CHAPTER LII.

"Two maskers! what had they to doWith vows forsworn and loves untrue?"

Mrs. Le Roy gave her attention to Mr. Ford and the child. She had drawn little Laurence to a seat by her side, and was showing him some fine engravings. She could not keep her fascinated eyes from the beautiful, spirited, boyish face that bore such a startling resemblance to that of her own son. Mr. Ford watched her closely, and he saw that her heart had gone out to the child, and that she was trying to win his love in return. He looked on approvingly, longing, in the depths of his unselfish heart, for a reconciliation between the long-parted husband and wife.

"Neither one is happy," he said to himself, looking at them as they sat talking calmly like strangers—the proud husband and the proud wife. "That man has a story written on his face; he has suffered intensely; is it possible he does not suspect the truth? Can he look at her—speak to her—and not recognize her? It almost seems impossible. There was never beauty before like hers—never such winsomeness and artless grace. Before I came here I despised St. Leon Le Roy. Why is it that I pity him now? Is it because I can read his sorrow and repentance in the sadness of his face?"

Mr. Le Roy, rising at that moment, said, quietly, looking at his mother:

"I am taking Mrs. Lynn to the library, mother, to show her a book we have been discussing, if you and Mr. Ford will excuse us."

"Certainly," both answered in a breath; and they went away, followed by Mrs. Le Roy's startled glance.

"Your niece is very beautiful," she said, turning back, after a moment, to Mr. Ford. "Has she been long a widow?"

"Seven years," he answered.

"Then the child has never known his father?" she said, with a light, pitying touch of her ringed white hand on the boy's dark, clustering curls.

"No—much to the lad's regret," said Mr. Ford.

"I dare say you have acted a father's part by the fatherless one," she remarked, turning her grave, questioning eyes on his face. It seemed as if she was fascinated to speak of little Laurence. She could not keep her eyes nor her thoughts from him.

"Since I have known him—yes," Mr. Ford answered. "But though his mother is my own sister's child, Mrs. Le Roy, I never met her, never knew of her existence, until she was a widow, with a son three years old."

She looked the curiosity she was too well bred to express in words.

"Do you care to know the reason why?" asked Mr. Ford.

"I confess you have aroused my curiosity," she replied, with a smile.

"Then I will tell you," he said. "When I was quite a lad I ran away to Australia, seized with a gold-fever, then very prevalent in New York. After years of ill luck, sickness, and misfortune, I struck a bonanza. I was an old man then, and my heart yearned for the home and the friends of my youth. I came home, determined to share my wealth and prosperity with them, but all were dead, mother, father, and even the toddling little sister I had loved so dearly. She had married, and died in a short time after, leaving one daughter, whom I found it impossible to trace. Several years later, I discovered my missing niece, by a fortunate accident, in the brilliant novelist, Mrs. Lynn."

"She is very young to have achieved fame in the literary world," said the lady.

"The result of necessity, my dear madam," Mr. Ford replied. "Losing her husband before the birth of her child, my niece, scarcely more than a child herself then, was thrown upon her own resources for support. She became a writer, and most fortunately for the sake of the little, helpless being dependent upon her care, she succeeded where the many fail," he ended, leaving Mrs. Le Roy's unspoken curiosity on the subject of Mrs. Lynn even greater than before, through his meager explanation.

Mr. Le Roy led his beautiful guest to the library, and placed a chair beside the table where he usually sat to read. Laurel sat silently a moment with averted face. She was fighting down her heart, thrusting back the memories that would arise like pallid ghosts from the dead past. Here in this room, nay, in this very chair where she was sitting, St. Leon had wooed her for his wife. She could be cold and proud in the grand drawing-room. It was there that he had put her away from him, there that he had spoken the cruel, angry words that sundered their hearts and lives forever. The memory of that night and that scene hardened her heart to her unforgiving husband, and helped her to be cold and careless. Here it was all different. This quiet retreat was hallowed by some of the sweetest moments of her life.

That hour which had lifted her from dumb, jealous misery and despair to the heights of bliss had come to her here.

The memory of her year of wedded happiness rushed over her with all the love and joy that had been crowded into it.

