"But you must have been so very young at the time that you could not have cared for him so very much," said Lady Ivon, anxiously.
"Yes, I was very young," Azalia answered, dreamily; but she added to herself that she cared so much that she should never forget her dead husband, and sighed:
"Forget thee? Yes, when life shall cease To thrill this heart of mine; But not till then can I forget One look or tone of thine!"
There was a burden on her heart--the burden of the secret she had not dared to confess either to Mr. Kelso or to her great-grandparents.
She feared that they would not receive her if she confessed that she had been married in secret to a man who had deserted her so strangely, and that she had borne a little child that was dead and had been buried in a secret grave.
"If I told them they might say, like Jewel, that it was all a sham, that the man had deceived me," she thought, with burning cheeks. "They might drive me out into the cold, hard world, of which I am so terribly afraid. No, no, I dare not speak!"
So she kept her sorrowful secret hidden in her own heart; and when Lady Ivon sometimes caught that look of sad retrospection on the fair face, she thought that she was thinking of a dead lover--not a dead husband and child.
"I fear that she must have cared more than I suspected," the old lady would say to herself, uneasily; and, could she have gazed upon Azalia now, she would have felt more anxious than ever.
She said to herself that she must find out the truth as to this Laurie Meredith. But how to accomplish it was the question that occurred to her, since she dare not ask any questions.
No answer presented itself to her mind, and she could only hope that she might meet this Laurie Meredith in society.
"But what if I should meet Jewel, too? Would she recognize me? Would she tax me with my identity? If she did, I should not acknowledge the truth."
It was perhaps a week after that snowy day when Azalia Brooke sat, looking back with dim, wet eyes into her shadowy past, that Jewel Fielding reclined at ease in a beautiful boudoir hung in white and gold, and listened to the roar of the winter wind as it whistled in the eaves of the handsome but ancient old mansion that she called home.