He paused a moment, then went on, anxiously:
"But before I go I have somewhat to ask of you. Perhaps it may be too great a favor."
"Name it," she answered, gently, and he replied:
"Lilia Stuart—your husband's child, and who should have been yours, too—lies ill unto death at her father's villa with that fatal malady, consumption. Last night you carried the child's heart by storm. To-day, in her illness and pain, she sings over fragments of your songs—they think if—you would come—that it might make happier her dying hours."
"Let her father comfort her," she said, bitterly, jealous in her heart of that other woman's child.
He took her hand and gazed deep into her soft, pure eyes, tinctured with a certain womanly pride.
"Mrs. Stuart," he said, letting his voice linger firmly on the name, "this is not worthy of you. Your heart harbors resentment against your husband when he has never wronged you. He has not sinned, he has been sinned against. Just now he cannot come to the child. He must first bury his dead."
"How can I sing to her when my heart is so empty and full of pain?" she asked, drearily.
"Because God will bless your efforts to cheer the last hours of that motherless child," he said. "Clarence Stuart loves the child, and it might have been yours as well as his. You must love it for his sake. Think if it were your own loved Irene, dying in the spring of her life."
"I will go," she answered, tremulously.