CHAPTER XXIV.
“THE PANGS THAT REND MY HEART IN TWAIN!”
Madame Ray despised Arthur Varian so much that she was bitterly chagrined on learning that he was related to her favorite, Frederick Foster, whom she hoped to see Cinthia marry.
Foster had frankly confided his hopes to the actress, and elicited her sympathy in his love. She had promised to do all she could to help him win Cinthia, and it annoyed her very much that, for a time at least, the ardent lover would be debarred from seeing the object of his love.
Perhaps, too, if he should find out that love episode with his cousin Arthur, he would not wish to marry a girl who had been so cruelly deserted on the eve of marriage. She guessed wrongly that the Varians would very likely use all their influence against Cinthia.
But, however much she worried, she could see no way out of the dilemma. Foster had been abruptly parted from Cinthia before he had taught her to love him, and she saw no safe way of bringing them together again in the present. Time alone could solve the problem.
It was a great disappointment not to be able to take Cinthia to Newport, where she knew that the girl’s grace and beauty would create a sensation; but, of course, it was not to be thought of now. Cinthia and Arthur Varian must be kept apart for the sake of the young girl’s peace of mind.
But how handsome and manly he had looked—not at all like the weak coward Madame Ray deemed him. She found herself dwelling with pleasure on his handsome face and form, his dark-blue eyes, and brown, clustering hair.
“Much after the style of Cinthia’s handsome father. I fancy he might have looked like that when he was a young man, before the gray came into his brown locks, and the anxious lines into his face,” she mused, thoughtfully; and her eyes grew grave, and her cheek pale with a sudden, startling thought that made her exclaim: “Good heavens! could it be?”
The line of thought thus started was most distressing, as evinced by the agitation of her face, and presently she muttered:
“There may be a mystery, after all. I will try to get at the bottom of it.”
Meanwhile, Cinthia, struggling with the heartache renewed by her encounter with her lost love, or her false love, as she preferred to call him, made a great effort to throw off the weight on her spirits and become herself again.
Cinthia could not thrust Arthur’s image from her heart however much she tried and longed to do so. She could wear the mask of pride over her sorrow, that was all.
Her father hoped and believed that she was overcoming her trouble, and would have rejoiced as much as Madame Ray if she could have transferred her heart to Frederick Foster. He who had known the pangs of wounded love so well was eager to find a cure for his daughter’s heart.
But all chance of this had been temporarily frustrated by her unexpected rencontre with Arthur Varian.
He felt that all the old ground would have to be gone over now again, and cursed the evil fates that had worked against him.
He regretted that a sudden weariness of foreign shores had decided him to return to America, and made up his mind to take Cinthia away again out of reach of the Varians. This was why he had said that he was going to California.
He had decided to make a home for himself and daughter under those blue and sunny skies, among orange groves and bowers of bloom, where life would glide so softly amid wooing zephyrs, that it would seem like an Arcadia even to disappointed hearts like his own and Cinthia’s. There they would win forgetfulness of the past and hope for the future.