"Count L. Levigne, Breslau: When you receive this I will be dead. Make no effort to trace me; it will be useless; my present name is an assumed one. We have been enemies many years, but everything changes in the presence of death, and I do not begrudge you the pleasure of knowing that your brother is beyond trouble and want forever and the title is yours. The Cremona, to which I have clung even when honor was gone, I have given to a young American named Morgan, who has made my life happier in its winter than it was in its summer.
"Gaspard Levigne."
The count watched the reader curiously as she examined the letter. Her face was white, but her hand did not tremble as she handed back the letter.
"It is well," she said. "I am satisfied. Good morning, gentlemen."
In Paris, Cambia's mind was soon made up. She privately arranged for an indefinite absence, and one day she disappeared. It was the sensation of the hour; the newspapers got hold of it, and all Paris wondered.
There had always been a mystery in the life of Cambia. No man had ever invaded it beyond the day when she put herself in the hands of a manager and laid the foundation for her world-wide success upon the lyric stage.
And then Paris forgot; and only the circle of her friends watched and waited.
Meanwhile the swift steamer had carried Mrs. Gaspard Levigne across the Atlantic and she had begun that journey into the south-land, once the dream of her youth—the going back to father and to friends!
The swift train carried her by towns and villages gorgeous with new paint and through cities black with the smoke of factories. The negroes about the stations were not of the old life, and the rushing, curt and slangy young men who came and went upon the train belonged to a new age.
The farms, with faded and dingy houses, poor fences, and uncared-for fields and hedges, swept past like some bad dream. All was different; not thirty years but a century had rolled its changes over the land since her girlhood.
And then came the alighting. Here was the city, different and yet the same. But where was the great family carriage, with folding steps and noble bays, the driver in livery, the footman to hold the door? Where were father and friends? No human being came to greet her.