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, by _fair_ means, of Whitestone Hall. CHAPTER XXIII. The servant who opened the door for Daisy looked earnestly at the fair, pleading young face, framed in rings of golden hair, so pure and spiritual that it looked like an angel's with the soft white moonlight falling over it. "You will not refuse me," she repeated, timidly. "I must speak to Mrs. Lyon." "You have come too late," he replied, gently; "Mrs. Lyon is dead." The man never forgot the despairing look of horror that deepened in the childish blue eyes raised to his. "Rex's mother dead!" she repeated, slowly, wondering if she had heard aright. "Oh, my poor Rex, my poor Rex!" How she longed to go to him and comfort him in that terrible hour, but she dared not intrude upon him. "If there is any message you would like to leave," said the kind-hearted Parker, "I will take it to Mr. Rex." "No," said Daisy, shaking her head, "I have no message to leave; perhaps I will come again--after this is all over," she made answer, hesitatingly; her brain was in a whirl; she wanted to get away all by herself to think. "Please don't say any one was here," she said, quickly; "I--I don't want any one to know."