RALPH'S LETTER.
The world is naught when one is gone
Who was the world; then the heart breaks
That this is lost which once was won.
ARLO BATES.
But before the old gentleman called in the morning, Kathleen had a
great shock of surprise.
The morning papers had not had anything so exciting to chronicle for a
long time as the news that Ralph Chainey, the great actor, and the idol
of the hour, had been secretly married to a beautiful ballet dancer who
was no better than she ought to be, and that he had publicly applied
for a legal divorce to free him from his galling fetters.
Of course the public had to know all about it, so the reporters had
besieged Ralph Chainey, and he had talked freely with them, giving them
all his sad story, hoping in this way to reach the obdurate heart of
beautiful Kathleen.
Surely, he thought, when she heard his story aright--when she heard how
cruelly he had been betrayed by the false and wicked Fedora--she must
pity and pardon her unhappy lover.
Ralph Chainey was not much of a praying man, but in these hours of
awful suspense his thoughts took almost the form of a prayer to God
that He would help him to win his proud young love who had scorned him
in such disdainful fashion.
So he told the reporters his sad story in his most eloquent fashion,
and they reproduced it in glowing paragraphs, denouncing Fedora in
unmeasured terms for her sins and her hypocrisy, and hinting at the
beautiful love affair that had been broken off by Fedora's resurrection
from the grave in which her young husband believed her resting. They
did not tell the name of the actor's beautiful young love, because
Ralph Chainey had been very careful not to tell them; but they dwelt
eloquently on the actor's love for her, and his hope that, in the event
of his securing a divorce, she would become his worshiped wife.
Kathleen read this moving story with heaving bosom and dilated eyes,
and while she was yet reading it, the bell rang and a package was
handed in for her with a letter.
Ralph Chainey--forgetting, like any true lover, his pride in his
love--had sent to Kathleen marked copies of the morning papers and some
brief, pathetic lines.
"Oh, my lost love," ran the note, "will you not read, and reading,
pity and forgive me, the story of my sorrows? Oh, Kathleen! they say
that you are pledged to wed another. Tell me that it is not so! My one
great hope is for freedom, that I may yet have the hope of winning
you. Life without that hope would be a living death. Oh, Kathleen, my
love, my darling! pity me--pity yourself! You have not learned to love
the man you have promised to marry. Send him from you. Wait a little,
my darling, and happiness will come to us!
"RALPH."
"Oh, my poor boy--my poor boy!" sobbed Kathleen.
She forgot herself, she forgot Teddy Darrell, to whom she had promised
herself, and she kissed Ralph Chainey's letter with red, clinging lips,
as if it had been his handsome face.
"Why did I not listen to him that day when I was so wild with jealousy
that I would not let him explain?" she cried, self-upbraidingly. "I was
foolish and silly. It is a wonder that he could ever forgive me. No. I
can not marry Teddy now. But--will--he release me--from--my promise?"