“Are you sure that none of your grand relatives will object to your marrying a poor little typewriter girl?”
To her surprise, he started and looked visibly embarrassed.
“Ah, I made a clever guess!” she exclaimed, with faint sarcasm, and then he recovered himself.
“No—yes,” he stammered, and then added: “I have no near relatives, Pansy, except a widowed sister. She has one child—a beautiful daughter, who has counted confidently on being my heiress. I think they both will feel disappointed at hearing of my marriage, but they have no right to do so. My sister has a neat little fortune of her own, and her daughter is soon to marry a rich man.”
“Then you have not written to ask their consent?” Pansy asked, with unconscious bitterness, feeling an unaccountable antagonism to those two unknown ones.
“Certainly not,” Colonel Falconer answered, with some surprise, and continued: “I’m ashamed to confess that I don’t pretend to keep up any correspondence with my sister. I have written her once since I came to San Diego. She has not answered yet, so I shall not take the trouble to announce my marriage to her until we are safe on the other side of the Atlantic. She will be glad for such bad news to be delayed,” laughing grimly.
Afterward it seemed strange to her that she had never thought of asking the names of these people, who would soon be related to her so closely by her marriage with Colonel Falconer. And it seemed equally strange that he did not tell her without the asking. There was a fate in it, she told herself, when she came to know, for if she had heard those two names she would never have married Colonel Falconer, and run the risk of again meeting Norman Wylde.
The next day they were married quietly at church, but there were quite a number of people present, for the affair had become known through the gossip of the delighted Mrs. Scruggs. Pansy remembered with a bitter thrill that ceremony in Washington, which had made her so blindly happy.
“Poor, deluded fool that I was!” she sighed, thinking how much sadder and wiser she had grown since then, for now she was past twenty, although she looked so fair and girlish no one would have thought she was more than sixteen.
They left San Diego directly, and went abroad. They spent a year in travel, and in that time Pansy learned much and improved much. The clouds passed from her beautiful face, and she was tranquilly happy with her husband, save when one blighting memory intervened. It was the thought of Norman Wylde and the dark episode in her life that she had concealed from Colonel Falconer.