Levallion's Heir.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 136, 8 June 1907, Page 14

Levallion's Heir.

CHAPTER A-VII. THE SEALED LETTER. „t "wT n °, t my wifo '" Gordon said should not clear himself, if he dared not answer her plain question. '"I never naa a wife and never will have. The woman Hester Murray meant was nothing to mc, though it was true she was in trouble and I helped her, till I found out she was a worthless liar. If Air* -Murray dared," he hesitated, "to tell yon that, someone must have made it very much worth her while." | "Adrian," said Ravenel, her eyes straight on his, 'yon mean that? Be- j cause we're just a* if wo were dead, you and I. We've got to tell the truth."* "You know it's true." he answered heavily. "That woman lied to you. Only ' I can't see how it was her business."" with the vile conviction on him that only at Levallion's own bidding would Hester Murray have helped him to take* a wife, and with pressure even then. He roused himself sharply. j '•"Never mind that, it doesn't matter." Since it was too dangerous to touch on! "You say. I didn't go to the duchess. Well, I wrote to you that I couldn't go; '. that it- was my only day to marry you." j She could hardly hear him, saw him j as in a mist through scalding tears of I relief that was yet worse anguish. "I I waited all day. I came back that night' and threw gravel at your window, tried every door in the bouse, and couldn't wake you or Tommy. Jacobs came outl to bark, and found it was a friend—but I no one else. And at dawn I had to go. Surely you must have heard, or Tommy I must! I made all the noise I dared." "I never heard," she answered, with a! tearless sob, "and Tommy could not have I heard anyone in the garden, for he slept' on the other side of tlie house." She| would not tell him how she. had cried i "Herself to sleep on the floor that night. | and never waked till dawn. She went on sharply: "If I had heard Jacobs bark j I should never have thought of you, be- j cause your letter said the next day was —was when yon were coming for mc." j Kot the pains of hell could have made her say "our wedding-day." "I was only wretched because I'd lost your ring and had such a dreadful disappoint-1 ment at the party. T never dreamed yon had come for mc while I was out." "But, of course, I came! I wrote I should." He stared at- her with a puzzled frown. "And 3 7 0u said tou got mv letter?" "'Oh, I got it." slowly. "But you must have made a mistake in ir. It said you would come for mc on the 14th, and be at the duchess' on tlie 13th. Look!" With an uncontrollable impulse she did what she had. meant not to do, and threw on the table that lying letter she had kept because she was not brave enough to bum it. '-Read for yourself." Tear-stained, rubbed out with long poring over, it lay in his hand, but he was looking at the envelope instead of the enclosure. "\'ou see it was sealed!*' she.'cried. u ~So one could have opened it." "That is just it," said Gordon, quietly. "I never sealed a. letter in my life. I never owned a seal with "'A' on it. That was someone else's work, ~S&], not mine." He. shook the letter out painfully with one hand and let the light slant across it. "Look," he said, "the dates have been .rubbed out and altered. Just five minntes' work and a bit of sealing-wax, but they've ruined you and mc. See. I wrote, 1 can't go to the dnehess'!' And one flick of a rubber made it, 'I can go!' But who could have done it? Who could care?" "Lady Annesley." There were no tears in her eyes, just as there lurked no doubt in her heart. "The letters all went to her first. I thought it had escaped her notice, because of the London postmark, and the seal —like a fool! — for in .an Annesley house there must have been plenty of seals with 'A' on them. And Tommy warned mc that very morning that he thought she had her eyes on yon and mc. I might have known it —when her ladyship was kind!" bitterly. "She couldn't have dared do it. She had no reason." Lady Levallion laughed, and it was ugly laughter. "She is allowed a. thousand a year now. and a house," she said, in a voice like her laugh. "She ha 3 been able to shake the dust of dulness and Annes-.-ley Chase and mortgages off her feet. Oh! she had reason enough. Tommy said she meant Levallion to marry mc, but the funny part of it is that in the j end she had nothing to do with it." '"What do you- mean? 1 ' with a dull horror at the look on her face. "And j what did you mean just now about Lady j Annesley's ring, when I said you sent mine back ?" "I meant just that." she answered bit-1 terly. "I thought. I lost your ring, but 1 never did, since it's here, in my hand. Who could have sent it to you but Sylvia? And I know now how she got itShe cut the ribbon off my neck when she tried on that wicked dress she gave ' mc. She pretended to arrange the train just to pick the ring off the floor. I j thought even then I must have dropped ] it in her room, but I was afraid to ask. And then, when I was going to stay with the. duchess she gave mc a ring of hers— and it was the note I sent that ring back to her in that you know by heart. J She simply enclosed my ring in it to j you. Oh"—she was getting out each jerky sentence breathlessly—"l see it I all now! Just like A. B. CI, one thing, after another. Except," listlessly,; "how J she found out about it in the first place: j but she was always suspicious. It all I began with my trying on that dreadful dress—that 1 only took for you to see." "And Lcvatlir .1 saw you instead," quietly. "You're wrong," she cried. "It was ail Sylvia. Levallion had nothing to do with it. It was I! I, who, after yon went, got wicked. Married him with my eyes open, to hurt you." She coyered her face. But all he said was almost to himself. "Nel, my Ncl all the time!" "Not now," fiercely, -'nor ever! Adrian, can't you see it? We're done for, just as though we were dead." "Til see Lady Annesley first," grimly. "You can't!" she whispered. "Not now. She lied to mc, but I— l married "Levallion of my own accord. And he 'was good to mc. I can see now that if I'd had the sense to tall him he might have—but what had Ito tell?" breaking off with a sick sob. "Only that you had trown mc over. I couldn't expect him §to write .-.nd ask you to take mc back a !"*™- -^ ld I thought you were raarneil and i._d H.ed to mc." *. - i?*" 11 r < "'-' uUln ' t do anything," feeling tSS«? *ii 5aW him6eU as ha been i*u %ti9 time m hat. -ustg, "J sreuidn i t

