Elaine took the letter in her trembling hands, and, through a mist of bitter tears, saw the pretty girlish writing of the daughter she had mourned as dead. She wiped the dew from her eyes and read the sorrowful words that had flowed from the girl's burdened heart.

"Dear Mrs. Leslie, my true friend," Irene had written, "forgive me for going away in seeming ingratitude for all your kindness to me. Troubles encompass me, from which I have no refuge but in flight. I do not love Mr. Revington, and I am not free to marry him. But he has it in his power to work me ill, and I must fly far, far away, beyond the reach of his power. I have a sorrowful secret, but I cannot tell it to you; my heart is broken, but I cannot tell you by whose coldness and cruelty. Enough that I leave you reckless and despairing, not knowing if we may ever meet again. God forever bless you for your friendship and kindness to the mysterious stranger.

"Irene."

"You have read this?" said Elaine, lifting her tearful eyes to Mr. Kenmore's grave, sad face.

"Yes; by Mrs. Leslie's kind permission," he replied.

"Is it your coldness and cruelty to which she so sadly refers?" asked Elaine.

"Mine? by no means," he answered, startled. "I cannot at all understand what she means by those phrases."

"You are willfully blind," she answered. "I am quite sure she referred to you. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, my poor child had learned to love you. You should have claimed her before them all as your wife, if you really loved her."

He looked very grave and perplexed. A deep flush colored his face.

"God knows I would have done so, gladly enough, but I feared to offend her. I believed she would be angry if I attempted to claim her for my own. And you must remember that she bore an assumed name. I was waiting, with what patience I could, hoping she would relent toward me and acknowledge her identity."

"Waiting for the child to throw herself into your arms," said Elaine, with one of her sweet, pensive smiles. "Ah, Mr. Kenmore, you are very noble and chivalrous, but you know little of the subtle workings of a woman's heart. My little Irene is very proud, and the circumstances of her marriage were not such as to make her feel confident of a welcome from you. I believe she would have died before she would have come to you and said: 'I am your wife, whom you believed to be dead!'"

"She was cold, proud, indifferent to the verge of rudeness," he answered, gravely. "She seemed bent on showing me that she loved Julius Revington."

"Yet you see now that she did not care for him. Ah, Mr. Kenmore, I can see plainly how pride and sensitiveness stood between you. While you waited for her to declare herself, she waited for you to claim her, and, despairing of your love at last, went away."

She extended her white arms to him, imploringly.

"Oh, Mr. Kenmore, you will find her for me, my little girl, my darling," she pleaded, piteously.

"Yes, I will find her for you, and for myself—I swear it," he said, passionately. "I will never give up the search until I find my proud and willful little wife."

He paused a moment, then went on, anxiously:

"But before I go I have somewhat to ask of you. Perhaps it may be too great a favor."

"Name it," she answered, gently, and he replied:

"Lilia Stuart—your husband's child, and who should have been yours, too—lies ill unto death at her father's villa with that fatal malady, consumption. Last night you carried the child's heart by storm. To-day, in her illness and pain, she sings over fragments of your songs—they think if—you would come—that it might make happier her dying hours."

"Let her father comfort her," she said, bitterly, jealous in her heart of that other woman's child.

He took her hand and gazed deep into her soft, pure eyes, tinctured with a certain womanly pride.

"Mrs. Stuart," he said, letting his voice linger firmly on the name, "this is not worthy of you. Your heart harbors resentment against your husband when he has never wronged you. He has not sinned, he has been sinned against. Just now he cannot come to the child. He must first bury his dead."

"How can I sing to her when my heart is so empty and full of pain?" she asked, drearily.

"Because God will bless your efforts to cheer the last hours of that motherless child," he said. "Clarence Stuart loves the child, and it might have been yours as well as his. You must love it for his sake. Think if it were your own loved Irene, dying in the spring of her life."

"I will go," she answered, tremulously.