On the fourth day of Isabel’s illness Chester St. John, who had left the city on the day when Iris rejected his love, returned to his home, and, chancing to hear of the illness of Hilton’s daughter through the conversation of two gentlemen in his clubroom, at once concluded that the sufferer was the girl whom he had loved—nay, whom he still loved as he could never love another, although her own words had condemned her as a heartless coquette, and he had parted from her with bitter words of reproach and recrimination.
“Iris dying! Oh, it cannot be! My bright, beautiful love,” he groaned, and the impulse to go to her home and beg them to let him look upon her face once more was too strong to be resisted.
He remembered now, when he had believed that Heaven was taking her from him—remembered with an anguish keen as death—the last look he had seen in the deep blue eyes of Iris—the look of passionate love and bitter pain that had followed him, even while her cruel lips sent him from her.
“There was some mistake—oh, my love! My precious little Iris, if I could see you now you would make it plain to me,” he thought, and walked directly from the club to Oscar Hilton’s, his heart turning sick within him as he approached the house, and a terrible fear came to him that he might see long streamers of crape and white ribbon streaming from the bell handle.
“I think the sight would have killed me,” he murmured, as he stood on the threshold awaiting admittance a few minutes later.
On this day Isabel had been pronounced “out of danger,” and Oscar Hilton consented to leave her bedside long enough to see Mr. St. John.
The desire to win this rich man for his daughter’s husband instantly revived in the father’s heart at sight of Chester’s card, and he left the presence of the girl who had been so near to the portals of death with no prayer of thanksgiving in his heart to the God who had spared her to him, but with wild schemes running through his brain for her worldly advancement. He knew that when she gained her strength again she would stop at nothing to bring this proud, handsome Chester St. John to her feet, and he himself had a plan by which he hoped to aid her in the accomplishment of this purpose.
On entering the little reception room into which a servant had shown St. John, Mr. Hilton was startled by the almost ghastly pallor of the young man’s face. He was not long in making the discovery that it was fears for the life of Iris, and no anxiety for Isabel, that had wrought this change in the strong, proud man before him, and a fierce and unreasoning hatred sprang to life in his heart for the hapless child whose sweet, young face had had power to awaken such a wondrous depth of love in this man’s soul, a love that his own queenly Isabel had failed as yet to inspire.
The plans which had been hitherto vague and shadowy took sudden form and shape in his scheming brain, and when Chester St. John left the house, nearly an hour later, Oscar Hilton watched his retreating form with a look almost amounting to triumph.
“I have shaken his faith in her, even as she herself could not shake it, although she assured him she had no love for him, and led him to think her a coquette. He will not seek her now, although he does not as yet believe—as I hinted to him—that she has left my roof for the arms of some unworthy lover. He shall believe it, though—if Evelyn has not forgotten her cunning in imitating her daughter’s pretty penmanship.”