“No, indeed, Leon, for the patter of children’s feet and the sound of their happy voices would be like music in this great, lonely mansion. Here we could care for them like our own children, and how happy it would make our daughter when she comes home to find her loved little cousins with us. Let me have my way in this, Leon, if you can feel satisfied with the arrangements.” “Satisfied, my own love? Why, it will, indeed, be a boon to me for which I shall feel grateful to you till my dying day,” he declared with fervor. And thus it happened that on the very next day Mark and Willie Lyndon were removed from the dreary abode of poverty to their new palatial home. But the secret rage of Cora Ellyson at the turn affairs were taking can better be imagined than described. She had never felt a spark of real love for Mrs. Dalrymple, and had contemplated her impending death with inward satisfaction, expecting to inherit all her money, and rule royally in the social world by reason of it. It was a bitter blow when her aunt came back from the gates of death and began to convalesce, but she reasoned to herself: “It is only a temporary improvement in health, for when her daughter’s fate continues to be unknown she will relapse into a worse stage than at first, and die of disappointment.” But when Mrs. Dalrymple confided to her the new turn affairs had taken, she could scarcely conceal her rage. “You are going to remarry your divorced husband--the man you deserted of your own will, Aunt Verna, and pretended to hate and despise all these years--Impossible!” she exclaimed remonstratingly. Mrs. Dalrymple’s dark head instantly crested itself with the pride Cora knew so well, and she dared not find further fault. So Cora, repulsed, could only vent her rage in secret, and bitter enough it was, though mixed with one sweet drop of triumph in the thought that never again would their eyes rest on Jessie’s sweet face. “Let them search and search, but never again will their eyes be gladdened by her return. Let them go on believing that Cora Ellyson is sorry she sent her into exile that night. Ha, ha!” and a laugh that was fiendish in its cruel triumph rang out upon the stillness of the room. She was in a retrospective mood, and as she shook loose the braids of dark hair over her shoulder, she gazed fixedly at her pallid face in the long mirror, muttering: “Yet Frank Laurier doesn’t love me. How mortifying to marry a man who shrinks from one with secret aversion! Yet I will not turn back. I will marry him if only to punish him for his perfidy! And if he withholds love then he shall feel to the core of his heart what it is to trample on a woman’s love!” Stung to fury by the indifference he could not hide, Cora was filled with the venom of “a woman scorned.”