Mrs. Leslie was filled with dismay and terror at the result of her thoughtless communication to her protege.

"What a silly tattler I am to tell such shocking things to that poor sick child," she said to herself, with lively compunction.

Then she flew to the dressing-table, and securing a bottle of eau de cologne, proceeded to drench Irene's face vigorously.

The result of her treatment was that Irene speedily gasped, shivered and opened her eyes.

"Oh, you are alive yet, are you, my dear?" exclaimed her friend. "I was afraid I had killed you with my foolish tales."

"Then it wasn't true—you were jesting with me?" exclaimed the girl, unconsciously clasping her small hands around her friend's arm, and lifting her dark, anxious eyes to her face.

"Eh? what, my dear?" Mrs. Leslie asked, rather vaguely.

"The wreck, you know—the people who were drowned," Irene answered, with a shudder. "Is it true?"

"Oh, yes, child, every word of it, I am sorry to say, but I oughtn't to have told you about it while you were feeling so badly. It shocked you very much, poor dear."

"Yes, it shocked me very much," Irene replied, in a strange voice. "You were saying—were you not?—that one of your friends was—was—drowned," she concluded, with a faint quiver in the last word.

"Yes—poor Guy Kenmore of Baltimore—one of the most splendid men I ever met," sighed Mrs. Leslie. "But do not let us talk about it any more to-night, dear. It makes you nervous, I think."

"Yes, and I am very tired. I should like to go to sleep. Good-night, dear Mrs. Leslie," said Irene, thus gently dismissing her friend.

"Very well, since you want to go to sleep, good-night, dear," said the lady, good-humoredly; "I hope you will let me know if you are worse in the night, though."

Irene promised, and received Mrs. Leslie's good-night kiss. Then the lady went away and left her alone.

Why did she weep so bitterly upon her lonely pillow that it was drenched with her bitter tears?

Now that her husband of an hour was dead, Irene knew that she loved him.

As she lay there weeping sorely on her pillow, she recalled that sweet June night, but a few short months ago, when her own willful folly had led her into that deplorable entanglement. She recalled the handsome face of Bertha's lover, as she then deemed him—handsomer then and now to her fancy than any other man she had met. He had given her no word of blame or reproach for her folly that had led him into that mad marriage. Nay, how kindly, how gently he had tried to make the best of it—he had offered to keep faithfully those marriage vows he had taken, even when he knew that she was a nameless child, and her mother a disgraced woman. How kindly he had spoken to poor Elaine, even when her own child madly reproached her. She seemed to feel again the warm, gentle clasp of his arm around her waist while poor Elaine told her sorrowful story.

"I love him. It is not wrong, for he belonged to me, and he is dead," she said to herself, plaintively and sadly, through her falling tears.

She forgot Julius Revington for a while in the shock of this new grief. One hour was given to her sorrow and her tears.

"He is dead, yet I cannot realize it," the girl-widow said to herself, trying to fancy those laughing brown eyes drowned in the salty waves of old ocean—those languid, musical tones hushed in its everlasting roar. It was in vain the effort. It was in life, rather than death that he dwelt in her thoughts.

"He is dead, but no more dead to me than he was in life," she repeated over and over to herself, "for I should never have seen him again."

And suddenly, like an Arctic wave coldly sweeping over her, came the remembrance of Julius Revington.

"I am free now," she repeated to herself, with a shiver of horror. "Nothing lies between my mother and happiness but my own unconquerable repugnance to the man who holds the secret of my mother's wrongs."

Remorseful memory pictured that beautiful mother sad, lonely, bereaved, wasting her heart in unavailing sighs and tears.

"Oh, mother, I was hard, cold, cruel to you that night in my madness," she cried. "I, who shadowed your life with an ever-present memory of shame for sixteen years, now owe you reparation and atonement even to the sacrifice of my poor life."

And in the solemn, mystical midnight hours the great battle was fought between self-pity and mother-love.