The grand old trees seemed to stretch their giant arms protectingly over her, as if to ward off all harm.
The night-wind fanned her flushed cheeks and tossed her golden curls against her wistful, tear-stained face. Noiselessly she crept up the wide, graveled path that led to his home––the home which should have been hers.
Was it fancy? She thought she heard Rex’s voice crying out: “Daisy, my darling!” How pitifully her heart thrilled! Dear Heaven! if it had only been true. It was only the restless murmur of the waves sighing among the orange-trees.
A light burned dimly in an upper window. Suddenly a shadow fell across the pale, silken curtains. She knew but too well whose shadow it was; the proud, graceful poise of the handsome head, and the line of the dark curls waving over the broad brow, could belong to no one but Rex. There was no one but the pitying moonlight out there to see how passionately the poor little child-bride kissed the pale roses on which that shadow had fallen, and how she broke it from the stem and 104 placed it close to her beating heart––that lonely, starved little heart, chilled under the withering frost of neglect, when life, love and happiness should have been just bursting into bloom for her.
“He said I had spoiled his life,” she sighed, leaning her pale face wearily against the dark-green ivy vines. “He must have meant I had come between him and Pluma. Will he go back to her, now that he believes me dead?”
One question alone puzzled her: Had Birdie mentioned her name, and would he know it was she, whom every one believed lying so cold and still in the bottomless pit? She could not tell.
“If I could but see Birdie for a moment,” she thought, “and beseech her to keep my secret!”
Birdie had said her brother was soon going away again.
“How could I bear it?” she asked herself, piteously.
It was not in human nature to see the young husband whom she loved so well drifting so completely away from her and still remain silent. “I will watch over him from afar; I will be his guardian angel; I must remain as one dead to him forever,” she told herself.