She trembled, she recalled all the horror and despair that had followed after, and for a moment it seemed to her that all was a hideous dream from which she would awaken presently. She longed to cry out aloud, to rush from this haunted room, to do anything that would free her from the gaze of those sad, dark eyes, whose burning glances as they sought her face seemed to read her secret and to plead with her for love and reconciliation. A smothered gasp, and she shook off the dangerous, luring spell, and became herself again, calm, indifferent, yet gracious, the woman that slighted and scorned love had made "icily splendid," fatally fair, as many a man had owned to his cost.

She looked about for something to divert her attention, and saw just at her hand lying on the table a volume elegantly bound in crimson and gold. She took it in her hand and read aloud the gold-lettered title on the back: "Laurel Blossoms."

"Laurel Blossoms," she repeated, and turned to the title-page. With widening eyes and a swift color that went and came from white to red and from red to white she read: "By Louis Vane."

St. Leon had drawn a chair near her. He spoke to her now in a calm, carefully modulated voice that went far toward restoring her shattered equanimity.

"That is a collection of tales and essays, Mrs. Lynn, arranged by myself for publication. The author is long since dead. He was my wife's father."

"Yes," she murmured, turning the precious pages slowly with her trembling hands, her eyes downcast, and bravely keeping back their threatening tears.

"Perhaps some one has told you the romantic story of my marriage, Mrs. Lynn?" he said, watching the fair, drooping face with earnest eyes.

She shook her head. She would not trust herself to speak.

"No?" he said. "Then perhaps I will tell you some day myself. You love romance and tragedy, I infer, from your books. My marriage had the elements of both in it."

She bowed again silently. It was quite impossible for her to utter a word just then; but she said to herself, with a sort of passionate disdain, that he was very daring, indeed, to speak to her of his marriage—to her, of all women in the world.

He went on in his quiet, musical tones:

"Louis Vane was a genius, but, like many another gifted spirit, he smirched the glorious talents given him in the degradation of strong drink. He loved pleasure better than fame. But for his weakness and his madness he would have made a name that must have gone ringing down the ages."

She was silent, steeling her heart to the sweetness of those words of praise. She remembered that strong, sweet voice that praised Louis Vane for his genius now, denouncing and scorning her that night, long years ago, as a "drunken journalist's daughter."

"When my wife died, seven years ago," went on St. Leon, "I made it my duty and my pleasure to gather her father's miscellaneous writings from the journals and magazines where they were scattered,and publish them in one volume, that they might be rescued from oblivion and preserved for the pleasure of his admirers. The book had a great sale. It was very popular. Have you never seen it before, Mrs. Lynn?"

Again she shook her head in silence.

"Then let me beg your acceptance of this copy. I should like you to read it. I assure you it will repay perusal. You may wonder at its fanciful name. My dead young wife was called Laurel. Is it not a sweet name? In memory of her I called it 'Laurel Blossoms'!"

Would he never have done speaking? A strange softness was stealing over her heart that frightened her. No other atonement on earth could have touched and moved her like this one. It was what she could have wished most upon earth—to have her father's brilliant essays collected into this beautiful volume, and yet she had never thought of doing it herself. A pang of self-reproach pierced her heart.

"Forgive me, father," she whispered, inly, as if the dead were present in spirit, and could know and feel her mute repentance. "I have been so absorbed in my own selfish sorrows and triumphs I forgot to rescue your genius from the oblivion that must have ingulfed it but for this man's effort."

All this while he was waiting for an answer. What must he think of her strange silence? With a great effort she lifted her eyes to his face, and said, in tones ringing with latent sarcasm and incredulity:

"You must have loved your wife very dearly, Mr. Le Roy?"

"More than I knew," he answered, simply, and the tone even more than the words betrayed the burden of remorse and sorrow his heart had borne for years.

She rose abruptly with the precious volume of her father's writings clasped tightly in her hands. She was afraid to stay longer—afraid of that sweet and subtle pity that thrilled her woman's heart.

"I have made too long a call for a first visit," she said. "Another time will do for the books of which we spoke. The 'Laurel Blossoms' made me forget."

"You have forgotten the flowers I promised to show you, too," he said. "Let me take you to the garden now."

"Some other time. I must really go now," she said, feeling that for this one day she had already borne all that she could bear.

He did not urge the point. Perhaps the trial was as hard for him as for her.

"Will you drive with me to-morrow?" he asked, as he touched her hand at parting. "There are some beautiful views in this vicinity that I should like to have the pleasure of showing you."

