Wife in Name Only

by Charlotte M. Brame

"It may be in the book of fate that you will do both," she observed; and they parted, laughing at the idea.

To the last the light shone in her eyes, and the scarlet lips were wreathed in smiles; but, when the door had closed behind him and she was alone, the haggard, terrible change that fell over the young face was painful to see. The light, the youth, the beauty seemed all to fade from it; it grew white, stricken, as though the pain of death were upon her. She clasped her hands as one who had lost all hope.

"How am I to bear it?" she cried. "What am I to do?" She looked round her with the bewildered air of one who had lost her way--with the dazed appearance of one from beneath whose feet the plank of safety had been withdrawn. It was all over--life was all over; the love that had been her life was suddenly taken from her. Hope was dead--the past in which she had lived was all a plank--he did not love her.

She said the words over and over again to herself. He did not love her, this man to whom she had given the passionate love of her whole heart and soul--he did not love her, and never intended to ask her to be his wife.

Why, she had lived for this! This love, lying now in ruins around her, had been her existence. Standing there, in the first full pain of her despair, she realized what that love had been--her life, her hope, her world. She had lived in it; she had known no other wish, no other desire. It had been her all and now it was less than nothing.

"How am I to live and bear it?" she asked herself again; and the only answer that came to her was the dull echo of her own despair.

That night, while the sweet flowers slept under the light of the stars, and the little birds rested in the deep shade of the trees--while the night wind whispered low, and the moon sailed in the sky--Philippa L'Estrange, the belle of the season, one of the most beautiful women in London, one of the wealthiest heiresses in England, wept through the long hours--wept for the overthrow of her hope and her love, wept for the life that lay in ruins around her.

She was of dauntless courage--she knew no fear; but she did tremble and quail before the future stretching out before her--the future that was to have no love, and was to be spent without him.

How was she to bear it? She had known no other hope in life, no other dream. What had been childish nonsense to him had been to her a serious and exquisite reality. He had either forgotten it, or had thought of it only with annoyance; she had made it the very corner-stone of her life.

It was not only a blow of the keenest and cruelest kind to her affections, but it was the cruelest blow her vanity could have possibly received. To think that she, who had more admirers at her feet than any other woman in London, should have tried so hard to win this one, and have failed--that her beauty, her grace, her wit, her talent, should all have been lavished in vain.