"I have nothing further to say," Guy interrupted, flushing with indignation and disgust, and without another word he abruptly left her.
Two days later all Baden was shocked by the startling news that young Nelson Leonard had accidentally shot himself and was lying at the point of death.
Those melancholy hours of watching by Leonard's bedside, in that dreary hotel room, lived in Guy's memory. When the doctor's sad verdict was pronounced, the dying man pleaded to be left alone with his friend.
"Ah, dear old fellow," he said gently, when they were alone, "pretty well done—for an accident? Forgive me," he murmured, as he caught a sharp look of pain in Guy's face. "Forgive——" his voice faltered, and his head fell wearily back on the pillow.
Then the poor boy's mind wandered, and Lillian Stuart's name was constantly on his lips. In broken, halting sentences a pitiful story of deception and disappointment was revealed to Guy—a story which would be sacred to him to his life's end, and, as he listened, his whole soul revolted against the woman who had so willfully trifled with this man's tender, loyal heart. Before morning dawned, Nelson Leonard's eyes had closed forever on a life which he had found too difficult for him. When the sad affair was over, Guy would fain have left Baden at once, but he was obliged to await there the arrival of Leonard's family from America.
In the days that ensued Lillian Stuart was markedly subdued, but if she had any suspicion of the real truth concerning Leonard's death she never betrayed it by word or look. She did all in her power to overcome Guy's aversion for her, but he sternly repulsed her. To attempt conciliation was a new rôle for Miss Stuart, and his cold disregard of all her efforts was the severest wound her vanity had ever received.
Such a slight is not readily forgiven or forgotten by a woman of her type. So when Guy Appleton once more crossed her path, and she found, in his deep love for Helen, his vulnerable point, she felt that her day of triumph had come.
It had been an easy task to secure Helen's friendship, and then to so use her influence with the girl as to effect the annulling of the engagement. Miss Stuart knew Guy's nature well enough to feel almost sure that, however sorely he might be tempted, he would probably never betray his knowledge of that unpleasant episode in her past; so, trading on the man's very uprightness, she revenged herself for the bitter sting of wounded vanity that rankled in her memory.
Her well-planned scheme had been marvelously successful, but one unlooked-for element had entered into it; for Helen's simplicity and purity of nature, her lack of vanity, coquetry, or duplicity, above all, her entire confidence and trust, had touched a tender chord in the heart of this cold and worldly woman, and were in themselves a power so great she felt herself held by them. Could she have foreseen the future, she would, perhaps, have struggled against this most disturbing element.
Guy's return to Hetherford with the announcement that his engagement was at an end, and that he was going immediately abroad, created quite a ferment among the good people at the manor and Rose Cottage, and many were their fruitless conjectures as to the cause of Helen's sudden change of feeling. Across at the parsonage, happy-go-lucky Nan puckered up her jolly face, pondered long over this vexatious question, and hit at last upon the correct solution of it, but wisely kept her own counsel.