"Well?" asked the young man, eagerly.
"Mrs. Stone is own cousin to Teddy Darrell, and he was Kathleen's lover last winter. Can there be any connection between her being there with Mrs. Stone—whom I'm certain she used not to know—and Teddy Darrell?"
The shaft went home. She saw him pale and tremble with jealous dread.
"I know Teddy Darrell," he said, trying to speak carelessly. "Did—did she ever care for him?"
"Yes, I believe so. There was a flirtation anyway, and we thought once it would be a match; but suddenly it all came to nothing. I don't know who was to blame, but I'm afraid it was Teddy. He's known to be fickle-minded and a wretched flirt."
How sweetly and artlessly she spoke; but every word was a sword-thrust in the hearer's heart. Wan and haggard with misery, he rose and began to pace the floor restlessly.
Alpine watched him under her down-drooped lashes, her breast heaving with its love and pain. Yet she knew that she was no more to him than a hundred other girls whose names he barely knew, save and except that she was Kathleen's step-sister. She "was not the rose, but she had lived near it."
It was cruelly hard, when she loved him so dearly. The temptation seized her to fall at his feet, to cry out to him that she could not live without him, that she was going mad for his dear love.
She recoiled with horror from the thought. No, no; he would despise her. Let her show him tenderness and sympathy, but not love. By and by he might turn to her when he became convinced that Kathleen was lost to him forever.
"And she is, she shall be!" vowed the girl; and after watching Ralph in silence for some moments, while he strode up and down, seemingly oblivious of her presence, she moved to his side, and slipping her hand timidly within his arm, murmured, softly: