"If I told them they might say, like Jewel, that it was all a sham, that the man had deceived me," she thought, with burning cheeks. "They might drive me out into the cold, hard world, of which I am so terribly afraid. No, no, I dare not speak!"
So she kept her sorrowful secret hidden in her own heart; and when Lady Ivon sometimes caught that look of sad retrospection on the fair face, she thought that she was thinking of a dead lover—not a dead husband and child.
"I fear that she must have cared more than I suspected," the old lady would say to herself, uneasily; and, could she have gazed upon Azalia now, she would have felt more anxious than ever.
She said to herself that she must find out the truth as to this Laurie Meredith. But how to accomplish it was the question that occurred to her, since she dare not ask any questions.
No answer presented itself to her mind, and she could only hope that she might meet this Laurie Meredith in society.
"But what if I should meet Jewel, too? Would she recognize me? Would she tax me with my identity? If she did, I should not acknowledge the truth."
[CHAPTER XXX.]
It was perhaps a week after that snowy day when Azalia Brooke sat, looking back with dim, wet eyes into her shadowy past, that Jewel Fielding reclined at ease in a beautiful boudoir hung in white and gold, and listened to the roar of the winter wind as it whistled in the eaves of the handsome but ancient old mansion that she called home.