A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9132, 3 July 1908, Page 2

A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

CHAPTER Xlll.—Continued.

"Have you written to, Miss Lacklyne and told her of this appointment? lam sure she will be keenly interested in hearing of it," he said, when the subject had been discussed a little further. Michael seemed tp hesitate an instant. / "I went down to Westshire yesterday," he said. Then, with a little colour creeping into his cheeks: "I felt I should like to see the White Abbey again, and to tell Miss Lacklyne presonally about my plans. She was more than kind to me, and 1 am glad I went." How little Paul Darnley guessed the effort it cost the young man to speak of this matter in the3e calm, ordinary tonus! "Although I was sorry to find Miss Lacklyne looking very ill, she seemed to me to bo much changed." '"ill!" Paul Darnley repeated the word sharply. "You distress me, Everest," he added abruptly. "I have the deepest interest in all that concerns Lacklyne's daughter. I hope you are wrong in this. I heard from her the other day, but she said nothing of being ill." "Possibly lam wrong—l hope so," Michael answered, with a note in his voice that touched Darnley, although he was so thoroughly disturbed at what he had just heard.,- that Michael's emotion did not hold hi a attention as it would have done under 1 the circumstances; "and certainly' IMISa did not admit she was ' jLhvthing but quits wen. She told j me she had been confined very much \Q th§ hou.se, ag the lady—her relation, I beH«»vc-«tfho Is how staying Wi6h her has been alarmingly ill) lately. Nevertheless, although this i was a reasonable explanation for her ; white tired look, 1 reel somehow as if sh<? ware suffering herself. lam sure," Michael added earnestly, "Miss Lacklyne ought to be per-' suaded not to remain at the White > Abbey throughout the winter. She | had a great ahock in her father's , death, and the surroundings seem so i sad and depressing. I wished,"' Michael continued, with a fleeting smile, as he rose to go, I wished yesterday, for the first time in my life, that I could have been a woman, so that I might have offered Miss I Lacklyne my friendship: she is so! terribly alone." The two men were silent. With' his own heart tuned to ths exquisite sympathy and comprehension that belong to a great love, Paul Darnley divined a portion at least of the secret that was torturing this other honest man's heart. ,He caught the burdan of Michael's anxious thought j and tender care for Cecil in the sound of the low-pitched, nervous voice, as it expressed his full sympathy. "It is a great regret to me that I cannot go immediately to the White Abbey, and look after this child, for, placed as I am, I can do nothing for the moment. When we come back, in two or three weeks' time," Paul added, with the colour mounting to his cheeks as he spoke thus casually of himself and Dora as man and wife, "I shall lose no time doing my very best to effect a great change in Cecil's life. It is, as you say, most unwise that she should remain at the White Abbey. I have always felt this, and feel it doubly now that you tell me hhe ha 3 the confinement and anxiety of a sick-room to add toxthe other depressing influences that must belong for a time to her old home. I shall drop a line to Doctor Thorold and ask him to let me have a candid opinion about the girl." Michael stood an instant silent. "I fancy Doctor Thorold does not attend the White Abbey. There'was another doctor there yesterday; he travelled down from town with me. He attended Sir Charles at. the last, I believe,. I know he was at the funeral." It was strangely difficult for Michael to speak of this other man. "Oh, you mean Bingham—Felix Bingham! He is old Thorold's nephew; a very clever young man, I am told. I suppose Doctor Thorold must be ill, then, and his nephew is acting for him. He is often ill in the winter now." Michael took up his hat and cane. Darn ley's matter-of-fact tone in speaking of Bingham's professional capacity comforted him in a faint way, but it would take a long time for hi-n to recover from the jarred hurt that bad come to him when he had seen Felix standing beside Cecil's delicate, beautiful form. There was a suggestion of familiarity in Doctor Bingham's smiling » manner that had sent the blood rushing and circling wildly about Michael's heart. It seemed to him almost a sacrilege that this man, whom last he had seen smiling and chatting so intimately with Kate Kearney,, should smile and talk in exactly the same manner with a girl who by nature and circumstances demanded the fullest homage to her fragrant purity, her absolute unworldliness. He had seen, too, that a change had been wrought in Cecil, which, though it enhanced her beauty, was a sorrowful change to him. The few moments they had spent alone in the big hall while Doctor Bingham had run up-stairs to see his patient were laden with exquisite sweetness and misery to Michael Everest. He could hardly realise that the dream of his waking and sleeping hours eince his separation from her had become a truth for a. brief space—that he was actually in Cecil's presence. He saw and answered her in a state of dazed nervousness, and, indeed, the fear that had been born into his thoughts did not come to him sharply till he was well away from her, and had time and opportunity to recall each minute detail of an interview that

By Effle Adelaide Rowlands, Auttur of "Hugh Gretton'a Secret," "A Splendid Iloart," -Bravo B.irkn," "Tl.o Temptation of Mary Barr," "Solina's Love Story," etc.

had been so little to her, and so much to him. Then it was that the full signifiance ot Felix Bingham's intimate presence in the girl's home came to him with a pang that had not a touch of personal pain in it It was not the moment to remember himself, or to dwell on what his own feelings must be in the realisation that, though so unattainable to himself, Cecil was fiee to be wooed and won by another man; it was a p:.ng of purest thought and dread for her. He knew nothing absolutely of Felix, pave that he was the son of one whom his mother had found to bo an enemy. He might, indeed, be worthy in mind, as he certainly was in physical appearance, to stand beside the girl as her lifelong protector and companion; yet Michael' could not dismiss that strong sensation of fear and repugnance in even the imagination of such a future for Cecil Lacklyne. That he should judge Felix harshly because he had chanced to see him talking familiarly with a burlesque dancer in the open street would have been to Michael's honest mind wholly unjust. True, he had no knowledge of, nor desire to mingle with, the world of music-hall and theatrical celebrities that had, he was aware, such potent attractions for most young men of the day. Nor was he capable of. summing up a man's character as undesirable simply because this man's tastes ran in a different direction from his own. Far from it. Michael was generous to a degree in this respect, and be would have set very little store on Felix's undoubted intimacy with a wellknown dancer, had he not boon as has been said, by noting that Doc-* tor Bingham's manner was just as smilingly intimate with Cecil as it had been with this other woman; and he also remembared Cecil's strangely isolated position and the danger that might easily accrue to one so young as she from constant intercourse with a man handsome enough to dazzle the eyes of most women. "There is no Ostensible reason why 1 shoula doubt him, or no reason why he should not e/entually bt regarded as a good husband for her," poor Michael had said to himself, as he was whirled back in the train to town. "But, surely, he ought not to go there just how and when he likes. Evidently he is there very frequently, aod'she is such a child." indeed, Cecil had seemed more of a child than ever this day. She was shy and nervous in her speech; she seemed weighted for the first time either with the sense of her own importance or with the sad remembrance of her father's death. There was this strange change in her which Michael tried hard to understand, and there were undoubtedly to his tenderly anxious eyes the signs of illhealth. He had gone to Paul Darnley as to one who miorht step forward now and do the work tie longed to do. "1 am convinced Mr Darnley wculd be shocked if he saw her looking as she did tu-day; and though he has* no definite right to act in her life, yet he would, I am sure, not hesitate to speak out plainly if he felt, as I feel, that her present position has certain dangers attracted to it." (To be Continued). / For Children's Hacking Cough at night Woods' Great Peppermint Cure. I/6 and 2/6.