“You see, Alva is painting a Cupid, but she can not find a face to please her; and yesterday I saw a little salesgirl--in your father’s store, by the way, Miss Maury--who had an ideal face for the picture. Such a face! all dimples and roses, blue eyes, and rings of golden hair on the graceful boyish head. And her smile--it was something to dream of were one a man--saucy, sweet, enchanting--such a smile as Cupid himself might wear when drawing his bow to transfix a heart. Well,” drawing a long breath, “I meant to go to-morrow morning and secure this little beauty as a model for Alva’s Cupid, but to punish her now I shall not do so, so the charming picture will never be painted.” “You cruel mamma, I shall go and find her myself to-morrow, and you will be balked of your revenge!” exclaimed Alva, with sparkling eyes; and for the rest of the time she could think of nothing but the lovely face she was going to secure for her Cupid. Otho whispered to Maybelle: “It must have been Floy that she saw at father’s store.” “Yes,” she answered; and exulted in her heart that the fair Cupid face had lost its roses, the blue eyes their happy light, the rosy mouth its witching smile, all faded in death. Then the curtain raised again, and they turned to watch the mimic woes of “Trilby” and her lover. Otho watched with dull, glazed eyes, that saw through all the glare and brightness the face of one lost to him forever, and when the actors recited the griefs of “Pauvre Trilby,” his heart echoed “Pauvre Floy!” CHAPTER XIX. THE BERESFORD PRIDE. In the letter that Alva Beresford treated as a merry jest, St. George had poured out the tenderness of a love-freighted heart to his mother. When he parted from Floy that night beneath the vines on the cottage porch and hurried away to perform the mission on which he was sent across the sea, his heart was full of her grace and beauty, and every hour seemed leaden-winged that kept him from her side. “How beautiful she is, how far above all others in her ineffable grace and charm!” he said to himself every hour; and in his impatience to have her for his own he could not wait till his return to propitiate his mother, for whose sympathy he yearned with the eagerness of a loving son. He determined to write to her and plead his cause. He knew, alas! all the Beresford pride, and how high it soared. Had not Alva’s heart been crucified on its altar?--gay, mocking Alva, in whose past lay the story of a broken love-dream never to be resurrected now, for he was dead, the young poet lover whose suit her parents had scorned when Alva was a budding girl, fit incarnation of a poet’s dream. It was only a few months later that he died--of a lingering fever, said the physicians--of a broken heart, vowed the girl, flinging it frantically in her parents’ face in the desperation of her keen despair.