That was but the beginning. They met night after night in the saloons of fashion, although Jewel contrived to keep them apart, they studied each other closely, and both were startled by the other's likeness to a dead love.
Jewel was puzzled, too, by the terrible resemblance of Azalia Brooke to her dead half-sister.
"If I did not know that she was dead, if I did not know what was lying in that old cellar under the noisome water, ay, if I did not know whose ghost it was that haunted the corridors of that old house, I could almost swear that this was Flower masquerading under a grand seeming," she told herself over and over, with a shudder; for Jewel's life had the stain of a dark sin on it now, and she had seen more than once or twice the vision of a light, shadowy figure all in luminous white, with floating golden hair, flitting at twilight through the corridors of her stately home.
"It is Flower's spirit!" she decided, fearfully, and wondered if the murdered girl were going to haunt her all her life.
"Oh, how much I have done for the sake of my love for Laurie Meredith!" she thought. "And yet, I half believe that but for dread of me he would woo this hateful English girl only for the sake of that fatal resemblance. He is attracted toward her. I can see that in spite of the indifference he pretends. Let him beware! Let both beware, for if they played me false both should answer with their lives!"
[CHAPTER XXXVI]
Azalia Brooke went home that night from the grand ball, puzzled, tormented, almost convinced that her lover-husband was not dead, but that he lived in the person of Jewel Fielding's lover.
His striking likeness to him she had so long believed dead was so wonderful and startling that it had almost unnerved her that night, and it was only by a strong exercise of will-power that she resisted the impulse to cry out, to claim him, and charge him with his falsity, to say, bitterly: