"Mother, here is your daughter," he said, with the brightest smile she had ever seen on his darkly handsome face.
"And Cyril Wentworth?" she asked, blissful, but bewildered.
"I have never loved him. It was only fancy. I have broken with him forever!" answered the girl.
"Thank God!" she cried, drawing her new daughter into her arms and kissing her fondly; while she added to St. Leon, gladly: "I am so glad it is our sweet little Beatrix, and not that odious Maud Merivale!"
And that day she wrote a letter to Mrs. Gordon, telling her how cleverly their plot had succeeded, and that St. Leon had taken Cyril Wentworth's place in her daughter's heart.
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
"Wooed and married and a'." How swiftly it all had followed upon Laurel Vane's coming to Eden!
In June she had come to the Le Roys, a trembling, frightened, innocent little impostor, lending herself to a fraud for Beatrix Gordon's sake. From a most unwelcome intruder, whom they had received with secret disfavor, she had come to be the light of their eyes and their hearts. To-day—a fair, ripe day in October, with the "flying gold of the ruined woodlands driving through the air"—she clung to St. Leon Le Roy's arm, his worshiped bride, happy, with a strange, delirious happiness, in spite of the sword that ever hung suspended by a hair above her head—the sword that must surely fall some day, and cause her destruction.
She was dizzy with the whirl of events that had brought about this dazzling consummation.