a rich, clear tenor,
sweet and silvery as the chime of bells."

Leone remembered every tone, every note of it; they had spent long hours
in singing together, and the memory of those hours shone now in the eyes
that met so sadly. A sudden, keen, passionate desire to sing with him
once more came over Leone. It might be rash--it was imprudent.

"Mine was always a mad love," she said to herself, with a most bitter
smile. "It might be dangerous--but once more."

Just once more she would like to hear her voice float away with his. She
bent over the music again--the first and foremost lay Mendelssohn's
beautiful duet. "Oh, would that my love." They sang it in the summer
gloamings when she had been pleased and proud to hear her wonderful
voice float away over the trees and die in sweetest silence. She raised
it now and looked at him.

"Will you sing this?" she asked; but her eyes did not meet his, and her
face was very pale.

She did not wait for an answer, but placed the music on a stand, and
then--ah, then--the two beautiful voices floated away, and the very air
seemed to vibrate with the passionate, thrilling sound; the
drawing-room, the magnificence of Stoneland House, the graceful presence
of the fair wife, faded from them. They were together once more at the
garden at River View, the green trees making shade, the deep river in
the distance.

But when they had finished, Lady Chandos was standing by, her face wet
with tears.

"Your music breaks my heart," she said; but she did not know the reason
why.

CHAPTER XLIX.

THE WOUND IN HER HEART.

If Leone had been wiser after that one evening, she would have avoided
Lord Chandos as she would have shunned the flames of fire; that one
evening showed her that she stood on the edge of a precipice. Looking in
her own heart, she knew by its passionate anguish and passionate pain
that the love in her had never been conquered. She said to herself, when
the evening was over and she drove away, leaving them together, that she
would never expose herself to that pain again.

It was so strange, so unnatural for her--she who believed herself his
wife, who had spent so many evenings with him--to go away and leave him
with this beautiful woman who was really his wife. She looked up at the
silent stars as she drove home; surely their pale, golden eyes must
shine down in dearest pity on her. She clinched her white, soft hands
until the rings made great red dents; she exhau