Rex had asked her to be his wife, but she stood face to face with the truth at last––he did not love her. It was not only a blow of the keenest and cruelest kind to her affection, but it was the cruelest blow her vanity could possibly have received.
To think that she, the wealthy, petted heiress, who counted her admirers by the score, should have tried so hard to win the love of this one man and have failed; that her beauty, her grace, her wit, and her talent had been lavished upon him, and lavished in vain. “Was that simple girl, with her shy, timid, shrinking manner, more lovable than I?” she asked herself, incredulously.
She could not realize it––she, whose name was on the lips of men, who praised her as the queen of beauty, and whom fair women envied as one who had but to will to win.
It seemed to her a cruel mockery of fate that she, who had everything the world could give––beauty and fortune––should ask but this one gift, and that it should be refused her––the love of the man who had asked her to be his wife.
Was it impossible that he should learn to love her?
She told herself that she should take courage, that she would persevere, that her great love must in time prevail.
“I must never let him find me dull or unhappy,” she thought. “I must carefully hide all traces of pique or annoyance.”
She would do her best to entertain him, and make it the study of her life to win his love.
She watched the stars until they faded from the skies, then buried her face in her pillow, falling into an uneasy slumber, through which a beautiful, flower-like, girlish face floated, and a slight, delicate form knelt at her feet holding her arms out imploringly, sobbing out: