"I have been willfully blind; I have not understood till now," she moaned. "But, by the flash of jealousy and grief, I have seen my heart. Clarice was right, and I spoke falsely when I denied her. I love him--that haughty, handsome man, who has never given me one thought--who belongs to Maud Merivale. That is why I risked all to remain at Eden! Oh, God! how hard it is to read my own heart first by its jealousy and aching!" And the night winds and the river echoed her faint, despairing moan. CHAPTER XXI. After a little she dragged herself up wearily, and went back to the drawing-room. The young count brightened visibly at her appearance. Mrs. Le Roy told her that she had stayed out too long in the night air and dew. "You look as cold and white as the moonlight," she said. Laurel made her some careless answer and sat down. Count Fitz John engaged her in conversation. He was delighted to find some one who could converse fairly in his native tongue, and he never wearied of gazing on her rare type of beauty, and her tasteful dress that appealed so forcibly to his artistic eye. He admired her, perhaps, all the more that she piqued him a little by her quietness and girlish dignity. She was not flattered by his notice as other girls were. On the contrary, if he had not been rather self-conceited, he must have seen that she was decidedly bored. St. Leon and his fair guest came in almost an hour later. Laurel did not look up at their entrance, though she felt her cheeks growing hot, with the bitter wonder that was in her mind. Did St. Leon Le Roy suspect that she cared for him? Had he fathomed the secret of her heart before she really understood it herself? Was that the secret of his coldness, his almost harshness to her? Had he used "This rough discourtesy To break or blunt her passion?" The hot color flashed into her sensitive face. She tried not to hear his clear, firm voice, as he talked to Mrs. Merivale. To drown those tones, she was obliged to listen attentively to the count, and to talk more herself. She roused herself to almost vivacity. She _would_ be gay. No one should guess how her heart was bleeding. She succeeded so well in her efforts that the Frenchman was delighted. He thought that he had at last begun to make an impression on the lovely girl, and Laurel, never glancing toward the others did not know with what a frowning brow St. Leon watched her apparent coquetries. But the interminable evening was over at last. Laurel could never have told how she got through it, but at last they had all gone to their rooms, and Laurel stood before the long glittering mirror in her dressing-room gazing with sad eyes and trembling lips at the face reflected there as at a new creature--a girl who for three months had been living a strange unconscious love-dream, and who had first found out that she had a heart by its bitter aching.