"Yes, I will go," she answered, hastily, unable to deny herself the blended bliss and pain of his companionship even while she despised herself for what she disdainfully termed to herself her woman's weakness.

To-morrow came—one of the fairest of summer days, with a sea-blue sky and the goldenest sunshine and most fragrant flowers.Laurel prepared for her drive with Mr. Le Roy with a beating heart. She felt that she was acting imprudently in going with him, for she scarcely dared trust herself in his presence; but she could not draw back from her promise. An irresistible fascination drew her on to the meeting with the husband so hopelessly and madly loved in the long years while she wandered afar from him, an alien from his home and heart.

Some strange thoughts were stirring in her heart, evoked by his looks and words. She could scarcely fail to see that he had repented.

"Perhaps, if he knew that Laurel Vane was living, he would forgive her and take her back. Her fault might not seem so black and bitter now, seen through the kindly veil of years," she said to herself. "He might even love and trust me again."

But there came to her a sudden remembrance of words he had spoken long ago, when he had told her of Maud Merivale's deceit and falsity.

"I could never again love a woman who had deceived me. Once fallen from its pedestal, the broken idol could never be restored again."

She looked at the beautiful, passion-pale face reflected in the glittering mirror, and a hopeless sigh drifted across her lips.

"I am a 'broken idol,'" she said, drearily. "I have fallen from my place in his heart, and I can never be taken back, St. Leon is too proud to forgive my girlhood's sin."

She had not been unloved in all these years. Proud men and gifted had bowed before her, won by her beauty and her genius. They marveled at her coldness, her indifference. No one guessed at the mad love lying deep in her heart under the ashes of the dead years—a smoldering fire that in the past few days had leaped into a living flame. It needed all her strength, all her pride, to fight it back. She went with him, and when he saw her he could scarcely repress a startled cry. She had chosen the colors that always became his young wife best—white and scarlet. Her white hat and a wreath of scarlet poppies; some scarlet passion-flowers were fastened in the neck of her white dress. She was so like—so like his dead wife that it would only have seemed natural to have taken her in his arms and kissed her and called her by the name of the dead.

Suddenly, as they paused before the white gates of a great, wide inclosure, she uttered a cry of dismay.

"This is the cemetery, Mr. Le Roy! Surely, you did not mean to bring me here!"

"Yes," he answered, and helped her down from the landau and led her into the grim necropolis of the dead.

She did not understand. She walked by him, silent and frightened, among the gleaming marbles, the dark-green shrubbery, the beautiful flowers with which loving hearts had decorated the graves of their dead. She heard her husband dreamily repeating some sad familiar words:

"The massy marbles restOn the lips that we have prestIn their bloom:And the names we loved to hearHave been carved for many a yearOn the tomb."

Suddenly he drew her hand in his arm, and led her down a shaded green alley-way. In a minute they paused before a little plot of ground whose velvet-green turf was bright with beds of rarest flowers. In the midst was a single grave, with roses and passion-flowers trailing over it. Laurel lifted her eyes and read the name cut deep into the gleaming marble shaft.

"LAUREL,Beloved wife of St. Leon Le Roy."

She felt a strangely hysterical inclination to laugh out aloud. How strange it seemed to stand there, so full of life and youth and passion, and read her own name carved upon a gravestone! How strange, how horrible to feel that, standing there by her husband's side, she was as dead to him as if, indeed, her lifeless clay were moldering in that low, green grave!

His low, deep voice broke the trance of hysterical horror that held her senses enchained:

"Mrs. Lynn, I told you yesterday that there were elements of romance and tragedy in my marriage that might interest even you. I promised, too, that I would tell you the story some day. Here, at poor Laurel's grave, I propose to keep my word."

He found her a seat, and she waited silently to hear him speak. She was most curious to hear the story of her girlhood's love and temptation told by her husband's lips from his own standpoint.

St. Leon Le Roy threw himself down on the green turf at Mrs. Lynn's feet, and resting his arm on his wife's grave, leaned his head in his hand. So resting he could look up and note every expression of the beautiful face above him—the face, deathly pale with emotion now, for all she tried so bravely to appear politely calm and interested like the stranger she pretended to be.

"Do you care to hear this story I am about to tell you?" he asked, abruptly.

"I am sure I shall be interested," she replied, gently, and thus encouraged he began.

"It is more than nine years ago now that my mother received a letter from a lady friend in New York—Mrs. Gordon, the wife of the well-known publisher—perhaps you know him, Mrs. Lynn," he said.

