Alva looked intently at her brother, and she saw that he was struggling with deep emotion.

It pleased her to see that her picture could affect him so deeply.

“Is it not beautiful—the face of Cupid? Can you imagine anything living so perfectly beautiful?” she repeated.

Slowly, without taking his eyes from the lovely face, St. George replied, dreamily:

“Yes, I can imagine it, for I knew the original in all her living beauty, the fairest among women. Oh! my sister, how exquisitely you have reproduced her upon canvas! This picture must be mine, mine only—all that is left me of poor dead Floy.”

They drew close to him—father, mother, sister—and Alva caught his hand.

“What is that you mean? Have you ever known this girl Floy—my lovely model?” she exclaimed.

Half impatiently, as if amazed at her stupidity, he answered:

“Have I not told you that she was mine—my little sweetheart Floy, that the angels took away from me?”

“Floy Fane?” almost shrieked his mother; and he answered, wearily:

“Yes; did you not know?”

And so they stood face to face with the truth.

Bonny little Floy, the lovely Cupid of Alva’s picture, was St. George’s sweetheart, whom they had hated and reviled—without knowing!

The shock was so great for a moment that no one could speak, they simply looked at one another with joy, and wonder in their eyes.

They loved Floy in their hearts for her beauty and sweetness and pride. Oh, if they had only known it sooner, how much sorrow had been spared his suffering heart! Even their pride could not have rebelled against that lovely bride.

Mrs. Beresford found voice to exclaim:

“Why did you not tell me her name? Why did you say that she was dead?”

Something in her face and voice so startled him that, with his unstrung nerves, he could not stand upright. Sinking heavily into a chair before the picture, he looked up at her in wonder, answering bitterly:

“Why need I have told you her sacred name when I knew that you would only execrate it because my darling was a poor girl and not in the ‘set’ you adore? Besides, where was the use? She was dead, poor little Floy!”

They gazed at one another questioningly, wondering how they could break to him the truth that Floy was alive and well. In his nervous, enfeebled condition, how would the shock of joy affect him?

The father, with the usual masculine dread of scenes, kept himself in the background, leaving it all to the two women.

Mrs. Beresford’s heart swelled with joy as she thought that now was the moment in which to atone for all her cruelty.

She had been bitterly despondent over her son’s low spirits and failing health.

She had fancied sometimes, in her trouble, that the spirit of the beloved dead girl was drawing him by invisible threads to rejoin her in the spirit world.

Against that subtile power of love she had felt herself so impatient that she could have cried aloud for mercy, in her wild despair.

Then, what joy, what relief, to know that the girl was alive—a girl, too, so fair, so young, so innocent that she need not be ashamed to present her to the world as her son’s wife.

Her face fairly beamed with joy as she bent over him asking, tenderly:

“My son, who told you that Floy Fane was dead?”