Rising slowly from her seat, she put on her hat, caught up a small hand satchel from the floor, and passed silently from the poor apartment.
If only she had turned her fair, haughty head for one backward glance—if only——
For his passionate heart had almost leaped from his breast in the terror of his loss.
Anger, pride, and pique were forgotten alike in the supreme anguish of that moment’s despair.
As she turned away he stretched his arms out yearningly, whispering with stiff, white lips that could scarcely frame the words:
“Darling, come back!”
Had she only looked back, her heart would have melted with tenderness at sight of his grief. She would have fallen, sobbing, on his breast.
But she never turned her proud, dark head; she did not catch the yearning whisper, and his arms dropped heavily to his sides again, while the echo of her retreating footsteps fell like a death knell on his heart.
Angry and estranged, they had parted to go their separate ways forever, and the stream of destiny rolled in widely between their sundered lives, thus wrenched violently heart from heart.
To be born to the heritage of such beauty, pride, and passion, is not altogether goodly—yet, it is the daughter of this strangely parted pair whom I have chosen for my heroine, for in four months after Verna Dalrymple left her husband she became the mother of a lovely daughter—a girl that in its dainty beauty possessed the blond fairness of the father, the dark, dreamy eyes and proud, beautiful mouth of the brunet mother.