"My God!" he cried, burying his face in his hands, "this poor John Brooks did what I, her husband, should have done; but it is not too late now. I shall honor your memory, my darling; I shall have a costly marble monument erected to your memory, bearing the inscription: 'Sacred to the memory of Daisy, beloved wife of Rex Lyon, aged sixteen years.' Not Daisy Brooks, but Daisy Lyon. Mother is dead, what can secrecy avail now?" He would not tell Pluma until the last moment. Straightway he ordered a magnificent monument from Baltimore--one of pure unblemished white, with an angel with drooping wings overlooking the tall white pillar. When it arrived he meant to take Pluma there, and, reverently kneeling down before her, tell her all the story of his sweet, sad love-dream with his face pressed close against the cold, pulseless marble--tell her of the love-dream which had left him but the ashes of dead hope. He sealed the letter and placed it with the out-going morning mail. "Darling, how I wish I had not parted from you that night!" he sighed. How bitterly he regretted he could not live that one brief hour of his past life over again--how differently he would act! CHAPTER XXVIII. While Rex was penning his all-important letter in his room, Pluma was walking restlessly to and fro in her boudoir, conning over in her mind the events of the evening. Rex had asked her to be his wife, but she stood face to face with the truth at last--he did not love her. It was not only a blow of the keenest and cruelest kind to her affection, but it was the cruelest blow her vanity could possibly have received. To think that she, the wealthy, petted heiress, who counted her admirers by the score, should have tried so hard to win the love of this one man and have failed; that her beauty, her grace, her wit, and her talent had been lavished upon him, and lavished in vain. "Was that simple girl, with her shy, timid, shrinking manner, more lovable than I?" she asked herself, incredulously. She could not realize it--she, whose name was on the lips of men, who praised her as the queen of beauty, and whom fair women envied as one who had but to will to win. It seemed to her a cruel mockery of fate that she, who had everything the world could give--beauty and fortune--should ask but this one gift, and that it should be refused her--the love of the man who had asked her to be his wife. Was it impossible that he should learn to love her? She told herself that she should take courage, that she would persevere, that her great love must in time prevail. "I must never let him find me dull or unhappy," she thought. "I must carefully hide all traces of pique or annoyance." She would do her best to entertain him, and make it the study of her life to win his love.