“My dear girls, you will drive poor Rosalind wild. Let me tell her the cruel truth at once,” exclaimed Madam Fortescue, and taking the girl’s hand, tenderly, in hers, she said tearfully:
“I grieve to tell you that my nephew, Charley Bonair, has to-day capped the climax of his follies by making a clandestine marriage with the sick actress whom he saved from the bear pit the night of the ball.”
“Oh, heavens!” gasped Rosalind, in very genuine horror and indignation, for she had not expected the climax so soon.
She sat gazing at the speaker with a pale, stricken face, while she went on bitterly:
“It seems Charley had known the girl before that night. He met her first in the town where you live before she went upon the stage, and fell in love with her then, so he says. But she had some sort of a strange disappearance, then, and he believed her dead until coming home, unexpectedly, the night of our grand ball, he saw her on the stage and knew her at once for the missing girl. He was so agitated between his duty to you and his love for her that he did not make his presence known to us, but went out into the grounds to overcome his agitation. There he had the good fortune, as he calls it, of saving her life. The romance of this incident increased his love to recklessness so that he threw pride and duty to the winds and proposed to the girl yesterday. She accepted the offer, and this morning he procured a minister, and they were married, with the Clines as witnesses.”
Lucile chimed in furiously:
“He had the impudence to come and tell us all about it when the thing was irrevocably done, and to beg us to accept that nobody for a sister!”
Rosalind would never be paler than now, as she sat and listened, speechless with rage, at Charley’s escapade.
Where were all the clever plans she had made for circumventing him now? All shattered to pieces by this action of the ardent lover, who had cleverly forestalled everything by his hasty wedding.
“We will never accept her for a sister—never! We will never forgive him for the slight to you whom we loved already as a sister!” sobbed Marie, and at this juncture Rosalind thought it was time to fall back, half fainting, in her seat, but not to go entirely unconscious until she had heard all there was to tell.