When the sympathetic women left her alone that evening in her room, she knelt down in a passion of repentance, and prayed God to forgive her for her great sin in trying to throw away the life He had given. And she prayed Heaven to help her to forget Harry Hawthorne, and to love Clifford Standish, the man she had promised to marry. "Surely he is good and true, and deserves my love," she thought, in an impulse of gratitude to him for the way he had shielded her when the people talked of suicide. She was ashamed of the truth now--glad for them to think it had been an accident. "I will never be so foolish and so wicked again," she thought, in her keen remorse for her sin. She spent a wakeful, restless night in spite of the sedatives the kind Doctor Spicer had administered before he went away. The hotel was so close to the railroad that she could hear the trains thundering by all night long, and the sound made her shudder with terror at thought of the heavy iron wheels that had come so near to crushing out her fair young life. She was glad when morning came, and they boarded the train for New York. She was eager to get away from this place, yet she would never forget Alderson, with its beautiful mountains, its romantic, winding river, and the bridge where she had stood with Standish, listening to the cruel words that had extinguished the last spark of hope in her breast and driven her mad with despair. No, she would never forget beautiful Alderson, on the rippling, winding, singing Greenbrier River, set like an emerald chain between its romantic banks, overshadowed by wooded mountains, but she would remember it always with a horror it did not deserve, poor Geraldine, because of its tragic associations. CHAPTER XVI. "CALL PRIDE TO YOUR AID, GERALDINE." "It is a common fate--a woman's lot-- To waste on one the riches of her soul, Who takes the wealth she gives him, but cannot Repay the interest, and much less the whole. "'Tis a sad gift, that much applauded thing, A constant heart; for fact doth daily prove That constancy finds oft a cruel sting, While fickle natures win the deeper love." We must return to our description of the scene in the theatre when the curtain rose on the first act, and the eager eyes of the large audience turned upon the stage. The heroine of the play, Laurel Vane, a beautiful girl, left penniless and alone by the death of her only surviving parent, was discovered weeping in the shabby room from which she would soon be turned out, because she had no money to pay her rent. Enter the handsome villain, Ross Powell, who declares his love for Laurel, and makes wicked proposals. Repulsed with scorn, he departs, vowing vengeance on the scornful little beauty. Desperate with misery, Laurel seeks a beautiful young lady, the noble daughter of a publisher, for whose magazine her father had written until his death.