Lily shuddered at this intimation of Peter's cruelty.
"Haidee, I did not mean to hurt you that day," said she, earnestly. "I would not hurt the meanest thing that lives if I could help it. I only pushed you to throw you off your balance, so that I might get away."
"You had better eat your supper," said Haidee, not caring to recall that day, for she still harbored a furious resentment against the girl on the score of it, and often felt tempted to wreak revenge upon her. "You had better eat your supper, for old Peter will be angry with you if you keep him waiting outside the door so long."
"Take the bread away. I cannot eat any to-night," answered Lily, with a hopeless sigh.
[CHAPTER XX.]
The autumn sunlight fell goldenly on the handsome face and form of Lancelot Darling as he stood on the broad marble steps of the grand hotel where he boarded, his glance roving carelessly up and down the crowded street.
Our hero was that rara avis whose species is almost extinct at the present day—a young man of wealth and fashion, yet totally unspoiled by the flattery and adulation of the world.
Carefully raised by judicious parents, whom he had unhappily lost by death in the dawn of manhood, he had been shielded from many temptations that would have assailed one less carefully guarded than this only and beloved child of fond and doting parental care.
Enjoying the possession of an almost princely fortune, which precluded the need of work, one would have thought him liable to be whirled into the maelstrom of vice and dissipation, and engulfed in its fatal whirlpool forever.