arch on them all by marrying the dark-eyed beauty then and there. He
not only thought it, but executed it, but it was not the lark that he
thought it was going to be. For one short happy week he lived in a
fool's paradise, then a change came over the spirit of his dreams. In
that one week she had spent his year's income and all the money he
could borrow, then petulantly left him in anger.

For two long years he never looked upon her face again. One stormy
night she returned quite unexpectedly at Whitestone Hall, bringing
with her their little child Pluma, and, placing her in her father's
arms, bitter recriminations followed. Bitterly Basil Hurlhurst
repented that terrible mistake of his youth, that hasty marriage.

When the morning light dawned he took his wife and child from
Whitestone Hall--took them abroad. What did it matter to him where
they went? Life was the same to him in one part of the world as
another. For a year they led a weary life of it. Heaven only knew how
weary he was of the woman the law called his wife!

One night, in a desperate fit of anger, she threw herself into the
sea; her body was never recovered. Then the master of Whitestone Hall
returned with his child, a sadder and wiser man.

But the bitterest drop in his cup had been added last. The golden-haired
young wife, the one sweet love whom he had married last, was taken
from him; even her little child, tiny image of that fair young mother,
had not been spared him.

How strange it was such a passionate yearning always came over him
when he thought of his child!

When he saw a fair, golden-haired young girl, with eyes of blue, the
pain in his heart almost stifled him. Some strange unaccountable fate
urged him to ever seek for that one face even in the midst of crowds.
It was a mad, foolish fancy, yet it was the one consolation of Basil
Hurlhurst's weary, tempest tossed life.

No wonder he set his teeth hard together as he listened to the cold
words of the proud, peerless beauty before him, who bore every
lineament of her mother's dark, fatal beauty--this daughter who
scornfully spoke of the hour when he should die as of some happy,
long-looked-for event.

Those waving cotton-fields that stretched out on all sides as far as
the eye could reach, like a waving field of snow, laid waste beneath
the fire fiend's scorching breath! Never--never!

Then and there the proud, self-conscious young heiress lost all
chances of reigning a regal queen,