When Elaine went to the villa her strange, romantic history was known to
all the inhabitants except Lilia. Mrs. Leslie, in her woman's wisdom,
had judged it best to tell all the rest, but no one breathed it to the
dying child. She alone never knew that the beautiful singer who had
taken her young heart captive was her father's real wife. When he came
and found her singing like an angel by Lilia's dying bed, he made no
sign save by the silent gratitude in his dark eyes, and Elaine was best
pleased thus.
There were several days of fluctuating hope and fear before the fair bud
faded on its drooping stem. Sometimes she would have every appearance of
rallying, but it was only the deceptive flattery of her insidious
disease, and she would immediately fall back into the most alarming
symptoms.
The day came when Mr. Stuart could bear it no longer to hear the weak
voice asking for her mother, and wondering why she came not.
He told his child the truth with such infinite pity and gentleness that
it softened the blow to her young heart---- told her that her mother had
gone before her to the unknown Land.
Lilia bore it more bravely than he had expected.
"She has only gone before me a little," she said, sadly.
And later on she asked Mrs. Leslie for Irene.
"I loved her at first until mamma bade me not to," she said,
plaintively. "Then I was cruel and unkind. Is she angry still, that she
does not come to me when I am so sick?"
They told her gently that Irene did not know of her illness, that she
had gone away.
"Then I shall never see her again," said Lilia, sadly. "Tell her I was
sorry for my cruelty, Mrs. Leslie, and ask her to forgive me. Tell her
she should have been my sister only mamma was not willing. She was good
and pretty and I loved her even when I tried to hate her."
Mrs. Leslie promised to deliver the message when she found Irene.
"I know she will forgive you, Lilia, for she loved you even when you
were unkind to her," she said, marveling to herself how the tie of blood
had asserted itself in the spontaneous love of the two girls whom the
dead woman had so maliciously sundered.
"Poor little misguided Lilia. She will know in Heaven that they were
really sisters, and it will be a comfort to her," she said to herself.
That evening in the glow of the golden Italian sunset Lilia closed her
heavy-lidded eyes softly as flowers shut their petals at twilight, and
forgot to open them again in the world in which she had tarried a little
while. Elaine had held her hand and sung her to sleep in soft, sweet
numbers that breathed of a Better Land.
"A land whose light is never dimmed by shade,
Whose fields are ever vernal;
Where nothing beautiful can ever fade,
But blooms for aye eternal." * * *
It was over the child's grave where they lingered together one twilight
eve, strewing lovely, pure, white flowers, that Clarence Stuart made his
first appeal to the wife he had so fondly worshiped, and from whom he
had been so cruelly sundered.
"Elaine, my house is left unto me desolate," he said. "Will you ever
consent to return to me?"
The fair flower-face drooped, crimson with the warm tide of her heart's
emotion, but for a moment she could not speak, and he continued, sadly:
"I have never ceased to love you, Elaine, even when I believed you
false, even when they told me you were dead, even after another bore my
name, and shared my home. I never loved her. She was my father's choice,
not mine, and she could not make me happy. Elaine, my early choice, my
own worshiped wife, will you not come home to my heart?"
He held out his arms to her eagerly, but she drew back, though not
unkindly.
"Not yet," she answered, gently. "It is too soon. Let us give a few
months to the dead who filled your life so long, then---- come for me."
"And this contemplated public career---- I am very selfish, love," he
said. "Will you sacrifice your ambition for my sake? Will you give up
that sweet voice to me to be heard only in the walls of my home? It is
sacred to me since it sang my child into her last, long sleep."
"It shall be as you wish, Clarence," she answered, gently; and though
Professor Bozzaotra was disappointed at the loss of that grand voice to
the world, he acquiesced in her decision. He was glad that Elaine's
romance had ended so happily.
"Although it is a sad disappointment to me," he sighed. "When she was
but a girl at school I told her that her voice belonged to the world,
and when she came to me at last to teach her again I was charmed that
the public should have its due. Ah, well, I must not spoil her happiness
with my vain regrets!"