“She has settled it beyond a doubt––is not that what you mean, Rex?” she asked, looking him squarely in the face, with a peculiar glitter in her sparkling dark eyes.
“There is something you are keeping from me, Pluma,” cried Rex, seizing both of her hands, and gazing anxiously into the false, fair, smiling, treacherous face. “You know where Daisy has gone––in Heaven’s name, tell me! I can not endure the suspense––do not torture me, Pluma! I will forget you have spoken unkindly of poor little Daisy if you will only tell me where she has gone.”
“Sit down, Rex,” she said, soothingly; “I will not dare tell you while you look at me with such a gleaming light in your eyes. Promise not to interrupt me to the end.”
A nameless dread was clutching at his heart-strings. What could she mean? he asked himself, confusedly. What did this foul mystery mean? He must know, or he would go mad!
“You may speak out unreservedly, Miss Pluma,” he said, hoarsely. “I give you my word, as a gentleman, I shall not interrupt you, even though your words should cause me a bitter heart-pang.”
He stood before her, his arms folded across his breast, yet no pang of remorse crept into Pluma Hurlhurst’s relentless heart for the cruel blow she was about to deal him.
“I must begin at the time of the lawn fête,” she said. “That morning a woman begged to see me, sobbing so piteously I could not refuse her an audience. No power of words could portray the sad story of suffering and wrong she poured into my ears, of a niece––beautiful, young, passionate, and willful––and of her prayers and useless expostulations, and of a handsome, dissolute lover to whom the girl was passionately attached, and of elopements she had frustrated, alas! more than once. Ah! how shall I say it!––the lover was not a marrying man.”
Pluma stopped short, and hid her face again in her kerchief as if in utter confusion.
“Go on––go on!” cried Rex, hoarsely.
“‘Lend me money,’ cried the woman, ‘that I may protect the girl by sending her off to school at once. Kind 54 lady, she is young, like you, and I beg you on my knees!’ I gave the woman the required amount, and the girl was taken to school the very next day. But the end was not there. The lover followed the girl––there must have been a preconcerted plan between them––and on the morning after she had entered school she fled from it––fled with her lover. That lover was Lester Stanwick––gay, fascinating, perfidious Lester––whom you know but too well. Can you not guess who the girl was, Rex?”