Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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 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 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! ”

“ 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.” ”