He knew all she had said was quite true. He had tried so hard to love this beautiful queenly girl from her infancy up. He was tender of heart, honest and true; but an insurmountable barrier seemed ever between them; each year found them further apart.
Basil Hurlhurst lived over again in those few moments the terrible folly that had cursed his youth, as he watched the passion-rocked face before him.
“Youth is blind and will not see,” had been too bitterly true with him. It was in his college days, when the world seemed all gayety, youth and sunshine to him, he first met the beautiful face that was to darken all of his after life. He was young and impulsive; he thought it was love that filled his heart for the beautiful stranger who appeared alone and friendless in that little college town.
He never once asked who or what she was, or from whence she came, this beautiful creature with the large, dark, dreamy eyes that thrilled his heart into love. She carried the town by storm; every young man at the college was deeply, desperately in love. But Basil, the handsomest and wealthiest of them all, thought what a lark it would be to steal a march on them all by marrying the dark-eyed beauty then and there. He not only thought it, but executed it, but it was not the lark that he thought it was going to be. For one short happy week he lived in a fool’s paradise, then a change came over the spirit of his dreams. In that one week she had spent his year’s income and all the money he could borrow, then petulantly left him in anger.
For two long years he never looked upon her face again. One stormy night she returned quite unexpectedly at Whitestone Hall, bringing with her their little child Pluma, and, placing her in her father’s arms, bitter recriminations followed. Bitterly Basil Hurlhurst repented that terrible mistake of his youth, that hasty marriage.
When the morning light dawned he took his wife and child from Whitestone Hall––took them abroad. What did it matter to him where they went? Life was the same to him in one part of the world as another. For a year they led a weary 111 life of it. Heaven only knew how weary he was of the woman the law called his wife!
One night, in a desperate fit of anger, she threw herself into the sea; her body was never recovered. Then the master of Whitestone Hall returned with his child, a sadder and wiser man.
But the bitterest drop in his cup had been added last. The golden-haired young wife, the one sweet love whom he had married last, was taken from him; even her little child, tiny image of that fair young mother, had not been spared him.
How strange it was such a passionate yearning always came over him when he thought of his child!
When he saw a fair, golden-haired young girl, with eyes of blue, the pain in his heart almost stifled him. Some strange unaccountable fate urged him to ever seek for that one face even in the midst of crowds. It was a mad, foolish fancy, yet it was the one consolation of Basil Hurlhurst’s weary, tempest tossed life.