By ADELAIDE STIRLING, Author of«; Abore AH Thi ags ," - VTten Love Diwns," «• A Sactifice to Love," etc.

wonder at-anything you did. Tell mc, is Tommy also thinking mc a scoundrel?" A pencilled letter seemed such a little thing to be able to drag a man's honour in the dust, and take away from him all that life held. There were both dismay and anger in his eyes as he Trailed for her to answer. "Tommy only knows that I was engaged to you, that I lost mv ring, and you left mc without writing. You needn't think I told anyone the rest," simply. -Adrian, what are we going to do? Levallion—he's been good." She | faltered, stopped. Yet he knew her white lips were not for Levallion. "We can't do anything. I must "o away," and he touched the lace at hewrist as if the. very hem of her garments were sacred to him! his eyes swept with the old look from her bronze hair to her little shoes. But from the sight of her wet eyes, her trembling lips, he turned away, cursing himself that in blind madness he had believed even her own bandwriting against her; wincing at the rej membrance that "Levallion had been kind." Levallion, whose kind acts, to , his knowledge, had been two, and one '. of -them might very well bear another : significance. He could not forget that i it was Levallion who had sent him to j India. J "Go? You can't go! You're not fit!" She was frantic as she looked at his changed and ravaged face. How worn he • was—how like, with quick horror—to Levallion! "Where can you go?" "Town." laconically. * "Rooms. till I'm better." Like a flash saw him sitting alone in those rooms, with a broken ring, a lying letter, in pain, old in his youth. "You can't go. It would kill mc!" | she said, quietly. But she drew away I from him so that her lace was out of his | reach. If he touched the flesh of her j wrist she knew that not Tommy, nor .honour, nor Levallion. could 'keep her from following him to the end of the world. "T must. I can't stay here!" "I could nurse you, take care of you!" wildly, her face bloodless over her lace tie. her collar of Levallion's pearls. "Any one on God's earth but you!" said Gordon, with a quick shudder". He leaned back in his chair as if he were faint. He had known the light of his life was gone out, but he had not known alien fingers had extinguished it against Ravenel Annesley's will. The. hard words, the exhaustion in his face, steadied her, as pain always did. ''You're worn out. I had no right to tell yon," she said, miserably. "I've only hurt yon." "You've showu mc heaven," he answered, and bravely, for all his pain of body and mind. • "Just ijhat, after being through hell and out again. Go now, Nel. They'll wonder—you've been so long! Give mc the ring. I can keep that, can't I? It's all I have, you know." "But I'll see you again?" "Not alone," gravely. "It isn't likely. So this is good-bye." Good-bye! After to-day, then, she would see his face no more. Would never hear his voice, that could move her as no voice on earth .vould ever do; would be alone till she died, the ungrateful, unloving girl LevaUura, had been good to. And he would be alone, too, but out in the world where he could forget her, as men forget and womeu never. Ashy pale, she put that ualucky rim? in his hand; silent, broken-hearted, turned away from him; and had never loved him so much as now, evhen he bade her go. <p "Nel!" he said, as she turned at the door. But not to