[CHAPTER XXIX.]
It was of all these stirring events that Azalia Brooks was thinking as she sat in Raynold Clinton's library, crushing in her jeweled hands the paper that held those two names with their magic power to evoke the past, her sad eyes full of retrospection, her heart heavy with pain.
Since that May day, more than two years ago, when William Kelso had so opportunely found her beside her mother's grave, she had been a most fortunate girl, for Lord Ivon and his wife, in their loneliness and their desire for an heir to reign after them, welcomed her with open arms, overlooked the dark stain upon her birth, and only stipulated that it should be kept from the knowledge of the world. In order to further this end, and to destroy her identity with Daisy Forrest's illegitimate daughter, they changed her name to Azalia Brooke, and as no one in England knew any better, except William Kelso, who kept the secret inviolate, her right to the name remained undisputed. She remained for a year secluded at Lord Ivon's magnificent country house in Cornwall, under the care of accomplished governesses and masters, and when she was presented in society created the greatest furore by her grace and beauty. The lovely American, as she was called, was all the rage, and scores of suitors bowed before her, but all in vain, for no one ever awakened her heart, they said, and Lord and Lady Ivon began to feel sorely disappointed. They had hoped she would fall in love with some of her noble suitors and marry.
"Perhaps you have left a lover in America, dear?" Lady Ivon said, anxiously, one day; and she never forgot the look of pain that shadowed the beautiful face as Azalia replied:
"No, grandmamma, I did not. I never had but one lover, and he died in a few months after we became acquainted."
"But you must have been so very young at the time that you could not have cared for him so very much," said Lady Ivon, anxiously.
"Yes, I was very young," Azalia answered, dreamily; but she added to herself that she cared so much that she should never forget her dead husband, and sighed:
"Forget thee? Yes, when life shall cease
To thrill this heart of mine;
But not till then can I forget
One look or tone of thine!"
There was a burden on her heart—the burden of the secret she had not dared to confess either to Mr. Kelso or to her great-grandparents.
She feared that they would not receive her if she confessed that she had been married in secret to a man who had deserted her so strangely, and that she had borne a little child that was dead and had been buried in a secret grave.