"Mr. Gordon is my publisher," she replied.

"He had an only child—a beautiful daughter," said Mr. Le Roy. "She had betrothed herself to a poor young man of whom her parents disapproved. They proposed to break off the match by strategy, if possible. They sent their daughter to Eden to remain a few months, proposing to send her lover abroad during her absence, and so separate them as to end the affair in the quietest manner possible."

He paused, but she made no comment on his words, only inclined her golden head attentively.

"I was five-and-thirty years old when Beatrix Gordon came toEden, she a beautiful child of sixteen," went on St. Leon, slowly, as if looking back into the past. "Perhaps you will think I was too old for her, Mrs. Lynn, but my heart was carried by storm, as it were, by the lovely girl. I think almost from the first hour of our meeting I recognized my fate in her. She was like no other woman I ever met. If I talked to you all day, Mrs. Lynn," said St. Leon, looking deep into her eyes with his dark, mesmeric orbs, "I could never portray in words her beauty and sweetness. There was a charm of novelty about them. She was rarely original. She was afraid of me at first.Thatpiqued me, although it was my own fault. Very soon I found that my pique was the offspring of unconscious love. I, St. Leon Le Roy, who despised women, who had been angry at first at the girl's coming, had lost my heart to the slip of a girl who belonged to another. The bitter consciousness of that latter fact aroused my jealousy and added fuel to the fire of my passion. I was angry with myself, ashamed of myself, yet I could no more have checked the course of my strong, passionate love than I could have stemmed the tide of a rushing river. Can you understand me, Mrs. Lynn?"

She answered quietly, "Yes," but to her own heart she said: "Ah, if he only knew."

"Then you may guess something of what I suffered," said St. Leon, and for a moment he was silent, and his gaze turned from her face, as he seemed lost in retrospection. She looked at the dark, haughtily handsome face, and her heart thrilled within her. It had all its old, luring, magnetic charm for her. She had repented her fault long ago; she was sorry for her sin, bitterly sorry, but looking on her husband's face now, she did not wonder that she had sinned for his sake. In spite of time, in spite of pride, the old love was strong within her. She might have exclaimed, with Byron:

"I deemed that time, I deemed that pride,Had quenched at length my early flame;Nor knew till seated by thy side,My heart in all save hope the same."

It was well for her that when he resumed his story he did not look up. Too much of her heart was written on her lovely, mobile face.

"From the despair of my jealous love and misery, I wakened to passionate bliss," he continued. "I know not when the child's first shyness and dread of me changed to a tenderer feeling, but it came upon me suddenly, and with heavenly sweetness, that she loved me. She had forgotten her lover in New York. Mrs. Lynn, I swear I believed she loved me even as I loved her, with a singleness and depth of devotion such as few hearts are capable of feeling. God forgive me that I doubted her once! No one was ever more cruelly punished for unbelief and hardness than I have been!"

With his eyes downcast upon that low, green grave, he did not see how bitterly her lip curled as it always did when that night of her betrayal rushed bleakly over her.

"She gave me her tender, trusting heart, and her beautiful self," he went on. "We were married. Her parents were absent, and it was a very quiet ceremony in a quiet church that gave me the desire of my heart. We went abroad for our honeymoon, and remained more than a year."

A sigh, heavy with his heart's despair, drifted over his lips.

"Sucha year, Mrs. Lynn!—a golden year, into whose short space was crowded all the real happiness and bliss of my life. She made me the happiest, most blessed of men in that brief time. I am forty-four years old, Mrs. Lynn, but, it seems to me I have only really lived one year—one year that shines on me from the past like a radiant star in the darkness of night."

Laurel felt a dreary kind of pleasure in hearing her husband ascribe to her the only real happiness of his life. It was some atonement for all that she had borne, all that she had suffered. Her heart beat quick and fast beneath her white robe. He went on sadly:

"Never was there a stormier ending to a beautiful, sunny, summer day, never a sadder waking from a happy dream. And it was all so swift and sudden. It was like Burns' poem.

"'No pause the dire extremes between,She made me blest and broke my heart.'"

Ah, yes, Laurel could remember how swift and sudden it had all been—how like a thunderbolt falling from a clear sky. She sat there pale and silent, and listened to her own story told by her husband's lips, and felt a strange, dreary, aching pity for the girl who had loved and suffered so much quite as if it had been another woman than herself.

