But she negatived the proposition in extreme alarm.
"It could only afford me pleasure to see Mrs. Lynn again," she declared. "I love her for her likeness to the dead. I am unwilling to lose a single chance of seeing her. And I promise you, St. Leon, that I will not lose my self-control again as I did to-day in the first shock of meeting her. I will be as calm and cold as she is."
[CHAPTER LI.]
A few days later Mr. Ford brought his niece and her son to call at Eden.
The brilliant writer looked very elegant and distinguished in her dress of soft, rich black silk and lace. A dainty bonnet of black lace and gleaming jet rested on the dark golden waves of her hair, and set off to the greatest advantage her blonde loveliness, lighted by such dark and star-like eyes. A soft color glowed on her rounded cheeks, and her eyes were bright with repressed excitement, but no trace of her heart's emotion showed in her calm, gracious manner as she bowed to her handsome host and greeted his stately mother. She had schooled herself to calmness, and no heartless queen of society ever bore herself with more nonchalant ease and outward coldness than did Laurel in the hour when she re-entered the home she had left long years before, a wretched, despairing child, for whom life seemed over and done. Now, as she stepped across the threshold, a beautiful, proud, successful woman, whom the world delighted to honor, she remembered that broken-hearted child with a pang of bitterness that steeled her heart to the softness that had melted it for a moment. She would be cold and calm for the sake of the girl so cruelly put away from her husband's heart, so cruelly misjudged and scorned. Yet, as it all rushed over her again, she wondered, as she had wondered over and over in the past, how she had lived through her sorrow—that sorrow which she had said so many times would kill her when it came.
"The day drags through, though storms keep out the sun,
And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on."
She said the pathetic lines over to herself, wearily, even as she touched St. Leon's hand with her own and looked at him with a smile—a smile bright but cold like moonlight on snow. He had no answering smile in return. His face was almost stern in its marble pallor and intensity of repressed emotion. His firm white hand was cold as ice as it touched the rosy palm so graciously extended; his voice had a strange tone, even to himself, as he welcomed her to his home.
"You have the most beautiful home on the Hudson. Eden is far more beautiful than Belle Vue," she said to him, with her bright, cold smile.
"I am glad you like my home. It will always have an added charm in my eyes since Mrs. Lynn has deigned to praise it," St. Leon answered, gallantly.