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For a single instant the eyes of these two girls met whose lives had crossed each other so strangely Daisy's blue eyes soft, tender and appealing, Pluma's hard, flashing, bitter and scornful. She drew herself up to her full height. "Remain in your house?" she cried, haughtily, trembling with rage.

A blaze of lightning illumined the hall for one brief instant, and I can swear I saw a woman's face a white, mocking, gloriously beautiful face strangely like the face of your first wife, master, Pluma's mother. I knew it could not be her, for she was lying beneath the sea-waves. It was not a good omen, and I felt sorely afraid and greatly troubled.

"Oh, lots of things," answered Birdie. "When I tell him how pretty every one says she is, he groans, and says strange things about fatal beauty, which marred all his young life, and ever so many things I can't understand, and his face grows so hard and so stern I am almost afraid of him." "He is thinking of Pluma's mother," thought Mrs. Corliss but she made no answer.

Daisy glanced shyly up through her veil with a strange feeling of awe at the noble face, with the deep lines of suffering around the mouth, as he opened his study door, and, with a stately inclination of the head, bade her enter. "His face is not like Pluma's," she thought, with a strange flutter at her heart. "He looks good and kind. I am sure I can trust him."

Now he understood why he had felt such a terrible aversion to Pluma all along. She had separated him from his beautiful, golden-haired child-bride. His eyes rested on the certificate which bore Pluma's name, also his own. He tore it into a thousand shreds. "It is all over between us now," he cried.

In an elegant apartment of the Hall Basil Hurlhurst, the recluse invalid, lay upon his couch, trying to shut out the mirth and gayety that floated up to him from below. As the sound of Pluma's voice sounded upon his ear he turned his face to the wall with a bitter groan. "She is so like " he muttered, grimly. "Ah! the pleasant voices of our youth turn into lashes which scourge us in our old age.

One moment hushed and laughing, the queen of mirth and revelry, then pale and silent, with shadowed eyes, furtively glancing down the broad, pebbled path that led to the entrance gate. Yet, despite her bravery, Pluma's face and lips turned white when she heard the confusion of her lover's arrival.

No thought of treachery ever crossed Rex's mind as he read the lines before him; he never once dreamed the ingeniously worded postscript had been so cleverly imitated and added by Pluma's own hand. It never occurred to him for an instant to doubt the sincerity of the words he read, when he knew how dearly his mother loved the proud, haughty heiress before him.

"She forms likes and dislikes to people from simply hearing their name. Of course I agree with you it is not right to do so, but Birdie has been humored more or less all her life. I think she will grow to love you in time." Pluma's lips quivered like the lips of a grieving child. "I shall try so hard to make her love me, because she is your sister, Rex."

Nobody regretted Pluma's downfall, although Basil Hurlhurst carefully kept that part of the narrative back. "Oh, it is just like a romance," cried Eve Glenn, rapturously; "but still we must not be disappointed, girls; we must have a wedding all the same. Rex and Daisy must be married over again." Every one was on the tiptoe of expectancy to see the beautiful little heroine of a double romance.