ALPINE SOWS THE SEED OF JEALOUSY.

"You startle me! Kathleen really alive? Kathleen here, in the same city with us?" exclaimed Alpine Belmont, in genuine surprise.

Ralph Chainey had been telling her all about his visit to Mrs. Stone and his unexpected rencontre with his lost love.

"Some one has been slandering me to her, and she hates me now. She refused to have anything more to do with me," he ended, with a long sigh.

The beauty's lashes fell to hide her blue eyes' exultant gleam.

"Oh, how cruel of Kathleen!" she exclaimed. She sighed, and added, in a low, tender voice: "How could any one be cruel to you?"

He hardly noticed the purport of her speech, he was so absorbed in thought.

"You will go to her, Miss Belmont? You will bring her home?" he pleaded.

"But perhaps she will not come with me. Is it not a little strange that she did not come here at first, Mr. Chainey?"

"Yes, it is strange. There is something very mysterious about this affair. But go to her, Miss Belmont, and no doubt she will give you her confidence. Be her friend, if she needs one," pleaded the lover, forgetting his wrath against Kathleen in anxiety over her welfare.

"I will go to-morrow," promised Alpine, soothingly.

"And you will bring her home with you?"

"If she will come," answered Alpine. Then she gave a violent start, exclaiming: "Oh, I've just remembered something!"

"Well?" asked the young man, eagerly.

"Mrs. Stone is own cousin to Teddy Darrell, and he was Kathleen's lover last winter. Can there be any connection between her being there with Mrs. Stone—whom I'm certain she used not to know—and Teddy Darrell?"

The shaft went home. She saw him pale and tremble with jealous dread.

"I know Teddy Darrell," he said, trying to speak carelessly. "Did—did she ever care for him?"

"Yes, I believe so. There was a flirtation anyway, and we thought once it would be a match; but suddenly it all came to nothing. I don't know who was to blame, but I'm afraid it was Teddy. He's known to be fickle-minded and a wretched flirt."

How sweetly and artlessly she spoke; but every word was a sword-thrust in the hearer's heart. Wan and haggard with misery, he rose and began to pace the floor restlessly.

Alpine watched him under her down-drooped lashes, her breast heaving with its love and pain. Yet she knew that she was no more to him than a hundred other girls whose names he barely knew, save and except that she was Kathleen's step-sister. She "was not the rose, but she had lived near it."

It was cruelly hard, when she loved him so dearly. The temptation seized her to fall at his feet, to cry out to him that she could not live without him, that she was going mad for his dear love.

She recoiled with horror from the thought. No, no; he would despise her. Let her show him tenderness and sympathy, but not love. By and by he might turn to her when he became convinced that Kathleen was lost to him forever.

"And she is, she shall be!" vowed the girl; and after watching Ralph in silence for some moments, while he strode up and down, seemingly oblivious of her presence, she moved to his side, and slipping her hand timidly within his arm, murmured, softly:

"Do not worry over it, please, dear friend. Even if Kathleen is lost to you, there are hundreds of other girls as well worth the winning."

He did not answer; he was dumb with despair; but he suffered Alpine to cling to his arm and walk up and down by his side, murmuring low words of sympathy all the while.

"I shall scold Kathleen for her cruelty to you; you did not deserve it, for you were true to her," she said, and sighed. "Ah, how sad it is for one's love to prove false—false and fickle!"

He turned on her almost fiercely.

"You believe that she loves this Darrell?" he exclaimed.

"I believe she does," answered Alpine, with pretended reluctance, exulting in the pain she saw on his face.

It gave her a savage joy to wound him in his love for Kathleen. She longed to make him hate the hapless girl as bitterly as she herself hated her.

"I must go," he said, abruptly; then as she clung to his hand: "Do not forget your promise to go to her to-morrow. And—you will send me a note? I play here all this week."

"Yes, you shall hear from me. I shall see you again, too, for I'm coming every night to see you act," she answered, sweetly.

"Thank you," he replied, dropped her hand, and went away, never remembering how lovingly the blue eyes had looked into his, nor how tenderly she had spoken. It was Kathleen of whom he was thinking—his sweet, estranged love.