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.

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!"