The widow received him at every visit more like a lover, and less like a lawyer; men congratulated or envied him, women tacitly assumed his engagement. There was but one way to free himself from the toils the artful widow was encompassing him with—he must marry some one else.
But whom? The only girl he loved was poor, and had already refused him; yet he was sure she loved him, and something bid him try again. He had half a mind to do so, and "half a mind" in love is quite enough to begin with.
So he put on his hat and went to his sister's house. He knew she was out driving—had seen her pass five minutes before on her way to the park. Then what did he go there for? Because he judged from experience, that at this hour lovely Pauline Alexes, governess to his sister's daughters, was at home and alone.
He was not wrong; she came into the parlor by one door as he entered it by the other. The coincidence was auspicious, and he warmly pressed his suit, pouring into Pauline's ears such a confused account of his feelings and his affairs as only love could disentangle and understand.
"But, Philip," said Pauline, "do you mean to say that this Mrs. Kurston makes love to you? Is she not a married woman, and her husband your best friend and patron?"
"Mr. Kurston, Pauline darling, is dead!"
"Dead! dead! Oh, Philip! Oh, my father! my father!" And the poor girl threw herself, with passionate sobbings, among the cushions of the sofa.
This was a revelation. Here, in Pauline Alexes, the girl he had fondly loved for nearly three years, Philip found the long-sought heiress of Kurston Chace!
Bitter, indeed, was her grief when she learned how sorrowfully her father had sought her; but she was scarcely to be blamed for not knowing of, and responding to, his late repentance of the life-long wrong he had done her. For Philip's sister moved far outside the narrow and supreme circle of the Kurstons.
She had hidden her identity in her mother's maiden name—the only thing she knew of her mother. She had never seen her father since her flight from her home but in public, accompanied by his wife; she had no reason to suppose the influence of that wife any weaker; she had been made, by cruel innuendoes, to doubt both the right and the inclination of her father to protect her.