"We came home at last," he said. "My mother was very ill, and my wife nursed and tended her unweariedly, and with all a daughter's devotion, until she became convalescent. Then the hour of my awakening came. It was so swift, so horribly sudden, I wonder sometimes that it did not kill me."

Ah, she had wondered so often that she, too, had not died beneath the stroke of that cruel fate. But she made no sign, she only sat still and looked at the bowed head before her, and listened to his words.

"The Gordons came down from New York one day quite unexpectedly, to visit their daughter. I was delighted, Mrs. Lynn, because I thought it would add to my darling's happiness. I thought I would surprise her, so I concealed the fact of their arrival, and led her into their presence full of happiness myself in the prospect of witnessing her amazement and joy."

Mrs. Lynn held her costly fan before her face a moment. She did not want him to see the spasms of agony that convulsed her face. Ah, how bitterly it all rushed over her, the pain, the shame, the horror of that supreme moment he was now portraying.

"You are smothering a yawn behind your fan," he said. "Does my story weary you, Mrs. Lynn? It has not developed into a plot for a novel yet, has it? You see I have been telling it in the plainest fashion. I have not embellished it like a story-writer. And, besides, up to the moment of which I have spoken it had not developed any phases of the tragic. It had only been the simplest, sweetest love idyl that was ever lived."

"That is perfectly true," she said to herself, with a burning face and a strangely throbbing heart.

"But in the moment when I led my beautiful wife into the drawing-room at Eden to meet her parents thedénouementcame," said St. Leon Le Roy. "The tragic element entered my story then. Can you guess what happened, Mrs. Lynn?"

"Your wife was properly surprised, and glad to see her parents, I presume," said Mrs. Lynn, with an air of polite interest.

His dark lashes lifted, he gazed at her sadly a moment, then they fell again.

"No one could guess whatdidtake place," said Mr. Le Roy. "It was like a romance. You have never written anything stranger in all your novels, Mrs. Lynn. But you must not expect me to describe it to you in the language of fiction. Your own imagination must invest it with all the eloquence it merits. I have been surprised at many things in my life, Mrs. Lynn, but I was never more surprised, never more shocked, than I was in the moment when I led my Beatrix up to her mother. I had expected demonstrations of delighted affection, I beheld only utter dismay and confusion. Can you believe it, Mrs. Lynn? My young wife and the Gordons had never met before in their lives!"

A faint murmur came from her lips, meant to convey surprise. He accepted it as such, and went on slowly:

"Then it all came out. I had been deceived. I had been made the victim of a clever conspiracy. Two beautiful, clever girls had plotted together and the result was this: Beatrix Gordon had never come to Eden. She had gone away and married her lover, and she had sent Laurel Vane to us in her place. It was cleverly planned, as I have said just now, but I have often wondered how Laurel carried it out, and escaped detection. She was innocent and transparent as a child. She was frightened always, I know, for when all came out I could recall many things that pointed to the truth if only I had not been so blind. But fate helped it on, and made me the husband, not of Beatrix Gordon, the daughter of the wealthy, well-born publisher, but of Laurel Vane, the penniless orphan child of an author who, with the genius of an Edgar Allan Poe, had shared all the weaknesses of the great poet and died as miserable."

He paused, Laurel wondered if he could hear her heart beating in the stillness of that place of graves. It sounded so loudly in her ears, it almost drowned his voice.

It was only by the greatest effort of her pride and will that she preserved her outward calmness.

"It was a terrible discovery for me to make," he said. "I was wounded in my love, in my faith, in my pride. Can you imagine what I did, Mrs. Lynn?"

He had lifted his drooping head, and was looking straight into her face. She looked back at him steadily, almost scornfully, as she replied:

"You loved her so dearly, and she made you so happy, perhaps I should not err if I said that you forgave the girl for her sin."

He crushed back something like a groan upon his lips.

"Do you think I should have done so, Mrs. Lynn?" he asked.

"I do not know how to answer you," she said, and her voicetrembled. "From a woman's standpoint, I should answer yes. But men are unlike women, are they not?—harder, colder, prone to harsh judgments!"

"Yes, men are harder," he said, and was silent until she broke the strange stillness with her strange voice.

