"If you will come with me I will present you. I am curious to see the meeting between the loveliest girl in America and the greatest beauty in England!" exclaimed Mrs. Devere, who doted on beauty because she was irredeemably homely herself. Jewel was mollified by the compliment, and smiled brightly on her hostess and her lover as she rose from her seat. "Will you come, too, Laurie?" she asked; but he shook his handsome head. "Excuse me for the present," he replied; and Jewel went away with Mrs. Devere, secretly glad that her lover showed so little interest in the beauty over whom every one was raving. "And I have been so afraid of her--so foolishly jealous!" she thought, gladly, all her fears set at rest. CHAPTER XXXV. Laurie Meredith leaned his handsome head carelessly back, and the smile that he had worn for Jewel's sake faded away and left his face grave and sober, as it had grown to be since that summer when he had gone away from the sea-shore, leaving his little love behind him because she had changed her mind almost at the last moment and declined to go with her lover-husband. His tender thoughts of the dead girl were always mixed with pain and remorse, for he believed that Flower's love for him had been less strong than he had believed it at first. Her refusal to go away with him, and her subsequent short and strange letters, led him to this belief. "She was little more than a child, and it was a girlish fancy that she took for love," he thought now. "It was cruel in me to take advantage of her, and bind her by a tie that afterward made her miserable. Jewel may say what she pleases, but I am not sure that Flower drowned herself wholly on account of the unhappy circumstances of her birth. I fear that her sorrow over her hasty marriage, and despair at her situation, helped to drive her to that mad deed." At times he could not help contrasting the fickleness of Flower's love with the constancy and devotion of Jewel's. He had said to himself more than once, with a pang of wounded pride: "Flower cared but little for my love, but Jewel valued it above all else on earth. It is right that I should reward her devotion. I will try to love the faithful, dark-eyed girl as she deserves." But such is the strangeness of the human heart that he prized the memory of the lost girl far more than he did the living love of beautiful, passionate Jewel. He could not have helped it if he would, and he did not struggle much against the feeling, for it seemed to him that he owed his greatest allegiance to the memory of her who had loved him, for a time at least, tenderly and truly, and who had died so young; and to his heart there came sometimes, with a shuddering pain, the strangely fitting words of Poe, the passionate poet, who sounded the heights and depths of love's emotion: