Jewel bit her lips in anger and scorn when she learned that Laurie
Meredith had found out the secret she had guarded so carefully, fearing
lest he should love the memory of the dead girl better for that
knowledge.
But she dared not give vent to her chagrin in his presence. She knew
that she must dissemble, must keep up her deceitful rôle, and agree to
his declaration that the fact of his marriage to Flower should be made
public.
So she soothed him with gentle words of sympathy, and pretended to be
overjoyed at hearing that Flower had been a wife, and not the guilty
girl she had been believed to be.
She declared herself eager to convince every one that Flower had been
his wife.
"You will give me the marriage-certificate, of course, and I will show
it to the townspeople," she said.
He explained to her that he had left the certificate with his young
wife.
"You will probably find it among her papers," he said, confidently; but
search for it proved the contrary.
"What shall we do now?" she asked him, with pretended anxiety.
He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face cleared.
"Although the certificate can not be found I can prove the marriage by
the minister who performed the ceremony."
"Yes," said Jewel; but when he said that it was the Reverend Mr.
Archer, of little Episcopal Chapel, she shook her head.
"I am very sorry to tell you, but he has gone abroad. His health was
failing, and his congregation sent him to Europe for a year," she
replied.
He looked dismayed for a moment, then rallying, said, confidently:
"They will certainly take my word, when I declare that I was Flower's
husband."
Jewel looked very dubious. She would not answer.
"What do you think?" he demanded, impatiently, and Jewel sighed, and
answered:
"People are so hard and malicious--I--I--am afraid they would not
listen without proof."
He knew that this was quite true. The world was so hard, especially
where a woman's honor was concerned, that it would not hear the
vindication of an angel without proof.
Almost unconsciously he groaned aloud:
"What am I to do? How vindicate the memory of my lost angel in the
minds of those who believed her false and light?"
Much as she loved him, Jewel gloated over his suffering. She would not
have spared him one pang if by lifting her hand she could have thrown
off the whole burden of his misery.
"He preferred her to me! Let him bear the punishment I have meted out
to him!" she thought, triumphantly; and presently she said:
"There seems only one way out of our difficulty. We can not speak until
the Reverend Mr. Archer comes back to verify your story."
"That is hard--to wait a year--a whole year--ere I vindicate my
darling's memory," he groaned. But Jewel remained silent, knowing that
in the end he would be obliged to agree with her declaration.
He did so, and the next day he left Virginia and journeyed to the
watering-place where his mother and sisters were spending the summer
quietly on account of the recent death of the head of the house.
He did not tell them the pathetic story of his secret marriage, and
his young wife's death. They would hear it all from Jewel soon enough,
he thought, shrinking from all the questions they asked him about his
altered looks, and finding it hard to ask for the invitation Miss
Fielding desired so much.
But he did it at last, in spite of their haughty surprise; and, after
they had heard that he had been ill for weeks in the house of the
beautiful heiress, that she had tended him with all the affection of
a sister, and that she was lonely and orphaned, they began to feel
that they owed Jewel a debt that would be but poorly canceled by all
that they could do. So the invitation was written and sent, eagerly
accepted, and Jewel at once began to get ready for her winter campaign,
as she called it to herself, feeling that victory already perched upon
her banner.