With a beating heart and a face radiant with sudden joy Elaine knelt down beside him. She could have touched Clarence Stuart as he sat by the litter, but she shrunk sensitively back, without looking at him. Guy Kenmore stood apart at a little distance, with his arms folded over his broad breast, his clear brown eyes fixed gravely on the little group. "Clarence," said the dying man, turning his dim eyes on the face of his cousin, "you believed that this lady deserted you sixteen years ago of her own free will and desire. It was not true." "Not true!" gasped Clarence Stuart. "No, it was not true. She loved you and she was true to you. The wicked machinations of your father parted you from each other." "My father! Oh, God, no!" exclaimed Mr. Stuart, in an agony of grief. "It is horrible, but it is true," said Julius Revington. "He was bitterly enraged against you because of your marriage with Miss Brooke instead of the heiress he had selected for you. He laid his plans cleverly to circumvent you. Your severe illness that prevented you from returning to your wife was caused from drugs administered by him in the wine you drank that night." "What authority have you for making these statements? Remember that you are dying, Julius, and do not try to falsify anything," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, almost sternly. "I do not forget that I am dying," moaned the sufferer. "I speak the truth as God hears me--the truth as I received it from the lips of your father upon his death-bed." "He revealed the truth to you instead of to me--strange!" cried the tortured man, almost incredulously. "Yes; can you guess why?" "I cannot." "He repented of his sin, but he was afraid to confess it to you. He dreaded your terrible anger and dreadful despair. He feared that you would curse him upon his dying bed." "I am afraid I should have done so, indeed," muttered Clarence Stuart. "So he selected me as the instrument to right the wrong," went on Revington. "He wrote out a full confession of his sin, detailing the means he had used to separate you, and he deputed me to carry it to Bay View, where your first wife had been living all the time while you believed her dead in a foreign land." "And you failed in your promise to the dead," exclaimed Mr. Stuart, fixing a glance of deep reproach upon his cousin. "No, I kept my promise. You remember the night we stopped at Brooke Wharf on our way to Italy, Clarence?" "Yes, I remember." "Well, that night while you lay in your stores of fruit, and the rest of our party rambled about, I fulfilled my mission. I went to Bay View Hall, and I persuaded old Mr. Brooke to come out on the shore with me. I told him of your father's death-bed repentance, and I confided to his care the written confession. He promised to deliver it to his daughter Elaine, and I came away and left him." Elaine hid her face in her hands and low moans of pain came from her lips.