r, smiling, in a half-sad way.
"Hush!" she said, quietly. "You don't understand me. The fault was only
the fault of the old blunder. Don't try to throw your happiness away,
Theodora. You were not made to miss it. I have not been blind all these
months. How could I be? I only wanted to wait and make sure that this
was not a blunder, too. I have known it from the first. Theo, I have
done now--the old tangle is unravelled. Go to him, Theo, he wants you."
The next instant the door closed upon Priscilla, as she went out, and
Theodora North understood clearly what she had before never dared to
dream of.
There was one brief, breathless pause, and then Denis Oglethorpe held
out his arms.
"My darling," he said. "Mine, my own."
She slipped down by his side, beautiful, tremulous, with glowing cheeks
and tear-wet eyes. She remembered Priscilla Gower then.
"Oh, my love!" she cried. "She is better than I am, braver and more
noble; but she can never love you better, or be more faithful and true
than I will be. Only try me; only try me, my darling."
* * * * *
Three months subsequently, when Pamela and Priscilla had settled down
again to the routine of their old lives, there was a quiet wedding
celebrated at Paris--a quiet wedding, though it was under Lady
Throckmorton's patronage.
In their tender remembrance of Priscilla Gower, it was made a quiet
wedding--so quiet, indeed, that the people who made the young English
beauty's romance a topic of conversation and nine days' wonder, scarcely
knew it had ended.
And in Broome street, Priscilla Gower read the announcement in the
paper, with only the ghost of a faint pang.
"I suppose I am naturally a cold woman," she wrote to Pamela North, with
whom she sustained a faithful correspondence. "I will acknowledge, at
least, to a certain lack of enthusiasm. I can be faithful, but I cannot
be impassioned. It is impossible for me to suffer as your pretty Theo
could, as it is equally impossible for me to love as she did. I have
lost something, of course, but I have not lost all."
Between these two women there arose a friendship which was never
dissolved. Perhaps the one thing they had in common, drew them toward
each other; at any rate, they were faithful; and even when, three years
later, Priscilla Gower married a man who loved her, and having married
him, was a calmly happy woman, they were faithful to each other still.
THE END.
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