"But before I go I have somewhat to ask of you. Perhaps it may be too great a favor." "Name it," she answered, gently, and he replied: "Lilia Stuart--your husband's child, and who should have been yours, too--lies ill unto death at her father's villa with that fatal malady, consumption. Last night you carried the child's heart by storm. To-day, in her illness and pain, she sings over fragments of your songs--they think if--you would come--that it might make happier her dying hours." "Let her father comfort her," she said, bitterly, jealous in her heart of that other woman's child. He took her hand and gazed deep into her soft, pure eyes, tinctured with a certain womanly pride. "Mrs. Stuart," he said, letting his voice linger firmly on the name, "this is not worthy of you. Your heart harbors resentment against your husband when he has never wronged you. He has not sinned, he has been sinned against. Just now he cannot come to the child. He must first bury his dead." "How can I sing to her when my heart is so empty and full of pain?" she asked, drearily. "Because God will bless your efforts to cheer the last hours of that motherless child," he said. "Clarence Stuart loves the child, and it might have been yours as well as his. You must love it for his sake. Think if it were your own loved Irene, dying in the spring of her life." "I will go," she answered, tremulously. CHAPTER XLVIII. When Elaine went to the villa her strange, romantic history was known to all the inhabitants except Lilia. Mrs. Leslie, in her woman's wisdom, had judged it best to tell all the rest, but no one breathed it to the dying child. She alone never knew that the beautiful singer who had taken her young heart captive was her father's real wife. When he came and found her singing like an angel by Lilia's dying bed, he made no sign save by the silent gratitude in his dark eyes, and Elaine was best pleased thus. There were several days of fluctuating hope and fear before the fair bud faded on its drooping stem. Sometimes she would have every appearance of rallying, but it was only the deceptive flattery of her insidious disease, and she would immediately fall back into the most alarming symptoms. The day came when Mr. Stuart could bear it no longer to hear the weak voice asking for her mother, and wondering why she came not. He told his child the truth with such infinite pity and gentleness that it softened the blow to her young heart---- told her that her mother had gone before her to the unknown Land. Lilia bore it more bravely than he had expected. "She has only gone before me a little," she said, sadly. And later on she asked Mrs. Leslie for Irene. "I loved her at first until mamma bade me not to," she said, plaintively. "Then I was cruel and unkind. Is she angry still, that she does not come to me when I am so sick?" They told her gently that Irene did not know of her illness, that she had gone away.