e she would give him a final and very definite answer with
regard to their nuptials. While he read the _billet_ and was
pencilling a second appeal for the privilege of escorting her to the
rehearsal, she ran lightly downstairs, sprang into a carriage, and
eluded him.

Left in possession of all the records relative to her mother's
history, and furnished for the first time with a printed copy of
"Infelice," Regina spent a melancholy day in her own room. Among the
papers she found her father's letter, promising to claim his wife as
soon as he attained his majority; and as she noted the elegant
chirography and glanced from the letter to the ambrotype which
represented Cuthbert as he looked at the period of his marriage, a
strangely tender new feeling welled up in her heart, dimming her eyes
with unshed tears.

It was her father's face upon which she looked, and something in
those proud high-bred features plead for him to the soul of his
child. True he had disowned them, but could that face deliberately
hide premeditated treachery? Might there not be some defence, some
extenuating circumstance, that would lessen his crime?

Suddenly she sprang up and began to array herself in a walking suit.
She would go and see her father, learn what had induced his cruel
course, and perhaps some mistake might be discovered and corrected.
She knew that this step would subject her to her mother's
displeasure, but just then the girl's heart was hardened against
her, in consequence of her persistency in dramatizing a record which
the daughter deemed too mournfully solemn and sacred for the
desecration of the boards and footlights.

Grieved and mortified by this resolution, over which her passionate
invective and persuasion exerted not the slightest influence, she
availed herself of the absence of her mother and Mrs. Waul to leave
the hotel and get into a carriage.

The Directory supplied her with the address she sought, and ere many
moments she found herself in front of the stately, palatial pile, in
which Cuthbert Laurance had long dwelt Desiring to see Mr. Laurance
on business, she was shown into the elegant salon, and when the
servant returned to say that he had left the house but a few minutes
before she entered, she still lingered.

"Can I see Mrs. Laurance?"

"Madame is at Nice. Only Mademoiselle Maud is at home."

At that instant a side door opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman
pushed before her into the room a low chair pl