go back to him, not to touch his hand nor to kiss him but once before she went, for she read his face aright and knew he would have died a thousand deaths first. Only to stand and look at him as he at her, the truth for the first and last time spoken between them. After this it would be Levallion's wife who met him, never Nel Annesley who had loved him neither wisely nor well, but madly and in the bitterness of her soul. "Good-bye. sweetheart," he murmured. "Be good. Don't forget mc," and shut his eyes that he might not see her go. And neither.of them heard the quiet breathing of Sister Elizabeth, where she stood goggle-eyed in Adrian's bedroom. CHAPTER XVIII. A GROWING CLOUD IF WITNESSES. "My dear child, how are you?" cried the duchess, and kissed Ravenel on both cheeks. She was the last arrival of the houseparty, and she sank into a low chair by the fire and surveyed the scene, covertly and without her long-handled glasses. The big hall of Levallion Castle was lit by two fires and a sufficiency — no more—of shaded lamps. There were plenty of cozy corners and secluded chairs behind tbe great square pillajrs supporting the low roof, where dull gold gleamed fitfully in the fire flicker. Among the orderly disorder of chairs and tables and palms, people were sitting in twos and threes —occasionally drinking tea, laughing, warming themselves, and wondering what sort of a married man Levallion made. His past record happily did not point to a dull sojourn under his roof. But the duchess, like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Her red, comfortably handsome face was turned to the sumptuous figure at the tea-table, all white velvet and Russian sable and floating, wavy chiffon. "I am Annesley's little girl, turned into an accordion-plaited angel!" thought her grace, blind to everything but surprise. For Ravenel under her wing had been only a remarkably pretty girl, rather quick, almost shy. And here 'stood a beautiful woman, utterly self-possessed, and a work of art from her carefully dressed hair to the way her great grey eyes looked up from her tea-making. "A maid, that's the reason of those beautifully-done waves!'" thought the duchess. "But how much prettier she is than I imagined. A woman with those eyebrows and that upper lip might do anything. But what colour there is in her face, with those grey-bhie eyes and black eyebrows and that surprising bronze hair! She looks—eh, what-H—Le-vallion? Oh, tea!" "It's usual at this hour—or would you rather- " "Don't worry mc, my good man!" smartly. "She. looks well, Levallion; happier, I think!" "She is very welL" He glanced at his wife across the buzzing room. The dnehess was right; she did look happier. The queer, stony look that had be«i in £ex «£» yms gone, **&«amed to Mia

that the change in her dated from one evening when he had found her sitting alone in her room, with a burning colour in her cheeks and quick unwonted questions on her tongue. He remembered them now. "Levaliion, you really love mc? You didn't marry mc because Sylvia arranged it—nor just to have a wife? You would have married mc all the same even if I'd told you why " but she had never finished.

"I married you for love, and nothing else," he had answered quietly, and she had watched him as he said it, then turned from him and spoke labouredlr, over her shoulder. ""I'll do my best to be a good wife to you." (.To be continues dally.)