“My son, who told you that Floy Fane was dead?”
CHAPTER XLI.
JOY AND SORROW.
St. George looked up at his mother, and it angered him to see the look of joy on her face.
“She is so glad—so glad of my darling’s death that she has not the grace to hide it, to feign a sympathy she can not feel,” he thought, miserably.
“Answer me, dear,” she persisted, grasping his arm in her excitement.
He turned his heavy eyes on her face, and said, reproachfully:
“You need not look so glad that she is dead, mother; my grief is bitter enough without that. Well, it was Otho Maury, if you wish to know who wrote me she was dead. He sent me a paragraph from a daily paper. She died by accident—fell from a fourth-story window. Oh, God!” he ended, with a groan, putting his hand upon his eyes as if to shut out some terrible sight.
Mrs. Beresford drew back at her son’s reproach, and signed to Alva that she could not go on; it must be her task to break the truth to her brother.
She knelt down before him; she put her arm about his shoulders, and her dark eyes, when she raised them to his face, were streaming with tears—tears through which the sunshine of joy broke gladly, as she exclaimed: