"I was very young and foolish in those days," said Queenie, with a sigh. "I do not suppose that any girl ever lived more silly and romantic than I was. I brooded day and night over the mysterious donor of the fan and flowers. All my secret thoughts were of him. I felt quite sure in my own mind that the handsome man who had looked at me so admiringly in the fancy store was my unknown admirer. I expected daily to meet him somewhere in the haunts of the gay society in which I had become somewhat of a belle. You remember, Sydney?"
Sydney did not answer, and she went on, slowly:
"I did not meet him in society; but after a time we met in a public park. I was walking there alone. I slipped and fell, spraining my ankle severely. A gentleman rushed to my assistance. It was the handsome stranger of whom I had dreamed so much that I had become perfectly infatuated with him. He placed me in a carriage and took me home. You were all out that day, and I never told of that event in my life through some undefined fear of censure. That was where my fault began—in that first act of secrecy."
She paused a moment, and a heart-wrung sigh drifted over her pale and quivering lips.
Sydney sat perfectly still, regarding her with stern, unpitying eyes, as though they were strangers instead of sisters whom the same mother had nursed on her breast.
"We met again and again," said Queenie, slowly. "Always by accident, it seemed at first, Sydney, and I am quite sure it was accident on my part; but I know now that it was by design on the part of Mr. Vinton. He wooed me in the most romantic fashion. Flowers and poetry were the vehicles through which he conveyed his sentiments, until at last grown bolder, he openly avowed his love for me."
"You must have been very forward to have encouraged him to a declaration so soon," said Sydney, with a sneer.
"Sydney, I declare to you I was not. Oh! if you knew Leon Vinton as I do now, you would know that I was not—you would know that the more timid and shrinking the dove the more fierce and unrelenting would be his pursuit," exclaimed Queenie, with a scarlet blush at her sister's cruel charge.
"I knew, of course," she continued, after a moment's thoughtful pause, "home was the proper place for my lover to woo me. I said as much to him. His ready excuse appeared perfectly sufficient in my silly eyes. He told me that he was a foreigner of high birth and rank, exiled from his native land through a political offense and that he had heard that my father was bitterly opposed to all foreigners. He, therefore, felt it to be quite hopeless to seek for the entree to my father's house. Little simpleton that I was, I swallowed the whole stupendous lie because it was baited with the one single grain of truth—namely, the well-known fact that my father was bitterly prejudiced against all persons of foreign birth. I believed all he told me, and, worse than all, I believed that I was deeply and devotedly in love with him. That was the blind mistake of my life, Sydney. Now I know that I was not in love with the man. It was the romance and poetry of his manner of wooing me, the mystery that surrounded him with an atmosphere of ideality that fascinated and infatuated me. I was very young and romantic, as he well knew when he set his artful trap for me. He knew too well how to bait it. It was only the wooing that I loved when I thought it was the wooer."
Her voice broke a moment, and she buried her face in her hands.