"I could never again love a woman who had deceived me. Once fallen from its pedestal, the broken idol could never be restored again."
She looked at the beautiful, passion-pale face reflected in the glittering mirror, and a hopeless sigh drifted across her lips.
"I am a 'broken idol,'" she said, drearily. "I have fallen from my place in his heart, and I can never be taken back, St. Leon is too proud to forgive my girlhood's sin."
She had not been unloved in all these years. Proud men and gifted had bowed before her, won by her beauty and her genius. They marveled at her coldness, her indifference. No one guessed at the mad love lying deep in her heart under the ashes of the dead years—a smoldering fire that in the past few days had leaped into a living flame. It needed all her strength, all her pride, to fight it back. She went with him, and when he saw her he could scarcely repress a startled cry. She had chosen the colors that always became his young wife best—white and scarlet. Her white hat and a wreath of scarlet poppies; some scarlet passion-flowers were fastened in the neck of her white dress. She was so like—so like his dead wife that it would only have seemed natural to have taken her in his arms and kissed her and called her by the name of the dead.
Suddenly, as they paused before the white gates of a great, wide inclosure, she uttered a cry of dismay.
"This is the cemetery, Mr. Le Roy! Surely, you did not mean to bring me here!"
"Yes," he answered, and helped her down from the landau and led her into the grim necropolis of the dead.
She did not understand. She walked by him, silent and frightened, among the gleaming marbles, the dark-green shrubbery, the beautiful flowers with which loving hearts had decorated the graves of their dead. She heard her husband dreamily repeating some sad familiar words:
"The massy marbles rest
On the lips that we have prest
In their bloom:
And the names we loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb."