"She was little more than a child, and it was a girlish fancy that she took for love," he thought now. "It was cruel in me to take advantage of her, and bind her by a tie that afterward made her miserable. Jewel may say what she pleases, but I am not sure that Flower drowned herself wholly on account of the unhappy circumstances of her birth. I fear that her sorrow over her hasty marriage, and despair at her situation, helped to drive her to that mad deed."
At times he could not help contrasting the fickleness of Flower's love with the constancy and devotion of Jewel's. He had said to himself more than once, with a pang of wounded pride:
"Flower cared but little for my love, but Jewel valued it above all else on earth. It is right that I should reward her devotion. I will try to love the faithful, dark-eyed girl as she deserves."
But such is the strangeness of the human heart that he prized the memory of the lost girl far more than he did the living love of beautiful, passionate Jewel. He could not have helped it if he would, and he did not struggle much against the feeling, for it seemed to him that he owed his greatest allegiance to the memory of her who had loved him, for a time at least, tenderly and truly, and who had died so young; and to his heart there came sometimes, with a shuddering pain, the strangely fitting words of Poe, the passionate poet, who sounded the heights and depths of love's emotion:
"Would to God I could awaken!
For I dream I know not how,
And my soul is sorely shaken
Lest an evil step be taken—
Lest the dead who is forsaken
May not be happy now!"
Almost without his own volition, and perhaps partly inspired by the strain of half-sad music that floated out from the ball-room, these often-recurring thoughts came to him again, and, wrapped in their pain and pathos, he forgot the flight of time until he saw Jewel coming back to him alone, with such a pale, drawn face that he started in wonder.
"My dear, what is it? You look as if you had seen a ghost!" he exclaimed.
She fell wearily into the seat by his side, and answered, in a low, strained voice:
"Oh, Laurie, I have had a great shock!"
He could well believe her, for she was trembling violently; her face, and even her lips were ghastly pale, and her eyes had a startled expression in their dark, liquid depths.