She turned her face from him to the shining stars so that he could not read the despairing love written on it, and answered, firmly though gently: “I forbid you to tell her the truth, for I can never accept happiness based on the wreck of another devoted heart. You must marry Cora as you promised to do, and, perhaps, you will learn to love her again!” CHAPTER XXXIII. THE BLACKMAILER. Madame Barto’s doorbell clanged impatiently twice, and then a deeply veiled young lady was admitted, and shown to the small parlor where madame received her callers. She glanced around her, muttering: “Almost two years since I was here, yet how familiar everything appears! Madame herself would have the same old lying story to tell, perchance, if I were to cross her palm again with silver! Pah! the dingy hole disgusts me. I wish that wretch would hasten! I have no time to waste here, and Aunt Verna so ill that it was unseemly for me to quit the house.” She paced up and down the floor with the impatience of a caged lioness. “Why don’t he come? It is money again, I suppose! Money--always money! And since my unfaithful guardian speculated with my money and lost so much of it, I have scarcely enough for my own needs. I shall be glad when I am safely married to Frank, for then I shall defy Carey Doyle to do his worst. I can deny his story if he dares bring any charges, and Frank Laurier, I know, will defend his wife’s honor to the last. Ah, how I long to see him again, my love, my own! His steamer is due to-day, and I am wild with impatience. Ah! what cruel suspense I have endured since he went away. And even now I dread the meeting. My beauty is not as brilliant as before my terrible accident, and I shall always be compelled to depend on cosmetics to aid the charms that before were unsurpassed!” She flung back her thick veil and paused before a mirror, studying her face intently, as she had contracted a habit of doing now. She was indeed changed from the brilliant Cora of two years ago. The beauty specialists had done their best, but they could not restore all that the cruel flames had licked up so relentlessly that fatal wedding eve. She had tried to cheat Frank Laurier, but she could not cheat herself, and she dreaded inexpressibly the moment of their meeting. “Will his love survive the change? Has it, indeed, survived our long parting?” she asked herself anxiously, for she had not failed to notice how indifferent his letters had been, and how few and far between. She thought: