Conyers sprang to the side of the fainting woman, who murmured, with trembling lips, “He loved me! He loved me, at the last!”
With an infinite pity in his heart, Conyers gazed at the broken-hearted lonely widow. “Here is some strange new mystery,” he mused. “Thank God that it is sacred from me.” And then he told her of all the cautious actions of the Trust Company, which was now only awaiting the arrival of Miss Romaine Garland for the proper legal notifications. And so, the romance of a sweet sin remained sealed from all hearts but the one throbbing in Katharine Vreeland’s guilty bosom!
And thus in a week two young women who had never met before in life listened, with grave lawyers at their sides, to the publication of the formal news of an equal division of Garston’s great fortune between a now widowed ward, of whose past history the world knew nothing, and Miss Romaine Garland, at whose side Mrs. Elaine Willoughby, Judge Endicott and Hugh Conyers sat as a loving bodyguard. Even the “hardy reporter” was baffled by the guarded solemnity of the Surrogate proceedings. Scandal slept on its arms for once!
Katharine Norreys Vreeland saw that the beautiful stranger was robed in deep mourning like herself, and she started back in surprise as the lovely face was unveiled when Elaine Willoughby brought the two heiresses together in a private room.
“It is only to you here that I will say,” solemnly remarked the Lady of Lakemere, “that the settlement of the estate business will not require you to meet again. The Trust Company will properly close up all the details, and your personal lawyers can arrange all your affairs separately with them.
“I know,” she slowly said, with a broken voice, “that Senator Garston left no personal wishes, and that his trust for each of you was merely private and a personal one. He had no near relatives to quarrel with his final dispositions.”
“Can it be,” murmured Katharine Vreeland, “that another life secret is buried in his pulseless heart?”
But she was soon left alone, for the mother and daughter, with a grave inclination of their heads, had passed out of her life forever.
And, thrilled with a strange feeling of loyalty to the man who had been loyal to her at the last—the man who had died true to the unspoken secret which a kindly fate had so strangely guarded—Katharine Vreeland never sought to cross the gulf of that new-made grave.
That French Pandora Justine Duprez, had reached Paris, and the reunited mother and daughter were linked in a rapturous love at Lakemere, long before Romaine Garland listened to a few words spoken to her by the old advocate, who had undertaken her affairs. He had sought her out in a lonely nook of the new paradise.