"I do not understand you, Vane. Surely you know not what you say," Miss Langton utters in perplexity. "Listen, and you shall be the judge," he answers, with a heavy sigh. "I sailed with my wife on the _Hesperus_----" "And Uncle Langton?" she interrupts him to ask. "We left Mr. Langton resting at a quiet summer resort. He was too much indisposed to return with us so soon. We were to have gone back for him as soon as your freedom had been secured," he explains. She bows, silently, and he goes on, the pale, beautiful girl listening attentively. "Reine came to me the day that we had been five days out, with that little metallic case in her hand. She had been very bright and happy since we started, but just then she was pale and grave. 'Vane,' she said to me, 'I have put Maud's precious paper in this little case for greater safety. But I have a strange dread of losing it. Put it in your breast pocket and keep it for me!' I--oh, Heaven! I obeyed her," he exclaims, struggling with a bitter remorse. The beautiful prisoner regards him with silent sympathy. "I obeyed her," he repeats, with a passionate remorse, "and that night when we sprang into the water together, fleeing from the devouring flames, it was still on my person. All hope seemed gone, and we clung to each other in the desperation of despair, determined at least to die together. Suddenly a crowded life-boat came in sight. A man shouted there was room for one more and that they would take the woman in. At these words she cried out frantically that I had Maud's precious paper, and that I was the one to be saved, and with that she loosed her hold, and with an awful suddenness pushed me from her, and sank down, down in the terrible water. With the awful shock of her loss I became unconscious. They drew me into the boat in the place of my poor girl, and the boat swept on over her awful burial-place. It was for you, Maud. She gave her beautiful, innocent life freely for you rather than risk the loss of the legacy I have brought you!" CHAPTER XIX. Even Maud Langton's cold and shallow nature, utterly incapable of such an act of dauntless heroism as Reine's, is touched by the man's overmastering grief and the story of the woman's devotion. "Poor little Reine! I did not deserve such a sacrifice from her," she exclaims, with a guilty consciousness of her cruel and contemptuous treatment of her generous rival. Vane Charteris makes her no reply. He has dropped his pale, handsome face into his hands, his strong frame quivers with silent sobs. Maud watches him in amazement. "You take it hard," she says; "yet I thought you did not love her, that you would not care." "Not care!" lifting his somber blue eyes a moment to her pale, wondering face. "I care so much that by night or by day, sleeping or waking, her image is never absent from my thoughts. I would give the whole world to have her back, my poor lost darling!"