“Would you really?” asked Daisy, wonderingly. “You, whom people call so haughty and so proud––you would really let me wear one of your dresses? I do not know how to tell you how much I am pleased!” she said, eagerly.
Pluma Hurlhurst laughed. Such rapture was new to her.
The night which drew its mantle over the smiling earth was a perfect one. Myriads of stars shone like jewels in the blue sky, and not a cloud obscured the face of the clear full moon. Hurlhurst Plantation was ablaze with colored lamps that threw out soft rainbow tints in all directions as far as the eye could reach. The interior of Whitestone Hall was simply dazzling in its rich rose bloom, its lights, its fountains, and rippling music from adjoining ferneries.
In an elegant apartment of the Hall Basil Hurlhurst, the recluse invalid, lay upon his couch, trying to shut out the mirth and gayety that floated up to him from below. As the sound of Pluma’s voice sounded upon his ear he turned his face to the wall with a bitter groan. “She is so like––” he muttered, grimly. “Ah! the pleasant voices of our youth turn into lashes which scourge us in our old age. ‘Like mother, like child.’”
The lawn fête was a grand success; the élite of the whole country round were gathered together to welcome the beautiful, peerless hostess of Whitestone Hall. Pluma moved among her guests like a queen, yet in all that vast throng her eyes eagerly sought one face. “Where was Rex?” was the question which constantly perplexed her. After the first waltz he had suddenly disappeared. Only the evening before handsome Rex Lyon had held her jeweled hand long at parting, whispering, 18 in his graceful, charming way, he had something to tell her on the morrow. “Why did he hold himself so strangely aloof?” Pluma asked herself, in bitter wonder. Ah! had she but known!
While Pluma, the wealthy heiress, awaited his coming so eagerly, Rex Lyon was standing, quite lost in thought, beside a rippling fountain in one of the most remote parts of the lawn, thinking of Daisy Brooks. He had seen a fair face––that was all––a face that embodied his dream of loveliness, and without thinking of it found his fate, and the whole world seemed changed for him.
Handsome, impulsive Rex Lyon, owner of several of the most extensive and lucrative orange groves in Florida, would have bartered every dollar of his worldly possessions for love.
He had hitherto treated all notion of love in a very off-hand, cavalier fashion.
“Love is fate,” he had always said. He knew Pluma loved him. Last night he had said to himself: The time had come when he might as well marry; it might as well be Pluma as any one else, seeing she cared so much for him. Now all that was changed. “I sincerely hope she will not attach undue significance to the words I spoke last evening,” he mused.
Rex did not care to return again among the throng; it was sweeter far to sit there by the murmuring fountain dreaming of Daisy Brooks, and wondering when he should see her again. A throng which did not hold the face of Daisy Brooks had no charm for Rex.