“I knew her,” I replied in a hard, low tone, for sight of that smiling face brought back to me all the bitter remembrance of a part that I would have fain forgotten. “It is Ella Murray!”
“Ah!—yes, that’s her name. I recollect now,” he said; and I saw by his face that he was interested. “I think they were at school together.”
Again I looked upon the portrait of my dear dead love, my eyes fascinated, for I beheld there, at her throat, the small brooch I had given her on her birthday, a green enamelled heart with two hearts in diamonds entwined upon it.
Those sweet, wide-open eyes, clear blue and wondering like a child’s, gazed out upon me; her well-formed lips were slightly parted, as though she were speaking again, uttering those soft words that had so charmed me when she was mine, and mine only. I recollected the dress, too, one she had worn one night at dinner at the big country-house where we had been fellow-guests. Every feature of that lovely face was indelibly photographed upon my memory. Through those dark years, after that paroxysm of grief that had overtaken me when I discovered her false, I had, sleeping and waking, seen that smiling countenance as before my vision. Even in death Ella was still mine.
That smile! Ah! did it not mock me? Had not Avarice and Death cheated me out of Happiness? A great darkness was over my mind, like the plague of an unending night.
I set my teeth, swallowed the lump that arose in my throat, and with a sigh replaced the photograph upon the table.
“A pretty face,” remarked the man whose police record was in my possession.
“Yes, very,” I remarked casually.
Ah! what a storm of bitter recollections surged through my burning brain.
Had she but lived and loved how different would my own wasted, aimless life have been!