“I can not go to poor old Uncle John first,” she told herself. “I must go at once to Pluma. Heaven give me strength to do it. Rex will never know, and I can go quietly out of his life again.”
The marriage must not be! Say, think, argue with herself as she would, she could not help owning to herself that it was something that must be stopped at any price. She had not realized it in its true light before. She had had a vague idea that her supposed death would leave Rex free to marry Pluma. That wrong could come of it, in any way, she never once dreamed.
The terrible awakening truth had flashed upon her suddenly; she might hide herself forever from her husband, but it would not lessen the fact; she, and she only, was his lawful wife before God and man. From Heaven nothing could be hidden.
Her whole heart seemed to go out to her young husband and cling to him as it had never done before.
“What a fatal love mine was!” she said to herself; “how fatal, how cruel to me!”
To-morrow night! Oh, Heaven! would she be in time to save him? The very thought seemed to arouse all her energy.
“Why, what are you going to do, my dear?” cried Mrs. 173 Tudor, in consternation, as Daisy staggered, weak and trembling, from her couch.
“I am going away,” she cried. “I have been guilty of a great wrong. I can not tell you all that I have done, but I must atone for it if it is in my power while yet there is time. Pity me, but do not censure me;” and sobbing as if her heart would break, she knelt at the feet of the kind friend Heaven had given her and told her all.
Mrs. Tudor listened in painful interest and amazement. It was a strange story this young girl told her; it seemed more like a romance than a page from life’s history.
“You say you must prevent this marriage at Whitestone Hall.” She took Daisy’s clasped hands from her weeping face, and holding them in her own looked into it silently, keenly, steadily. “How could you do it? What is Rexford Lyon to you?”