Braeme.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Caroline Hart.

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Laura Jean Libbey.

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Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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Caroline Hart.

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Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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Caroline Hart.

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Little Sweetheart

Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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Caroline Hart.

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Charlotte M. Braeme.

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The Rival Heiresses

Caroline Hart.

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Little Nobody

Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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Her Husband’s Ghost

Mary E. Bryan.

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Sold for Gold

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Her Husband’s Secret

Lucy Randall Comfort.

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A Passionate Love

Barbara Howard.

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From Want to Wealth

Caroline Hart.

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Loved You Better Than You Knew

Mrs. A. Miller.

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Irene’s Vow

Charlotte M. Braeme.

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She Loved Not Wisely

Caroline Hart.

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Molly’s Treachery

Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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Was It Wrong?

Barbara Howard.

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The Midnight Marriage

Mrs. Sumner Hayden.

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Ailsa

Wenona Gilman.

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Her Dark Inheritance

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Viola’s Vanity

Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller.

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The Ghost of the Hurricane Hills

Mary E. Bryan.

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A Woman Wronged

Caroline Hart.

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Was She His Lawful Wife?

Barbara Howard.

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Val, the Tomboy

Wenona Gilman.

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The Richmond Secret

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Edna’s Vow

Charlotte M. Stanley.

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Hearts of Fire

Caroline Hart.

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Augusta J. Evans.

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Nobody’s Wife

Caroline Hart.

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Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.

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Self-Raised

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Pretty Little Rosebud

Barbara Howard.

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Inez

Augusta J. Evans.

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The Girl Wife

Mrs. Sumner Hayden.

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Dora Thorne

Charlotte M. Braeme.

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Followed by Fate

Lucy Randall Comfort.

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India, or the Pearl of Pearl River

Southworth.

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Mad Kingsley’s Heir

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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The Missing Bride

Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth.

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Wicked Sir Dare

Charles Garvice.

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Daintie’s Cruel Rivals

Mrs. Alex. McV. Miller.

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Lillian’s Vow

Caroline Hart.

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Miss Estcourt

Charles Garvice.

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Beulah

Augusta J. Evans.

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Daphane’s Fate

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Wormwood

Marie Corelli.

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Nellie

Charles Garvice.

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His Legal Wife

Mary E. Bryan.

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Macaria

Augusta J. Evans.

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Lost and Found

Charlotte M. Stanley.

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The Curse of Clifton

Mrs. Southworth.

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That Strange Girl

Charles Garvice.

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The Lovers at Storm Castle

Mrs. M. A. Collins.

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Margerie’s Mistake

Lucy Randall Comfort.

102—

The Curse of Pocahontas

Wenona Gilman.

103—

My Love Kitty

Charles Garvice.

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His Fairy Queen

Elizabeth Stiles.

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From Worse than Death

Caroline Hart.

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Audrey Fane’s Love

Mrs. E. Burke Collins.

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Thorns and Orange Blossoms

Charlotte Braeme.

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Ethel Dreeme

Frank Corey.

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Three Girls

Mary E. Bryan.

110—

A Strange Marriage

Caroline Hart.

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Violet

Charles Garvice.

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The Ghost of the Power

Mrs. Sumner Hayden.

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Baptised with a Curse

Edith Stewart Drewry.

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A Tragic Blunder

Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron.

115—

The Secret of Her Life

Edward Jenkins.

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My Guardian

Ada Cambridge.

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A Last Love

Georges Ohnet.

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His Angel

Henry Herman.

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Pretty Miss Bellew

Theo. Gift.

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Blind Love

Wilkie Collins.

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A Life’s Mistake

Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron.

122—

Won By Waiting

Edna Lyall.

123—

Passion’s Slave

King.

124—

Under Currents

Duchess.

125—

False Vow

Braeme.

126—

The Belle of Lynne

Braeme.

127—

Lord Lynne’s Choice

Braeme.

128—

Blossom and Fruit

Braeme.

129—

Weaker Than a Woman

Braeme.

130—

Tempest and Sunshine

Mary J. Holmes.

131—

Lady Muriel’s Secret

Braeme.

132—

A Mad Love

Braeme.

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Table of Contents

LITTLE SWEETHEART

LITTLE SWEETHEART.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

CHAPTER XXIX.

CHAPTER XXX.

CHAPTER XXXI.

CHAPTER XXXII.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

CHAPTER XXXV.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

CHAPTER XL.

CHAPTER XLI.

CHAPTER XLII.

CHAPTER XLIII.

CHAPTER XLIV.

CHAPTER XLV.

CHAPTER XLVI.

CHAPTER XLVII.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

CHAPTER XLIX.

CHAPTER L.

CHAPTER LI.

CHAPTER LII.

CHAPTER LIII.

CHAPTER LIV.

CHAPTER LV.

CHAPTER LVI.

CHAPTER LVII.

CHAPTER LVIII.

CHAPTER LIX.

CHAPTER LX.

CHAPTER LXI.

CHAPTER LXII.

CHAPTER LXIII.

CHAPTER LXIV.

CHAPTER LXV.

CHAPTER LXVI.

CHAPTER LXVII.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

CHAPTER LXIX.

CHAPTER LXX.

CHAPTER LXXI.

CHAPTER LXXII.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Transcriber’s Notes

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