"You talk as if I was a machine, mother, and could cease loving at will!" cried the beauty.
"It is much as a woman makes up her mind. If you worry yourself into the grave over a man, before the grass has time to grow over you he will have consoled himself with another sweetheart. So dry your eyes, and don't shed a tear over him."
Gerelda walked slowly from the room. It was not so easy to take her mother's advice, for she loved Hubert Varrick with all her heart; and the very thought of him loving another was worse to her than a poisoned arrow in her breast.
She knew why he did not care for her.
"I have only one hope," she murmured, leaning her tear-stained face against the marble mantel, "and that is that Hubert may soon get over his mad infatuation for that girl Jessie Bain."
Gerelda sought her couch, but not to sleep; and it was not until daylight stole through the room, heralding the approach of another day, that slumber came to her.
Hubert Varrick, in his room at the hotel, was quite as restless. He had paced the floor, smoking cigar after cigar, trying to look the matter calmly in the face, until he was fairly exhausted.
He was glad to know that Gerelda had not been false to him; and yet, so conflicting were his thoughts, that he almost wished to Heaven that she had been, that he could have had some excuse to give her up.
He made up his mind that he could not marry Gerelda while his heart was so entirely another's, but he must break away from her gently.
As he was passing a music store the next afternoon, he saw a piece of music in the window which Gerelda had asked him to bring to her. He went and purchased it, and was about sending it to her by a messenger boy, when he thought it would look much better to take it himself; besides, he had business to attend to in that locality.