A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9139, 15 July 1908, Page 2

A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

By Eflie Adelaide Rowlands, Author o£ "Hu;h Gretton'a Secret," "A Splendid Hoart," -Bravo I! r i," "The Temptation of Mary Barr," ''Selinus Lovo Story," etc.

CHAPTER XVlll.—Continued.

"I am sure you must be Miss Lacklyne; you arj exactly like the pictuie my boy has drawn of you. lam ao glad to be at home. You have come to ask me something? You are travelling?" Cecil hurriedly explained the position "I have left the White Abbey, and now I am anxious to leave England, to go to Italy with my old nurse; but everything is so strange, so difficult. You will understand this, for vou will know, through Mr Everest, what a curious life mine has been; and Nini is more helpless than I. We want to rest to-night and go to-mor-row, and I thought you might tell ns where we can go for to night." Jt needed no explanation for Cornelia Everest to read that some great change had been wrought in Cecil's life. She coloured warmly, from the rjsh of pleasure that overcame her as she conjured up the satisfaction Michael would have in knowing of this unexpected event, and her manner was full of charm as she answered Cecil: "Dear Miss Lacklyne, I feel so very, very glad you came to me. I have long wanted an opportunity of thanking you for all your kindness to my boy. You will, I hope, not hesitate to give me the happiness of being my guest for to-night, and as long as it may be convenient for you to stay. The house, as you see, is little more than a bandbox"~with a cheery laugh—"but it is wonderful what we can stow away in this little box, and just now lam more than usually fortunate, for my eldest girl is away from home, so that I have her room free, just as Michael's is free, too. I always keep a corner for my boy." The kind creature chatted on, determining not to see Cecil's visible emotion. "I like-to cherish the thought that he can come at any moment. We mothers are foolish creatures, you know." "You are very kind," Cecil said brokenly. She made no effort to resist this offer. All her heart warmed tu this pleasant, motherly woman, and there was an element of comfort, of home, about the bright little house that seemed delicious to her jaded, yet excited nerves. "It is such an invasion," she said once as the cab was dismissed, tne trunks were piled in the hall, and Nini was comfortably ensconced in the cosiest chair by the fire. "I shall never bs able ,to thank you, Mrs Everest, never—never." The evening that followed was one that seemed to Cecil full of sweetest influences,. As we know, life with her had been a barren thing; till her father's death had come she had known nothing of the simple meaning of life and home such as the words signify to most women. The Everest household was just an ordinary modest lady's home, but to Cecil it seemed a dream of peace and cpmfort. She had eyes for none of the shabbiness, only for the beauty. The small rooms seemed shelteringly welcome after the great bare ones to which she had been accustomed. Michael's mother and sister, in their neat gowns, were revelations to Cecil of what womanhood meant. Her heart was swept into a thousand feelings and sensations that night. The past, with its strange childhuoc', its memorable night of death, then the aftermath of vague, dreamy acquiescence to fate, followed by the awakening, with its hideous story of the long ago, and her own story of humiliation and suffering, vanished beneath this, the first touch of real womanly kindness and sympathy. She wondered vaguely how she had managed to live at all through that long succession of empty, cheerless, lonely years. The warmth of the welcome lavished upon her seemed to freeze something in her heart, and she felt she could never again be the girl she had been. When Nini had gone to bed, and Michael's sister had followed suit, Cecil found herself sitting quite naturally with Mrs Everest, telling the story of her present impoverished position. The older woman listened in silence. It was her first experience of definite wickedness, the story of Charles Lacklyne's terrible wrong she listened to, and it completely upset her. But she was careful to hide her feelings from Cecil; she was more gentle, more caressing than before with this most beautiful girl, Who came to her as helplessly as some lonely bird, and the story she listened to was enough to shock her simple heart. In Cornelia Everest's j there had never come such a tragedy as the one Cecil spread before her. They sat talking a long time, till the mother's eye caught the pallor and weariness on the younger face, and she insisted on escorting Cecii up-stairs ta bed. But she herself could not go to rest. She was far too excited. She drew out her writing materials, and, late as it was, she sat filling page after page with an account of all that had occurred. Her letter, needless to say, was to Michael. "I shall endeavour to keep her here a day or two, till I hear from you, my darling. I feel I cannot jot hexgo out of England in this way. She was determined, she tells me, that she will not turn to either Mr Darnky or the old doctor, who were, I remember you telling rne, the only friends shj had in the past, and do not fejl 1 lune the right, to urge her; and yet it seems terrible to let so and so beautiful a girl—and, oh! Michael, she ia very beauti-ful-wander out into the world without proper care and provision. I tried to set before her the undoubted fact that having been adopted as a child by Sir Charles Lacklyne, she has surely a right to some portion c^

his private fortune; but she shrinks from the very mention of it, and I can understand her feelings,so well. "Poor child! what a dreadful story this is that she has to learn now for the first time! I imagine finding out such a truth-that the man she has believed to be her father all these years was in reality the man who killed her own father! "I never knew such wickedness could be in real life. I listened to all she' had to tell me to-night, as if it were a novel or a play. My heart bleeds even now for that poor wronged woman who died the other day. How could she live, I wjnder, through those years of false imprisonment? No wonder her heart was charged with hate and bitterness. "If I had known the wickedness of that man whom you served, I should nave never ceased begging you to leave him. But he, too, must surely have suffered! One cannot be so evil and know happiness. What nights of miserable recollection he must have spent, remembering the woman whom he deserted, and who, by reason of his trickery, was convicted and punished for the crime he had committed himself! "This poor child does not speak of the woman whom she should call truly her mother. I see the working of an ever-merciful Hand, that this mother should have been cut away from all intercourse with her innocent child. Perhaps she was innocent of the worst. Perhaps, when she gave herself and little one into the keeping of the wicked man, she believed, as all the rest of the world believed, that her husband's sudden death lay at the door of the woman she had supplanted! "We will be merciful to her, and try to believe this, for her daughter's sake. And we must put all our wits j together now and try to solve the ! difficult problem of this young daughter's future. Write to me, instantly, my darling. You are so wise, and, then, you know more of Miss LackJyne and more of her friends than I can possibly gather in such a brief time; thus your word will be a comfort and help to me. "I breathe easily for hbr so long as she is under my roof, but I cannot force her to remain, and to let her go in her ignorance and loneliness and sorrow hurts me even to imagine. She has a look in her eyes that haunts me. I have a feeling for her I have never had for any other living creature! I shall wait impatiently for your letter." Mrs Everest found an unexpected ally for the furtherance of her hopes the next morning in Nini. The poor old woman had caught a slight cold the preceding day, and her whule system had been so jarred and tired by the unusual exertion and nervous excitement, that she developed as nationality have a habit of doing, a touch of fever. To dream of moving her was out of the question; and Cecil, in truth, though she shrank from burdening her new and good friends with her presence, bad a sense of renewed comfort in this postponement of their journey. She herself was both ill and tired. The ' reaction of the excessive mental I strain through which she had passed I was beginning. (To be Continued).