"Do you love Tennyson, Mr. Le Roy? I do. I think one of the grandest, most beautiful passages in the book is King Arthur's forgiveness of Guinevere's terrible sin. Do you remember those words:

"'Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives'?"

"Her sin was not like Guinevere's," he said, hastily.

"And therefore the more easily to be forgiven," she said. "Do you not think that your wife suffered for her sin? And, after all, it was for love's sake. And women do and dare so much for love's sake, remember."

"You are speaking as if I did not forgive her," he said. "I had not told you that yet."

"But I fancied it must be so," she said, "because this is her grave."

The shot went home. He shivered, and a hollow groan escaped his lips.

"Would she have died for such a cause?" he asked, and she answered gravely, and with a touch of sadness.

"Women's hearts have broken for even lighter causes."

To herself she said, mournfully: "I should have died myself if it had not been for little Laurie's coming. I could not have lived through these weary years if it had not been for the little child that loved me!"

"Herheart was broken then," he said, "for I refused to forgive her, Mrs. Lynn. I was hard and stern and angry. But I never dreamed what would happen."

"What did she do?" inquired the brilliant novelist, with interest.

"She went away that night, Mrs. Lynn, and all search for her proved futile and vain. In a few days after a body washed up from the river—a young, golden-haired woman. They said it was Laurel, my missing wife. You know the rest. This is her grave."

Laurel looked at the grassy mound with a strange dreary wonder over the waif whom they had buried there. She wondered what her name and history had been. "Perhaps as sad as mine," she sighed to herself.

"This is her grave," he repeated. "Ah, Mrs. Lynn, you have a glowing, vivid imagination. Can you fancy what I have suffered? Can you comprehend how the demons of remorse and despair have pursued me unceasingly?"

"Then you repented when too late?" she said.

"Too late," he echoed, drearily. "Yes, I repented whentoo late. Ah, Mrs. Lynn, are there any sadder words than those two in the English language?"

"Yes, I think so," she replied. "You remember what the poet Whittier has written?

"'Of all sad words of tongue or pen,The saddest are these: "It might have been."'"

"'It might have been,'" he repeated. "Ah, yes, I can testify to all the sadness of those words! Have I not felt it all? Since she died my life has been one dreary penance, one long regret. Ah, Mrs. Lynn, if only I had forgiven her—if only I had not driven her from me by my harshness and cruelty! I was a fool, and blind. She loved me and made me happy. She sinned through her love, first, for Beatrix Gordon, then for me. Her story is the saddest, the most pitiful I ever heard or read. I should have forgiven the child—she was nothing but a child, and she had not been well taught. But it was all so sudden, and I was half dazed by the shock. Ah, well, I have had ample time to repent my haste and madness. The years have been long and dreary enough without my darling. Every time I come here to this quiet grave I whisper to the silent dust beneath:

"'Oh, to call back the days that are not!My eyes were blinded, your words were few,Do you know the truth now up in heaven,Laurel, Laurel, tender and true?'"

How the sweet passion and sorrow of the words moved her! He was sorry for his cruelty, he repented it all. She said to herself that if she had really been dead in that grave beneath him, she must have heard those words—they would have thrilled even her dust. Tennyson's beautiful words came into her mind:

"My dust would hear him and beatHad it lain for a century dead,Would start and tremble under his feetAnd blossom in purple and red."

He looked up at her sitting there so fair and young, and so like the dead, and his heart went out to her in passionate adoration. He cried out, hoarsely, in his deep emotion:

"Mrs. Lynn, what do you think? Have I really sinned beyond forgiveness? If Laurel could come back from the world of shadows, do you think she would forgive me for that night?"

"Are you asking me to tell you what I should do in your wife's place, Mr. Le Roy?" she asked him in a low, strange voice.

"Yes, put yourself in her place," he replied. "Tell me, could you forgive me and love me again after the coldness with which I put my wife from me that night?"

"I do not believe I could ever forget or forgive such unkindness," she replied.

He looked at her keenly, with a brooding trouble in his eyes.

"Perhaps you do not look at the subject quite as my young wife would have done," he said, anxiously. "Laurel loved me, Mrs. Lynn. Do not forget that. Would she not forgive me for love's sweet sake?"

"No, I do not think she would. Her pride would be stronger than her love," answered the beautiful woman.

"Laurel was not proud," said St. Leon Le Roy.

