"Oh, how much I have done for the sake of my love for Laurie Meredith!" she thought. "And yet, I half believe that but for dread of me he would woo this hateful English girl only for the sake of that fatal resemblance. He is attracted toward her. I can see that in spite of the indifference he pretends. Let him beware! Let both beware, for if they played me false both should answer with their lives!" CHAPTER XXXVI Azalia Brooke went home that night from the grand ball, puzzled, tormented, almost convinced that her lover-husband was not dead, but that he lived in the person of Jewel Fielding's lover. His striking likeness to him she had so long believed dead was so wonderful and startling that it had almost unnerved her that night, and it was only by a strong exercise of will-power that she resisted the impulse to cry out, to claim him, and charge him with his falsity, to say, bitterly: "It was not you that died, Laurie Meredith. That was a clever sham, like your marriage with me. You were false to the core of your heart, and perhaps combined with my cruel sister to get rid of me." Wounded pride, bitter resentment, and a terror of being thrown helpless on the world, held her back from betraying herself to him who would have welcomed her so gladly. It was pitiful for those two who had loved so well, who had been all the world to each other, whose hearts still held each other's image, to meet as mere strangers, to speak coldly to each other, yet a cruel fate, in the person of Jewel Fielding, had willed it so, and they moved and acted like mere puppets under her merciless hands. "He did not even remember me. He betrayed not the slightest emotion on meeting me, while I--I was trembling with excitement. If indeed it be the Laurie of old he soon tired of me, and then forgot me utterly, so that after a few years he can meet me with a glance of a stranger," she thought, bitterly; and pride came to her aid to uphold her in the task of meeting indifference with indifference. "Yet I would give the world to find out if it is really Laurie, or only a relative with a startling resemblance," she thought many times. As they met so often in society, this longing grew upon her, but she could find no means of gratifying it, for she could not ask any one else about it, and Jewel was so jealous over her lover that she kept him chained like a slave to her triumphal car. But one afternoon they met at a kettle-drum--a species of informal entertainments then raging in society. The gentlemen came in their ordinary dress, the ladies in calling or simple walking costume. Chance threw Laurie Meredith and Azalia Brooke together in a cozy corner, with their cups of tea.