As the footsteps of Mr. Stuart and his companion died away, there was a
sudden rustling in the thick shrubbery that shaded the garden-seat. The
branches parted and the face of Mrs. Stuart appeared. It was white with
commingled fear and anger, the eyes flashed luridly, her white, jeweled
hands were tightly clenched, the breath came gaspingly between her
parted lips.
She sat down on the garden-seat, and gazed gloomily before her into the
deepening dusk.
"He suspects all," she uttered, huskily. "My God, what if he should
learn the truth? That girl--I have always instinctively hated her. Can
she be his child, indeed? If so, she must be removed as soon as
possible. Does Julius Revington suspect whom she is, and is he laying a
plan for my dethronement? I must see him privately and learn the truth.
I cannot, I will not, be ousted from my place. I have dared and risked
too much to lose all now!"
She made her way rapidly back to the house by a roundabout path, and
going to her room, arranged her disordered hair and dress. Then she
descended to the drawing-room in search of Mr. Revington.
The lamps were lighted and most of her guests were in the room amusing
themselves in various fashions. She missed Mr. Revington, but the tinkle
of his inevitable guitar came to her from the balcony. She went out and
found him pouring out a plaintive love-song into the unappreciative ears
of Irene. At the appearance of her hostess the girl effected a
precipitate escape into the house, leaving her lover to finish his
ditty to the desert air.
Mrs. Stuart went up to his side and laid her hand on his arm.
"Julius, I wish to speak to you," she said, in a low, strange voice.
The strings twanged discordantly under his hand. He looked up with
something like a guilty start.
"Now?" he asked.
"Of course not," impatiently, "but as soon as possible. Can we manage a
private meeting?"
"_I_ can, of course," he answered, with an emphasis on the pronoun. "The
risk is yours, not mine. What can you have to say to me?"
The impatient, almost insolent tone in which he addressed her, sent the
hot blood to her face.
"You take a high tone," she breathed in suppressed anger.
"Pardon me," he replied, with a fine latent sarcasm in his tone that
angered her yet more.
But she kept down her seething resentment with a powerful effort of
will.
"Can you come out into the grounds to-night? I have something very
important to speak about. I can slip out unnoticed about eleven
o'clock," she whispered.
"I will come," he replied, laconically.
She named a place for meeting, then returned to her guests in the
drawing-room. Her glance, full of envenomed hate and deadly malice, fell
on Irene.
The girl was standing at an open window half-hidden by the falling
drapery of the lace curtains, her beautiful, sad young face turned
toward the sky. She was looking wondrously lovely in her simple, white
mull dress with a great cluster of purple golden-hearted pansies nestled
in the filmy lace at her throat, and the veil of her golden hair half
hiding the slim, graceful form. Mrs. Stuart wondered at the air of deep
sadness that marked the girlish face and caused that pathetic droop of
the rosy lips.
How little she dreamed that the girl she hated so jealously was thinking
of one dead in the cruel sea as she stood there watching the starry
constellations of Heaven sparkling through the misty veil of night. She
did not dream what mournful thoughts filled the young heart nor how
sadly Irene murmured over to herself some plaintive words that seemed to
fit her melancholy vein:
"Ships are tossing at sea,
And ships sail in to the windy cliffs of the shore;
But the ship that is dearest to me
Will never come in with the tide--
Will ripple the bay no more,
Riding in with the tide."
All unheeded and unnoted by its object, Mrs. Stuart's angry glance dwelt
on Irene. The girl was so absorbed in her own sad thoughts that the
ripple of talk and laughter in the room seemed to flow past her like a
dream so faint and far-away it sounded. A feeling of utter loneliness
and pain, of vague longing and sharp regret possessed her. Only half
conscious of outward things she leaned against the window mournfully
musing.
Suddenly to her dulled senses penetrated the noise of a somewhat unusual
bustle in the room, the rustle of a silken robe as its wearer hastily
rose, and a sharp cry of wonder and surprise in the voice of Mrs.
Leslie:
"Mr. ----!" Irene lost the name in her apathy. "_Can_ this be you, or am
I dreaming?"
"I heard at Florence that you were here, Mrs. Leslie, and I could not
resist the temptation of calling," said a deep, sweet, musical voice.
That voice! Every drop of blood in Irene's heart seemed to answer it! It
shocked her out of her apathetic sorrow. She would have cried out in the
suddenness of her surprise, but her lips were parched and dry, her
tongue failed her.
Instinctively she shrank further into the shadow and turned her head
toward the sound.
Her heart had not deceived her. The world had never held but one voice
that could stir the secret depths of her heart.
And this was _he_! She had thought him dead--
"Down by the reefs and the shells
Far down by the channels that furrow the dolorous deep,
Where the torn sails rise with the swells,
And swing in the pulse of the sea.
Silently sleeping his sleep
Down in the sorrowful sea."
But there he stood--tall, large, handsome, with that easy, gracious,
indolent air she recalled so well--a smile on his lips as he replied to
Mrs. Leslie's eager questions and exclamations.
Then Irene, watching with startled eyes, saw and heard the hum of
greetings and introductions. Even Mrs. Stuart unbent from her
supercilious hauteur to do honor to the stranger. She had heard of him,
and knew that he was well-born and wealthy.
"What shall I do? Will he know me?" Irene asked herself, with a great
suffocating heart-beat.
She saw Mrs. Leslie coming to the window with her friend, and nerved
herself for the ordeal. Her thoughts flew confusedly back over the past.
How strangely they had parted, how strangely they were meeting.
Mrs. Leslie pushed back the rich lace curtain with her white, ringed
hand, and showed the beautiful, silent, statue-like girl.
"Miss Berlin, allow me to present my friend, Mr. Kenmore, the
dead-alive," she said, smilingly.