"Not when you loved her, not when she was happy," said Mrs. Lynn. "But can you not fancy the sweetness of even such a nature as hers turned to gall by wrong and ruth? I repeat it, Mr. Le Roy, if I were in your Laurel's place, if I could come back after allthose years, I believe I should be as proud and cold as I was gentle once, I do not believe I could forgive you!"

He sprung up, he held out his arms to her yearningly, his face transfigured by the yearning passion of his heart.

"Laurel, Laurel, do not speak to me so cruelly, do not judge me so hardly!" he cried. "Do you think I do not know you, my darling?—that I have not known you since the moment we met again? That senseless marble lies when it says my wife is dead! You are she, you are Laurel Le Roy!"

There was a moment of the most utter silence while St. Leon Le Roy's wild, appealing words died upon the stillness of the solemn place.

Mrs. Lynn was struck dumb for an instant by the suddenness and passion of her husband's accusation. She grew ghastly pale—she trembled like a wind-blown leaf, the denial she would have uttered died gaspingly upon her quivering lips.

"You are my wife," he repeated. "There was never but one face, one voice in this world like yours, and they belonged to Laurel Vane. My darling, you will not deny the truth! You did not throw yourself into the dark, cruel river that summer night. You went away and hid yourself from me in the wide world. It was some unknown waif whom we buried in this shaft for you, my own sweet one! That marble cross speaks falsely. Thank God you live, Laurel, to hear the story of my sorrow and repentance! You cannot, you will not, refuse to forgive me!"

She sprung from her seat as he advanced, and slowly retreated before him, her eyes wide and dark with terror; she put out her white hands before her as if to ward off a blow.

"You are mad!" she cried, hoarsely. "You are simply mad, Mr. Le Roy! Your great sorrow has unhinged your brain. Come away from this gloomy place of graves into the world again, and I will try to forget your momentary madness!"

"Do you mean to deny the truth?" he cried, gazing reproachfully at the beautiful, defiant face. "Is it right to scorn me, Laurel, when I have so bitterly repented the wrong I did you? Is it right to defraud me of my child's love—right to defraud the child of his father's love? Do you think I do not know that your beautiful little Laurence is my own child? Shall I tell you why my mother fainted in your rose garden that day? She lifted the boy's dark, clustering locks from his temples and saw the familiar Le Roy birth-mark—the crimson heart that you, my wife, have so often kissed on my temple. I saw her, although I made no sign. Laurel, you will give me my son? You will come home to Eden yourself, forgetting and forgiving all the past, will you not, my injured wife? I will atone for my momentary hardness by the devotion of a lifetime!"

He held out his arms yearningly to the beautiful, startled woman standing dumbly before him with a smile of scorn on her perfect lips. She was terribly frightened when she found that he had recognizedher, but she had no thought of confessing the truth. All the hard, bitter pride that had grown up in her heart these eight years was at war with her husband's claim. She held her hands out before her as if to ward him off as he came nearer to her side.

"I can only say, as I did just now, that you are mad," she said. "I can excuse you because I know that your brain must be turned by your sorrow. But this must go no further. I will not endure it. There are limits that even my patience will not suffer to be passed. I am nothing to you, St. Leon Le Roy—nothing! As for the child, you have deceived yourself. It is the scar of a wound on the child's temple, not a birth-mark as you think."

He stared at her like one dazed, his arms dropping weakly at his sides. That she would refuse to forgive him he had expected and dreaded, but that she would deny her identity when taxed with it, had not occurred to him. It put quite a new phase upon the matter. She had not staggered his convictions in the least, but she had shown him what ground both stood upon. He was powerless, helpless. There was nothing for him but to bow to her will.

"You deny my charges?" he said. "You cut the ground from under my feet and leave me without a hope—with nothing but this grave?"

"Yes," she answered, pale as death, beautiful, proud, defiant. "I forgive you for your brief madness. We will never recur to it again. Now, will you take me home?"

"In a moment," he answered. He was busy plucking some flowers from the grave. He held them out to her.

"Mrs. Lynn, will you take these flowers?" he said. "Take them and keep them. They may remind you sometimes of all that is buried in this grave for me—love, hope, happiness."

She took them silently, and they went away from that place of tombs into the busy, beautiful world again. They spoke but little driving home, and then only on indifferent subjects—never on the theme lying deep in their hearts—the love, the remorse, the unsatisfied longing, the fruitless pain of their lives.

