Happiness gone, with hope and love—
In all but breath already dead.”
While he lay suffering, an odd little letter had come to him from Paris, from Lord Stuart:
“My dear fellow, I hope you will forgive me for the suffering I caused you. My aim was bad. I only meant to give you a slight flesh wound in the shoulder, but I learn from American papers that you came near losing your life. I hope you will live. Camille was not worth the sacrifice of your strong young life. She is not with me, as I see it rumored in the papers. I have got over my fancy for her. I hear she is in London, but I do not know. I hope you will never make up your quarrel with her, for you are too good for such a woman.”
Camille had written, too, from London, begging to be allowed to return and nurse her husband. Mrs. de Vere was compelled to write that her son refused the offer.
CHAPTER XXIV.
“Sweetheart, will you go with me to the dance this evening?”
“I’ve promised to go with Frank—so there! And I wish, Tom Hinton, you wouldn’t call me that babyish name, Sweetheart. I can’t bear it!”
“What then?” asked Tom Hinton, a dapper young man, with dry-goods clerk written all over him too plainly to be mistaken.
“Why, Thea, of course,” said the beautiful golden-haired girl. “You knew when I went away to school we made that name up out of Sweetheart. I was called so by every one at school, and I want to be called so by my home-folks, too.”