A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9140, 16 July 1908, Page 2

A HEART'S TRIUMPH.

; gjCHAPTER XlX.—Continued. MRS EVEREST'S SUSPICIONS. Her gratitude and her natural s.veetness won her a deeper place in the hearts of Michael's mother and I sister, and her helplessness brought ti j ara to their eyes. She was like a child in her knowledge of the most commonplace facts of life, and yet in other ways she was so clever, so far above the average woman. On the afternoon of Cecil's second day beneath Mrs Everest's roof there came a telegram from Michael. "Am travelling to London to-morrow," it said. "Entreat Miss Lacklyne to remain till I come." •ind at the very hour that this message reached Cornelia Everest, the neat parlour-maid at Mrs Darnley's house was ushering Doctor Bingham—with a glance of great admiration at the handsome visitor—into the presence of her mistress. Though she fretted greatly over poor old Nini's illness, and though she saw in this early breakdown of : the faithful old creature a possibility of unforeseen difficulties in the pathway of their future, Cecil had never in all her life known such peace and rest and comfort as came to her in those hours she spent under Mrs Everest's roof. She the sympathy and to the kindliness lavished on her in a heart-whole manner. Contact with this good, motherly woman seemed, indeed, to have touched a spring of different thoughts and feelings that her former curious life had frozen almost into non-existence. Strangers though they were, Cecil felt herself ' clinging unconsciously to Michael's j mother, and dreading the moment when she and Nini must start out again on their journey through the J great, noisy, desolating world. She had turned to the thought of Italy when she had seen herself alone in ) the world, because her heart had been • tuned, -from the first, to think of ( Nini's loved home as a land of perpet- I ual sunshine and beauty. And she still desired to go'there; but Italy j was so far away, and Nini was so old,and she wa3so helpless! She kept • to herself the thoughts and dreads of what would lie outside when she had said farewell to this simple, comforting home of Michael's; out Mrs Everest knew wil'hout words that the girl's courage wsis leaving her, and ' she translated Cecil's eager acceptance of all her kindneas and help in its true sense. "Don't worry, my dear," she said to the girl, in her motherly way, when Nini's second day of illness came to an end, and seemed likelv to be followed by a third. "I hope you will realise that this little house is your home as long as you choose to stay with me, and you must stay a ' few days longer, till your, poor old nurse has recovered some of her strength, at least." j Cecil had a way of thanking Mrs' Everest with her eyes—a way that was most eloquent. , j "Nini is alarmingly weak. 1 hope • ' I have not done wrong in letting her go through so much fatigue. Like myself, she has lived at the White Abbey for years and years and gone i nowhere, and she is an old woman now, ar>d all this excitement is so bad for her. I ought to have thought of this." "Once she is in Italy, she will forget her old age. How she longs to go back! Poor old creature! Her love for her country is so patheti"." > "It has always been the same," Cecil said, in her slow, soft voice. "She has almost made me see Italy; she has spoken of it so often and so lovingly. Yes, She will be better when she is there; but it is a Ion;, long way from here." The words ended with a faint sigh, ' and Mrs Everest held silence, not without difficulty, for she longed more and more to urge this girl, so lonely and so beautiful, to stay near her —to share in the love she gave her own children, until, at lea-t her future life had been shaped in some ( fashion. j * She little imugined how close the desire of Cecil's heart lay to this | wish. Apart ftom the love and sym-1 pathy and homelike influence which I she was feeling for the first time, j there was to Cecil a sense of pro tec-, tion in the environments of the little I householdjjthat was convincingly.com- ] forting. Up-stairs, in the small room I allotted to her, she had been sur- j rounded by pictures of Michael taken at every age and in every sort of way, from babyhood through schoolboy days to manhood. It was a cozy little room, furnished in the most primitive way; but fresh with old • i fashioned chintz and full of character. I Cecil would have been dreadfully upset, could she have even imagined that' the room she occupied, and which was so sweet and charming to her, was Mrs Everest's own apartment, relinquished most willingly for the sake of so honoured a guest, ihe girl never could have guessed this, although she knew right well that only his mother's hands could have hung those pictures of Michael on the wall, and placed the dozens of small knick-knacks, reminiscences of old nursery days, in olds and ends of, corners. Cecil found groat pleasure in looking at Michael's handsome, honest faco. His mother's love and pride in him had brought him before her in a new light. She remembered that sha had always liked him, and j that her father's praise <>f niu new j • , asaLtin 1 ; had given her pleasure, but she ha-J never drawn so near to j Michael in himself as she did now, looking at his many photograph*. She filt her heart go out absolutely with the [mother's deep lovo and tender yearning over her absent son. Cornelia Everest had no nead to tell the world of the splendid qual- , ities, the nobh heart, that charac-

By Effie Adelaide Rowlands, Author o£ "Hujh Gretbon's Secret," "A Splendid Heart," -'Bravo B„rbr:m," "Tie Temptation of Mary liarr," "Selina's lovo Story," etc.

terised her boy; they proclaimed themselves frankly in his eyes, in the expression of his face. "If I could have had such a man as this for a brother!" was the thought that flashed through Cecil's mind sometimes as she stood looking at the latest photograph of Michael that his mother had framed with her own hands and put in the place of honour. "Ah! with such a brother, .life would not be to me what it is now!" Once a hot flush spread over her face as she looked up and met the gaze of Michael's pictured eyes, and a wave of shame came with the flush as she conjured up the scorn that such a man as Michael Everest would have for ono who had been so blind, so weak as she; and what a contempt he must have for the man who had for a brief time ruled her so completely. . Cecil's own contempt for Felix Bingham was now immeasurable. She, as we know, spared herself none of her own share in this contempt; she held herself to be degraded, in that her nature had not instantly recoiled from the flashy attraction of this coward, instead of giving him allegiance. There were times when she suffered actual physical pain as she recalled the past since SirJCharles Lacklyne's death, and told to herself the story of Felix's cunning and her own lamentable weakness. She would wake in the night sometimes with a tremendous start of remembrance, and then she would go all over the events of the last few weeks, and suffer as only an acutely proud, sensitive and injured woman can suffer. That Felix left her utterly alone was, of course, something to give her a sensation of relief; but not years of separation Jtrom contact with tins man would be enough to take from Cecil the horror of him and his base nature, and her own humiliation in the memory that she had imagined him a god. an 1 had suffered herself to be moved as he wished.^ In such moments of self-torture Cecil had a passionate longing to feel that Charles Lacklyne was once more on earth, to deal with this man who had dared to use her for his own ends. Wicked, selfish, cruel as she now knew this man Lacklyne to have been—this man who for so many years she had called father —she knew that he would have willingly struck Felix dead could he but have known of his cunning wrong to her. Cecil had, in truth, a deep pain at her heart as she set before her the story of her curious, blind infatuation ; for though there had never been love between that dead man and herself, '.here had been on his side a reverence for her girlish innocence ai d a pride in her honour that could not have, been greater had she been twenty times his own child. To preserve her in her white, childish purity, to shut away the world and its snares and evils, had been the main motive of that strange upbringing, that isolation which the world outside had-called madness. Cecil had a sense of deep gratitude for the thought that had prompted this care, and a deeper regret that she should have so eax-ly turned from her training and have taken a false step. (To be Continued).