But Laurel, when she had reached her own private room, threw herself down upon the floor with a great, tearless sob of utter agony.

"Oh, how cruel I am," she cried. "For the sake of my miserable pride, I have murdered my own last chance of happiness!"

It was a long while before Laurel recovered her calmness. She had been severely shaken by her interview with Mr. Le Roy. She did not feel half so triumphant and victorious as she might have done. She had repulsed her husband, she had made him suffer all that she had suffered that night when he had renounced her. But there was none of the sweetness of victory in her triumph. She was at war with herself. Her own heart was a traitor. It only ached over the conquest of love by ruthless pride. The triumph was bitterer than defeat.

When she dragged herself up from the floor at last, with all hermisery written on her face, she saw a letter lying on her toilet-table. It had been brought in by her maid during her absence. She took it up, and found that it was addressed to herself, in the delicate, refined hand of Mrs. Le Roy.

An expression of dismay and dread came over the beautiful face.

"Why has she written to me?" she asked herself. "Does she, too, mean to claim me and Laurie?"

She grew very pale at the thought. A dread came over her that they would take her child from her to punish her for her willfulness and pride.

"They shall not have him," she said to herself, setting her little white teeth firmly together. "I will take my little son and fly to the uttermost ends of the earth with him. I was foolish and weak even to have come here. I forgot many things I ought to have remembered. I forgot utterly that tell-tale birth mark on my child's temple—the birth-mark of all the Le Roys. I never dreamed that they would suspect me. I thought that grave with my name upon it was an all sufficient shield for me."

She opened the letter and read it. It was a beautiful, pathetic appeal that brought tears to Laurel's proud, dark eyes. Mrs. Le Roy had recognized her, too. She prayed her to forgive St. Leon for his hardness of heart, and to return to him.

"I do not know whether my son has recognized you or not, Laurel," wrote the anxious mother. "You may remember that he is very proud and reserved. He is silent. He makes no sign. And yet I think that he could not have failed to know you. Forgive him, Laurel. He has suffered bitterly and repented sorely. Let me tell him that you are living, and that your beautiful little son is his own child. Let me tell him that you both will come home to us. Ah, Laurel, my dear daughter, I cannot tell you how tenderly my heart goes out to you, both for your own sake and for that of the child. How I love the beautiful, manly little lad! He is the heir to Eden, the last descendant of the Le Roys, my son's son, my only grandchild. All these years you have kept him from us; you have had all his sweetness to yourself. I have no word of blame for you, my dear daughter. I know you were greatly wronged—almost driven, as it were, into the course you adopted. But you will give him to us now, will you not, dear? You will come back to the home you never should have left, you will be the light of our hearts and our eyes, as you were before that fatal night. To-morrow I shall come to you for your answer. I have not told St. Leon of my discovery. I shall not speak to him until after I see you. But I cannot help but hope, that your answer will be a favorable one. You would not have come here among us if you had not meant to be kind to us. I remember your gentle, loving heart, my dear, and, although you have the world at your feet now, I think you will be the same tender, loving little girl that you were of old. You will come home to us soon—you and my darling little Laurence."

"Laurence, Laurence, it is only of the child they think—only of their heir to Eden," she said to herself, bitterly. "I see through it all. They would endure the mother for the child's sake! I understand!But it shall not be. I will take my boy away. I have cared for him all these years, and I will do so still. They who were so cruel to the mother shall have none of the child's love!"

And when Mrs. Le Roy called the next day she was astounded to find that Carlyle Ford and Mrs. Lynn and her son had left Belle Vue the previous evening. None of the servants were aware of their destination. One of them gave the lady a note that Mrs. Lynn had left behind for her. It was brief and cruelly cold.

"I regret that I cannot have the honor of receiving you, as we are leaving suddenly and for an indefinite time," wrote Mrs. Lynn. "I must say that your letter was all Greek to me. You seem laboring under some strange hallucination of the brain. I fear you are threatened with a brain fever. I would advise you to consult a physician. Delays are dangerous in such cases."

Mrs. Le Roy went home like one dazed. She had not counted on such a terrible disappointment. She had staked everything on Laurel's sweet, forgiving disposition. She had made no allowance for a woman's pride.

She went to the library, where St. Leon sat among his books—dreaming, not reading—dreaming of a fair, cold, scornful face that shone on him from the walls of memory—

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