The quick tears started out beneath her golden-brown lashes.
"Alas, alas! he does not love me," she sighed. "Why should he do so? He never saw me but once before last night. It was my own willful folly that led him into that dreadful marriage. I doubt not he was glad when he thought that my reckless suicide had broken the fetters that had bound him. Last night he pretended not to know me, yet he could hardly have been ignorant of my identity. He could not have forgotten my face so soon. It is a fair one, they say—yet not fair enough to have won his heart."
That momentous question, "What am I to do?" echoed drearily in her heart. She could find no answer to it; she could think of no refuge from her sorrow. For the first time since that awful night in the cold, dark waves, she wished that the friendly plank had not drifted to her reach—that she had perished miserably then rather than have lived to find herself in this terrible strait.
"I cannot marry Mr. Revington now," she thought. "I must take back my promise of yesterday, with no reason save that of a woman's fickleness. He will be very angry; he will tell my miserable story to Mr. Stuart and Mrs. Leslie, to all of these people that sneer at the mystery that enshrouds my past. What shall I do?"
A passionate shame surged over her at the thought of the cold looks and sneering words that would be thrown at her when her discarded suitor should tell these strangers that her mother was a dishonored woman, and that she, her child, had no right to her father's name. She fancied that Mrs. Leslie and Mr. Stuart, the only two friends she had, would be turned against her, too. She would be utterly alone and wretched—friendless and forsaken.
"And yet I cannot be sorry that Guy Kenmore lives," she murmured. "Though he hate me and deny me; though he bring down shame and sorrow on my head, I must still be glad that he did not perish in the cold and dark waves. How strange it seems that only twenty-four hours ago I wept him dead, and now I weep him living. Alas! living or dead, he is lost to me the same. I must ever remain an unloved, unacknowledged bride."
Worn out by the weary vigils of the past two nights she threw herself down on the bed, dressed as she was, and fell into an exhausted slumber. She slept late and dreamlessly, and when she opened her bewildered blue eyes the next morning upon the beautiful sunny day no answer had come to the question that vexed her brain last night.
But in the golden light of the new day her woful strait did not look so grievous as it did last night. A feverish hope sprang up in her heart that God would befriend her in her sorrow and helplessness and show her some way out of her trouble.
When she had made her simple, pretty toilet, and gone down-stairs, she found that everyone had breakfasted except Mr. Revington, who had sentimentally waited for her. She swallowed her breakfast with what appetite she could, and then he asked her to take a walk with him.
"All the ladies of the family are out in the garden," he said. "Mrs. Leslie and her admirer, Mr. Kenmore, have been out almost an hour. That will be a match, I think."