“Not to-day, thank you, Leola, but I will call on you soon, for I am anxious to see you again, and also to meet your papa. Now if you will be so kind as to drive by Lady De Vere’s, where I am staying with my New York friend, I will be very grateful.”
Leola assented, and presently Jessie was set down at the place she wished, and blew Leola a deceitful kiss from her finger tips as she went in, muttering to herself as she watched her drive away:
“It was a gratuitous fib I told her about marrying Chester Olyphant, but I couldn’t resist stabbing her once more to see the light grow dim in the beautiful eyes that stole his heart from me. All my maneuvering has failed to win him back, and her turn will soon come, for he is here in Paris, although she does not know it, and at any minute they may meet, and everything be explained. Oh, how I wish hate could kill!”
CHAPTER XIX.
LIKE A STAR IN THE NIGHT OF HER DESPAIR.
At the luncheon, which was served in their private dining-room, Leola could scarcely touch a morsel, she was so eager to tell her father all that she had heard that morning, barring, of course, the facts about Chester Olyphant, whose name she vowed should never pass her lips.
But she had scarcely begun her story when he smiled and interrupted:
“It seems quite a coincidence that we have both met people from the United States this morning—ghosts, as it were, out of your past life.”
“Why, papa?”
“Yes, people from West Virginia, dear—old neighbors of yours—and from them I have heard already all you were going to tell me.”