With a low cry of joy he gathered her close in his arms, and laid her shining head upon his breast, calling her by every endearing name with which his heart was filled.
“You know all about it, my love? Who has told you?” he asked, surprised.
“Just one little sentence in a newspaper, which told me also that, when at the very moment I found you had been true, my life was to be a blank as long as I should live,” Star said, with unsteady voice and quivering lips. “I read,” she added “the notice of your marriage with Miss Richards in the Cheshire Gazette. These two names, Archibald Sherbrooke and Lord Carrol were printed there, and told me the whole story. I knew then how I had been deceived. But I cannot understand.”
She broke off suddenly, and drew herself away from him shivering and sick at heart again.
Surely that notice would never have been printed if he was not married, and she had no right to be thus in the arms of another woman’s husband.
She knew that he neither loved nor respected Josephine from the way he had addressed her; he called her Miss Richards, too, but it was a puzzle that she could not comprehend.
Lord Carrol read her thoughts, and saw by her white face how she was suffering, and he said, with infinite tenderness:
“My love, it was all a farce, a mock marriage planned by a wild and thoughtless girl, while I was chosen as one of the unfortunate victims and Miss Richards the other. Did you not read the description which followed that notice?”
“No; I read nothing but those horrible words, which told me of my own injustice, and that you and I would be parted forever. They burned themselves into my brain as if they had been branded there with a hot iron, and I cared to read no more.”
“If you had,” he returned, “you would have been undeceived; but I was very angry when I saw how the affair had been published, and if I could ascertain who wrote it up, I should be tempted to chastise the writer severely.”