As the footsteps of Mr. Stuart and his companion died away, there was a sudden rustling in the thick shrubbery that shaded the garden-seat. The branches parted and the face of Mrs. Stuart appeared. It was white with commingled fear and anger, the eyes flashed luridly, her white, jeweled hands were tightly clenched, the breath came gaspingly between her parted lips.

She sat down on the garden-seat, and gazed gloomily before her into the deepening dusk.

"He suspects all," she uttered, huskily. "My God, what if he should learn the truth? That girl—I have always instinctively hated her. Can she be his child, indeed? If so, she must be removed as soon as possible. Does Julius Revington suspect whom she is, and is he laying a plan for my dethronement? I must see him privately and learn the truth. I cannot, I will not, be ousted from my place. I have dared and risked too much to lose all now!"

She made her way rapidly back to the house by a roundabout path, and going to her room, arranged her disordered hair and dress. Then she descended to the drawing-room in search of Mr. Revington.

The lamps were lighted and most of her guests were in the room amusing themselves in various fashions. She missed Mr. Revington, but the tinkle of his inevitable guitar came to her from the balcony. She went out and found him pouring out a plaintive love-song into the unappreciative ears of Irene. At the appearance of her hostess the girl effected a precipitate escape into the house, leaving her lover to finish his ditty to the desert air.

Mrs. Stuart went up to his side and laid her hand on his arm.

"Julius, I wish to speak to you," she said, in a low, strange voice.

The strings twanged discordantly under his hand. He looked up with something like a guilty start.

"Now?" he asked.

"Of course not," impatiently, "but as soon as possible. Can we manage a private meeting?"

"I can, of course," he answered, with an emphasis on the pronoun. "The risk is yours, not mine. What can you have to say to me?"

The impatient, almost insolent tone in which he addressed her, sent the hot blood to her face.

"You take a high tone," she breathed in suppressed anger.

"Pardon me," he replied, with a fine latent sarcasm in his tone that angered her yet more.

But she kept down her seething resentment with a powerful effort of will.

"Can you come out into the grounds to-night? I have something very important to speak about. I can slip out unnoticed about eleven o'clock," she whispered.

"I will come," he replied, laconically.

She named a place for meeting, then returned to her guests in the drawing-room. Her glance, full of envenomed hate and deadly malice, fell on Irene.

The girl was standing at an open window half-hidden by the falling drapery of the lace curtains, her beautiful, sad young face turned toward the sky. She was looking wondrously lovely in her simple, white mull dress with a great cluster of purple golden-hearted pansies nestled in the filmy lace at her throat, and the veil of her golden hair half hiding the slim, graceful form. Mrs. Stuart wondered at the air of deep sadness that marked the girlish face and caused that pathetic droop of the rosy lips.

How little she dreamed that the girl she hated so jealously was thinking of one dead in the cruel sea as she stood there watching the starry constellations of Heaven sparkling through the misty veil of night. She did not dream what mournful thoughts filled the young heart nor how sadly Irene murmured over to herself some plaintive words that seemed to fit her melancholy vein:

All unheeded and unnoted by its object, Mrs. Stuart's angry glance dwelt on Irene. The girl was so absorbed in her own sad thoughts that the ripple of talk and laughter in the room seemed to flow past her like a dream so faint and far-away it sounded. A feeling of utter loneliness and pain, of vague longing and sharp regret possessed her. Only half conscious of outward things she leaned against the window mournfully musing.

Suddenly to her dulled senses penetrated the noise of a somewhat unusual bustle in the room, the rustle of a silken robe as its wearer hastily rose, and a sharp cry of wonder and surprise in the voice of Mrs. Leslie:

"Mr. ——!" Irene lost the name in her apathy. "Can this be you, or am I dreaming?"

"I heard at Florence that you were here, Mrs. Leslie, and I could not resist the temptation of calling," said a deep, sweet, musical voice.

That voice! Every drop of blood in Irene's heart seemed to answer it! It shocked her out of her apathetic sorrow. She would have cried out in the suddenness of her surprise, but her lips were parched and dry, her tongue failed her.

Instinctively she shrank further into the shadow and turned her head toward the sound.

Her heart had not deceived her. The world had never held but one voice that could stir the secret depths of her heart.

And this was he! She had thought him dead—

But there he stood—tall, large, handsome, with that easy, gracious, indolent air she recalled so well—a smile on his lips as he replied to Mrs. Leslie's eager questions and exclamations.

Then Irene, watching with startled eyes, saw and heard the hum of greetings and introductions. Even Mrs. Stuart unbent from her supercilious hauteur to do honor to the stranger. She had heard of him, and knew that he was well-born and wealthy.

"What shall I do? Will he know me?" Irene asked herself, with a great suffocating heart-beat.

She saw Mrs. Leslie coming to the window with her friend, and nerved herself for the ordeal. Her thoughts flew confusedly back over the past. How strangely they had parted, how strangely they were meeting.

Mrs. Leslie pushed back the rich lace curtain with her white, ringed hand, and showed the beautiful, silent, statue-like girl.

"Miss Berlin, allow me to present my friend, Mr. Kenmore, the dead-alive," she said, smilingly.