"Yes, I promise," she replied, with a gentle, smothered sigh. Then suddenly she lifted her eyes and asked him the last question he would have expected to hear from a girl nurtured in the lap of wealth and luxury. "Mr. Le Roy, if you were a girl like I am--and if you hadn't any parents, nor home, nor friends--nor any money--nor any practical education--what would you do to earn an honest living?" There was a palpable anxiety in voice and face. She had grown very pale, her dark eyes were distinctly wistful. "She is thinking of that obnoxious lover. She would even dare poverty for his sake," he said to himself in displeasure. Aloud he answered carelessly: "It is hard to say what I should do in such a case, Miss Gordon. I believe I should throw myself into that beautiful river yonder and so end all." In the dark after-days he remembered those words. CHAPTER VI. Beatrix Gordon looked at the beautiful river with wide, dark eyes. The summer sunshine gilded the blue waves, the white sails dotted its wide expanse like fairy shallops gliding to and fro. It was grand and dazzlingly beautiful, but the young girl shivered as she thought of the dark depths below. She turned from it to look gravely into St. Leon Le Roy's handsome face with its cold, cynical eyes. "You would throw yourself into the river and so end all," she repeated. "Oh, Mr. Le Roy, is it so hard for a poor girl to live that suicide is the least choice of evils?" Her little hands clasped each other tightly over the mass of glowing flowers in her lap, and her red lips trembled with earnestness. He looked at her in something like wonder. "I do not see why Mr. Gordon's daughter should trouble herself over such a question," he said. "But since you ask me I must answer yes. The world is full of pitfalls for the young and beautiful girl who has her own living to gain. Were I in the situation you describe, I believe I should speedily end the struggle with fate by a leap into the river." These hastily spoken words, too, he was fated to recall in an hour of which he dreamed not now. Beatrix did not answer him. She sat very still, looking before her with a strange, far-away expression on her face. A long, deep, unconscious sigh quivered over her lips. "You are troubled over what I said--why?" he asked, curiously. And the girl answered, with a shiver: "I am afraid of life." St. Leon began to feel vaguely interested in this girl whose coming he had dreaded so much. She was not like other young ladies he had known--not what he had expected the rich Mr. Gordon's daughter to be. There was a spice of originality about her. Why should she, the petted child of wealth and luxury, think about these things of which she had talked? Was it because her lover was poor? He did not like to think of that lover from whom her parents wished to separate her. She was a child, he said to himself--too young to burn her heart in the flame of love.