"I thank Heaven that she found an asylum in her friendliness," he said, although it was painful to think that she had ceased to love him so long ago that now she could meet him and conceal her identity in the fear that he might claim her as his own.
"But I shall never do that, for I am as proud as Lord Ivon's heiress, and, though I love her to madness, I will never even see her again unless she recalls me to her side," he mused; and then he realized, with a start, that now he could not marry Jewel Fielding since he felt so sure that Azalia Brooke was no other than his lost wife, lovely, fickle, willful Flower.
"Poor Jewel! she will take it hard, losing me like this," he thought, remembering her mad love with manly pity.
He asked himself if he should tell Jewel what he had discovered, and decided that he would not do so.
"Let Azalia Brooke keep her secret. I love her too well to betray her even to the sister who mourns her as dead. She may even marry Lord Clive, and believe herself safe under the mask of Lord Ivon's heiress. If I was wrong in binding her to me ere she fully knew her own heart, I will atone by 'silence to the death,'" he sighed, with loyal self-sacrifice.
He rewarded the old sexton most generously for his information; then, after some grave and thoughtful minutes spent by the grave of Daisy Forrest, he determined to return at once to Boston.
But while walking back to the little hotel, a startling thought came to him.
That dream of the mulatto man, Sam—what if it were no dream, but a reality?
Flower had not drowned herself that night, although Jewel had been so positive of the fact.
She had borne a child, his unhappy young girl-wife. What had become of the little one?