The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Didn’t the servant tell you Mr. Rayborne wished to see you?” Mark said.

“Mr. Rayborne, yes; but not Mr. Hilton. Are you Mr. Rayborne? Is that the name you took?” she asked, and he replied, “Yes, I am Mr. Rayborne, and I am here at Inez’s request. She is very ill,—dying, we fear,—the shock was so great. She wishes to see her sister.”

For an instant Mark’s eyes, which usually moved rapidly from one object to another, were still and held the woman as if a spell were thrown over her. With a sensation of numbness in every limb Helen gasped, “Inez, your daughter! and sister to my Fanny! How do you know that?”

She was almost prepared to deny Fanny’s paternity, but Mark’s reply prevented it.

“Fanny told Inez that her own father, Mark Hilton, whom she could not remember, was killed in the mines of Montana and that she took Judge Prescott’s name when her mother married him. Do I want more proof than that? I suppose you changed her name from Frances to Fanny, which was natural enough. Sit down. You don’t look able to stand.”

He brought her a chair and put her in it with his old-time courtesy of manner, while Helen began to cry. To find Mark alive was not so bad. Indeed, she was glad, for his supposed death in the mines had always weighed upon her as something for which she was in part responsible. But to find him a guide, a mountaineer, was galling to her pride. Her Apollo had fallen from his pedestal, not only in position, but in looks. He was still fine looking, but there were signs of age about him which her quick eye detected. His hair was tinged with grey, and he was not as erect as when he carried her through the rain. He had grown old and Helen found herself feeling sorry for it and sorry that he had lost the jaunty, city air he had when she last saw him. All this, however, was nothing to the fact that he had another daughter, who was Fanny’s sister and whom Fanny would claim at once if she knew of the relationship. She must not know, and Helen was about to speak, when Mark said to her, “You remember that the divorce was mentioned at some length in the gossiping papers, and in one of them sympathy was extended to you for the loss of your little daughter.”

“Yes,” Helen answered. “She was very ill and said to be dead by one of the nurses. The reporters were very busy and seized upon every item, whether true or false. The story was contradicted in the next day’s issue.”

“Just so. I saw the first, and not the last, and thought her dead. With her gone and you lost to me, as you were, and with no home or friends, it is not strange that I wanted to get away and be forgotten,” Mark said. “In California it is comparatively easy to do this. For a long time I would not look in a New York or Chicago paper if one came in my way, and so I missed seeing the announcement of your marriage with Judge Prescott and supposed you were still Mrs. Tracy, if living. I believe you dropped my name when you dropped me.”

Helen assented, and he went on: “There is no look in Fanny’s face like you, or like me, but she interested me strangely when I saw her, and sent my thoughts back to Ridgefield and to you, and the long ago, which I could wish blotted out, if it were not for Fanny and the love she and Inez bear each other. I have never heard a word of you since I came to California and did not know whether you were dead or alive. I have avoided eastern people lest I should stumble upon some one who knew me. I have acted as guide unwillingly, for fear of meeting an old acquaintance. Fortunately I never have. I had no suspicion that Fanny was my daughter until yesterday, when Inez came home, more dead than alive and I asked particularly about her friend. Inez’s mother died with heart trouble, which she inherits. I have always known this and tried to guard her from strong excitement. The fright yesterday was too much for her and she does not rally from it.”

“Does she know of—of—the relationship?” Helen asked falteringly, as if the word hurt her pride.