rich and fashionable, I should wait longer before I asked you to marry me; but it is for your sake and your mother’s, as much as for my own. Do you not know, dearest, that I am anxious to remove you from these humble surroundings”—and he flashed a glance of disdain around the shabby little room—“to[Pg 52] my beautiful Fifth Avenue home, where you will have such surroundings as befit your beauty and your worth?” [Pg 52] The beautiful face before him grew pale with emotion. Fair was frightened at the thought of marrying George Lorraine, yet dazzled at the glittering prospect he held out to her. Besides, what would her mother say if she refused him? Fair knew quite well that she would be bitterly disappointed, even angry. “I do not think you are indifferent to me, Fair,” continued her lover. “You have accepted my attentions, and you have seemed to take pleasure in my company and conversation.” It was all true; she could not deny it. Yet what would he say if she dared tell him that she had welcomed his coming, listened to him with delight, because he talked so much of his cousin—of Bayard Lorraine, whose image filled her heart, whom she loved with the maddest, most foolish love the world ever knew—since, for the one hope of meeting her ideal again, she was thinking of giving her hand to George Lorraine? “It is not so much his wealth, poor as I am, that tempts me, as the thought that, being his[Pg 53] wife, I should meet Bayard Lorraine again—meet him on equal terms, with a name as proud as his own,” she thought, finding a strange balm for her wounded pride in the prospect. “He despises the poor working girl, they say; but, as his cousin’s wife, he cannot look down on me. I shall meet him in society. I shall meet his haughty bride. And when I am dressed in jewels and satins and laces I shall, perhaps, be as beautiful as she is,” ran the tenor of her thoughts; and she was so young, so innocent, so untaught that she did not know that to marry George Lorraine in such a mood would be deadly sin. What did she know of the sanctity of marriage? Her mother had always railed against it as having been the cause of all her trouble. [Pg 53] She kept a little journal, to which alone she confided her girlish, romantic thoughts, and to which the struggles of these days were freely told. It would have brought tears to any eyes to have read there the story of her hopeless love, the tender little verses that flowed from her full heart, and
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