CHAPTER XIX.

Even Maud Langton's cold and shallow nature, utterly incapable of such an act of dauntless heroism as Reine's, is touched by the man's overmastering grief and the story of the woman's devotion.

"Poor little Reine! I did not deserve such a sacrifice from her," she exclaims, with a guilty consciousness of her cruel and contemptuous treatment of her generous rival.

Vane Charteris makes her no reply. He has dropped his pale, handsome face into his hands, his strong frame quivers with silent sobs. Maud watches him in amazement.

"You take it hard," she says; "yet I thought you did not love her, that you would not care."

"Not care!" lifting his somber blue eyes a moment to her pale, wondering face. "I care so much that by night or by day, sleeping or waking, her image is never absent from my thoughts. I would give the whole world to have her back, my poor lost darling!"

"Then you learned to love her?" Miss Langton exclaims, recalling his fastidious dislike of Reine's wild ways and sharp little speeches.

"Yes; now, when it is all too late," he answers, in a wild burst of remorse and sorrow.

Then there is a brief silence. How often those sad words, "too late," come home to stricken hearts with a pathos that words are all too powerless to express. Could Reine but have known--in that fair land to which her soul had flown--her husband's poignant repentance, she might well have answered with the poet:

"Too late, too late, thy beaming smile rests on me, Warm sighs and loving whispers come too late Since thou hast lost that true and loving passion Which, while it lived, met but thy scorn or hate.

"It might have been--had but thy love awakened Before my ruined life no power could save; But now, alas! thy warm and tender glances Fall on my heart like sunlight on a grave."

"Believe me, Vane, I am very, very sorry," Maud says to him in her gentlest tones. "Perhaps you think I was not worthy little Reine's generous self-sacrifice."

He has no answer ready for her. She begins to realize that he is strangely changed. The fair and handsome face that used to be so gay and debonair has grown wan and haggard. Some silver threads shine in the fair, clustering locks on his temples. His step is slow and heavy as he turns to go.

"How long will it be before I shall be free?" she asks him, wistfully, as he turns to go.

He starts, and turns back, remembering suddenly what the petted beauty must have endured in these weary weeks of confinement, with the shadow of an awful fate hanging over her.

Looking closer into the white face with its finely-chiseled features, sharpened and refined by the agony she has endured, his heart swells with momentary pity for the cold beauty who has wronged him so deeply.

"But a little while, I think," he answers, kindly. "I have seen your lawyer. He told me that the trial which he has been staving off from time to time, will take place to-morrow. He is quite sure that your innocence will be indisputably proven by the paper you hold, together with other facts in his possession. I congratulate you, Maud, upon your narrow escape from the terrible web that circumstantial evidence had woven around you."

She shudders, and grows deathly pale at the thought of it, and Vane hurries from the room and from the presence of her who had been, for a brief while, the sun of his existence.

Hurrying back to his hotel, he finds there a letter which has followed him across the sea from the quiet watering-place where he had left Mr. Langton. It is from the genial, kindly physician, and the news is startling.

The old millionaire, the sharp-tongued, irascible, yet kindly-hearted old gentleman, is dead--has died suddenly and strangely of disease of the heart in two days after Reine and Vane had left him in the confident hope of soon rejoining him. They have buried him there in the quiet churchyard by the sea, far away from his native land, and the friends he loved. All unknowing of Reine's fate, he has gone to rejoin her in the unknown land.