And again her thoughts turn homeward as if drawn by some irresistible power. "I will return to my native land," she resolves. "I will seek out Maud, if indeed she has escaped from the terrible web that encompassed her. I am so lonely and sad perhaps she will be kinder to me than of old." CHAPTER XXVII. A year has passed since the ill-fated _Hesperus_ was burned in mid-ocean with such terrible loss of human life. In the sultry heat of August, Vane Charteris has forsaken the breathless, dusty city for the coolness and verdure of that terrestrial paradise among the hills, Langton Villa. He is the guest of Miss Langton, who queens it right royally here over the grand domain she had nearly lost by her folly of one year ago. They walk up and down beneath the trees, Maud and her handsome lawyer, in the glow of the evening sunset, with the lovely sights and sounds of summer all around them. The heiress, in a robe of palest blue, with creamy lace, looks her fairest. Mr. Charteris, always handsome, is none the less so for the shadow brooding darkly in the deep blue eyes, lending its touch of earnestness to the grave, pale face. "How dull and _distrait_ you are," she says at length, impatiently. "Let us sit down here beneath this tree, and I will try to charm this dull mood away." But for once she finds her fascinations fail. Vane, always inclined to be taciturn, is more than usually so to-night, even to the verge of embarrassment. She wonders why his eyes evade her own, why he makes no reply to some tender epithets that falls cooingly from the beautiful lips. "I thought you loved me, Vane," she breaks out at last, with some indignation. "Yes, I thought so too, for a little while, under the glamour of your beauty and my own loneliness, but when you were gone, I found that I was mistaken. I am here to tell you this. Can you forgive me, Maud?" he blunders out, with all the shame of a man who feels himself placed in an uncomfortable position. "Mistaken!" she cries, transfixing him with the angry gleam of her blue eyes. "Why, only the last time we met you said that you loved me." Vane, rather red and ashamed, still holds his ground bravely. "I was mistaken, as I told you just now," he says. "I do not, I cannot love you." "Cannot!" she repeats, a little blankly. "I cannot," he answers. "I find in the light of my later experiences that I never really loved you, not even when I was about to make you my wife. I was under the spell of your beauty. I know now that my heart was untouched." "What do you mean by later experience?" the beautiful woman asks, sneeringly. "I mean that the love I feel now, when too late, for my lost wife, Reine, is the only love my heart can ever know," he answers, speaking low and reverentially, as if in the presence of the dead. The cold blue eyes of the beautiful heiress kindle with pride and resentment.