"I feel myself bound by honour——," he said.
"You are bound by honour to me. My father has no right to tell me who I shall marry. I refuse to be treated as a child; I am a woman, capable of choosing my own husband."
Thus did she urge him on against his better judgment, and one day they were missing. For better or worse Sylvia Jackson was married to Claude Custance, brilliant, erratic, a slave to morphia. For his sake she forgot her duty to her parents, the love and kindness they had lavished on her. The day that she left them a cloud came and rested over their home. For her, marriage proved a cruel and bitter disillusionment, for no woman can ever rival that deadly mistress, morphia.
The night before Sylvia's elopement, Desmond O'Connor had dined with the Jacksons. Mr. Jackson had hoped to displace Custance with the handsome young fellow whom he loved, and Sylvia had made use of Desmond to conceal her infatuation for the artist. They had sat together out on the verandah, and she had given him a rose.
"A rose for constancy," she said, as he held it in his hand and inhaled the perfume. "You deserve it."
"Shall my constancy be rewarded?" he asked eagerly.
"What a handsome boy you are!" she laughed. "I wonder will it be rewarded?"
"Why do you tease me?" he asked. "If you could read my heart——?"
"I can read it in your eyes. I know every word they say. Come inside and sing to me."
In his fine tenor voice he sang, at her request, Tosti's "Good-bye." That was his farewell to Sylvia Jackson.