Much as she loved him, Jewel gloated over his suffering. She would not have spared him one pang if by lifting her hand she could have thrown off the whole burden of his misery. "He preferred her to me! Let him bear the punishment I have meted out to him!" she thought, triumphantly; and presently she said: "There seems only one way out of our difficulty. We can not speak until the Reverend Mr. Archer comes back to verify your story." "That is hard--to wait a year--a whole year--ere I vindicate my darling's memory," he groaned. But Jewel remained silent, knowing that in the end he would be obliged to agree with her declaration. He did so, and the next day he left Virginia and journeyed to the watering-place where his mother and sisters were spending the summer quietly on account of the recent death of the head of the house. He did not tell them the pathetic story of his secret marriage, and his young wife's death. They would hear it all from Jewel soon enough, he thought, shrinking from all the questions they asked him about his altered looks, and finding it hard to ask for the invitation Miss Fielding desired so much. But he did it at last, in spite of their haughty surprise; and, after they had heard that he had been ill for weeks in the house of the beautiful heiress, that she had tended him with all the affection of a sister, and that she was lonely and orphaned, they began to feel that they owed Jewel a debt that would be but poorly canceled by all that they could do. So the invitation was written and sent, eagerly accepted, and Jewel at once began to get ready for her winter campaign, as she called it to herself, feeling that victory already perched upon her banner. CHAPTER XXIV. Two years went by on the swift wing of time, and Miss Fielding had drained to its dregs the full cup of success, in which there was but one drop of bitter, the torturing fact that Laurie Meredith still remained abroad, oblivious to her charms. He had gone away before she went to Boston, and so he had not seen her brilliant social triumph, for her dusky Southern beauty had carried society by storm, and Mrs. Meredith had been quite proud of her protegee. Now Jewel had an elegant home on the same street with the Meredith mansion, and Mrs. Wellings, as her companion and chaperon, was mistress of a home where the most elegant entertainments were given, and where life was always at its gayest, for the beautiful heiress loved to surround herself with light-hearted people, and to live always in the midst of pleasure, perhaps that she might keep at bay the pangs of remorse that must sometimes have pierced her heart if she had given herself time to think of those whose lives she had ruined. Winter was coming on again, and at last Laurie Meredith was coming home. He could not hold out longer against the prayers of his mother and sisters, so he had promised to return from that long exile, in which he had been a restless, unhappy wanderer, seeking: