CHAPTER XXVII.

A year has passed since the ill-fated _Hesperus_ was burned in mid-ocean with such terrible loss of human life.

In the sultry heat of August, Vane Charteris has forsaken the breathless, dusty city for the coolness and verdure of that terrestrial paradise among the hills, Langton Villa.

He is the guest of Miss Langton, who queens it right royally here over the grand domain she had nearly lost by her folly of one year ago.

They walk up and down beneath the trees, Maud and her handsome lawyer, in the glow of the evening sunset, with the lovely sights and sounds of summer all around them.

The heiress, in a robe of palest blue, with creamy lace, looks her fairest. Mr. Charteris, always handsome, is none the less so for the shadow brooding darkly in the deep blue eyes, lending its touch of earnestness to the grave, pale face.

"How dull and _distrait_ you are," she says at length, impatiently. "Let us sit down here beneath this tree, and I will try to charm this dull mood away."

But for once she finds her fascinations fail. Vane, always inclined to be taciturn, is more than usually so to-night, even to the verge of embarrassment.

She wonders why his eyes evade her own, why he makes no reply to some tender epithets that falls cooingly from the beautiful lips.

"I thought you loved me, Vane," she breaks out at last, with some indignation.

"Yes, I thought so too, for a little while, under the glamour of your beauty and my own loneliness, but when you were gone, I found that I was mistaken. I am here to tell you this. Can you forgive me, Maud?" he blunders out, with all the shame of a man who feels himself placed in an uncomfortable position.

"Mistaken!" she cries, transfixing him with the angry gleam of her blue eyes. "Why, only the last time we met you said that you loved me."

Vane, rather red and ashamed, still holds his ground bravely.

"I was mistaken, as I told you just now," he says. "I do not, I cannot love you."

"Cannot!" she repeats, a little blankly.

"I cannot," he answers. "I find in the light of my later experiences that I never really loved you, not even when I was about to make you my wife. I was under the spell of your beauty. I know now that my heart was untouched."

"What do you mean by later experience?" the beautiful woman asks, sneeringly.

"I mean that the love I feel now, when too late, for my lost wife, Reine, is the only love my heart can ever know," he answers, speaking low and reverentially, as if in the presence of the dead.

The cold blue eyes of the beautiful heiress kindle with pride and resentment.

"You expect me to believe this?" she cries, hotly. "Do I not know how you despised Reine Langton! How you called her vixen, spit-fire, scold! How you longed to be out of her presence and rid of her?"

"For all of which I would beg her pardon on my knees if she were living," he answers, still low and reverentially; "I did not understand her then. I was a simpleton, an indolent, fastidious fool. I know now that those bright, wild ways were but the ripple and effervescence on the water that ran deep, and calm, and sweet beneath. She was like a lovely rose that hid its sweetness behind 'little wilful thorns.' At heart she was true, and sweet, and womanly. Too late I learned that I loved her, and in honor to her memory I will make no other woman my wife."

The angry color rises into Miss Langton's fair cheek.

"You forget that you are pledged to me," she says, in a low, fierce whisper. "You forget that our marriage day is already set."

"I forget nothing," he returns, sadly. "Nothing except that I was blinded for a moment by your subtle charm, and offered you what was not mine to give, what belongs irrevocably to the dead--my whole heart. I came to ask you for my freedom, Maud."

"What if I refuse?" she asks, with a subtle flash in the blue eyes.

"Then God help me and forgive you," he answers, solemnly, "for we can never be happy together. There are two ghosts between us, Maud. The man who murdered himself because of your falsity, and the fair, sweet girl who gave her life to save yours. They would haunt us and reproach us with their slighted and forgotten love. They would come between us ever."

Her cheeks and lips are paling, her eyes stare before her, wild and frightened; she shivers, and puts up her white hand as if to ward off some threatening danger.

"I--am haunted already," she says, in a low and trembling voice. "Do you think I do not see him in my dreams, with menace in his staring eyes and reproaches on his lips? He was my dreaded companion in the lonely prison-cell. He stalks before me grimly in the grand saloons of wealth and pride, always with a look of terrible reproach and despair on his dead, white face. I am a haunted woman. It is for this I have sought to win back your heart. I would fain put your warm, living love and tenderness between me and the pursuing ghost of the man whom I betrayed to his death. I am afraid of the dark, the loneliness, the terror of my own thoughts. Do not put me away from you, Vane. My only hope is in you."

They gaze at each other silently a moment. The soft wind, odorous with the breath of honeysuckles, pinks and roses, sighing through the garden, whispers to them of a slight form bowed behind the tree, a white face convulsed with passionate emotion. But they neither hear nor heed its admonition. Maud speaks again, pleadingly:

"I cannot release you, Vane. I love you. Surely you can give me some little tenderness and love when once I am your wife? I will make you happy--I swear it."

"The only woman who could make me happy rests in her ocean grave," Vane answers, with deep solemnity and truth.

Miss Langton regards him in wonder.

"Yet once you scorned her," she says slowly. "How did she win you at last, Vane?"

He is silent a moment, as if the question has struck home to his own heart, awakening thought and memory to life. His lips grow strangely tender in their saddened curve.

"How can I tell?" he says slowly. "Perhaps it was the softened sweetness that hung about her after that night when our lives became one. Perhaps it was her proud, sweet patience under my unkindness. Perhaps, yes, after all! I believe it was the charm of her love that won me. Can you realize such a thing as this, Maud, that love should win love?"

"Yes," she answers, hopefully. "Did I not tell you just now that my love would win you and make you happy?"

He shakes his head impatiently

"That could never be, Maud. You and I are better apart. I can never forget Reine, my slighted girl-bride. She is ever in my thoughts. I think of her as of one living, not dead. I recall her rose-leaf lips, her dark, laughing eyes, the nameless charm that clung about her, and my very heart aches with the intensity of its yearning to find my loved and lost one again."

"Thank God!" exclaimed a low, rapturous, thrilling voice almost at his very side.