[CHAPTER III.]
It was the day following the funeral of sweet Lily Lawrence—a sunny day, fragrant and bloomy with the wealth of summer. Outside of Mr. Lawrence's stately mansion in the handsome grounds enclosing it, flowers blossomed, the fountain threw up its diamond spray, and birds twittered and chirped.
But within the house all was silence and gloom. Mr. Lawrence was shut up in the library alone with his grief; Ada Lawrence lay ill of a low, nervous fever, induced by her poignant sorrow, and Mrs. Vance sat in the drawing-room alone, nervous and ill, and starting at every trivial sound.
The stately-looking widow was very handsome this morning. She wore a dress of thin black grenadine, relieved by creamy old lace at throat and wrists, and delicate ribbons of heliotrope color. Her wavy black hair was braided about her small head like a coronet, and a cluster of heliotrope blossoms nestled in its silken darkness.
A faint roseate bloom tinted her lips and cheeks, and hightened by contrast the restless brightness of her full, dark eyes, and the whiteness of her low brow. She was fully thirty-five years old, but nature and art had combined so gracefully in her make-up that she did not appear twenty-five.
A sudden peal of the door-bell made her spring up suddenly in nervous terror of she scarce knew what. She had hardly reseated herself when an obsequious servant ushered in a tall, exceedingly distinguished-looking young man. It was Lancelot Darling, the betrothed lover of the dead girl.
He was a splendidly handsome and imposing gentleman, but his elegant dress was disordered, his face was pale, almost to the verge of ghastliness, his large, brilliant dark eyes were so wild in their expression of grief that they almost seemed to glare upon the lady who advanced toward him with extended hands.
"Mr. Darling," she murmured in a low tone of surprise and pleasure. "You are better, you are able to be out."
He pressed her hand speechlessly, and tottered to a sofa, falling heavily upon it while his eyes closed for a minute. In a fright at the look of exhaustion on his white face, Mrs. Vance darted from the room, soon returning with a glass of cordial.
She lifted his head on her arm and pressed the goblet to his lips, trembling excessively the while. In a moment he revived, and rising on his elbow looked up while a faint flush mounted to his white forehead.