Oh, how impatiently she waited for the answer to that letter! How eagerly she longed to be pardoned for the girlish conspiracy that had ended so disastrously to Laurel Vane! She began to see her fault in a darker light now since the tragedy at Eden. The shadow of Laurel's grave seemed to fall long and dark across her wedded happiness! An answer came at last from her outraged father--such an answer as withered all the springing-hopes in her breast. They would never forgive her for her fault. They had no longer a daughter. Their Beatrix was the same as dead to them, and they wished never to hear from Cyril Wentworth's wife. CHAPTER XLVII. "I want that rose so much, I would take the world back there to the night When I saw it blush in the grass, to touch It once in that fair fall light; And only once if I might. "Never any rose before Was like that rose very well I know Never another rose any more Will blow as that rose did blow." St. Leon Le Roy sat alone in his handsome, spacious library. He had been reading, but the book of poems had fallen from his hand, and he was dreamily repeating some lines that had touched an aching chord in his heart: "I want that rose so much, I would take the world back there to the night When I saw it blush in the grass, to touch It once in that fair fall light; And only once if I might." Memory was busy at his heart, for time had not healed, it had only seared the wound of years ago. Eight years had come and gone since that terrible night when his bitter anger and hard judgment had driven his erring childish wife out into the darkness of death. Scarcely an hour ago he had stood by the broken marble shaft that marked her grave and seen the gray moss creeping over the sweet, simple name-- "LAUREL, Beloved wife of St. Leon Le Roy." _Beloved!_ Yes, he had carved it on her tombstone when all too late to save the broken heart that had loved him with a madness that proved its own destruction. Beloved! ah, he never knew how well until the slow years coming and going, "barren of all joy," had shown him how empty and hollow was all the world measured with what he had lost. All his life was a long regret, an echo of the poet's plaint: "Oh, to call back the days that are not!" The years had marked his face with the story of their sadness. Handsome as Apollo still, there were lines of pain about the cold, proud lids, there were silver threads clustering in the raven locks tossed carelessly back from the white brow, there were shadows always lying _perdu_ in the splendid dark eyes. For years he had been a lonely wanderer by land and sea, but now that he had come home again to Eden and to his mother, and to Laurel's grave, he found that he had not forgotten--that he never could forget.