“I will not,” Thea promised; and after the old lady went out she sat a long time thinking compassionately of the woman who had been Norman’s wife long years ago, and who now lay dead, so bitterly hated still that he would not visit her grave. Norman had gone to see his publisher about a book he was just bringing out, so Thea had several hours of solitude in which to brood over what her mother-in-law had most unwisely told her. She could not help feeling sad over it. “I can not bear to think that my darling husband was hard and unjust to that dead woman. He seems to me so good and noble and tender that I can not realize him otherwise. But it must have been that jealousy drove him mad,” she sighed; and into her young heart came the most intense pity for Camille, whom he had put away so cruelly out of his heart and life. “And she lived under that heavy cross for years. How did she bear it? If it had been me, I should have died, I think, in the very hour of our parting,” sighed Thea, who fancied that any great grief had power to kill. She did not tell her husband that his mother had carried flowers to his wife’s grave, but she never forgot it. It kept Camille’s memory alive in her thoughts; it invested it with a certain tender and sacred air. She grew to look at the subject as her mother-in-law had represented it to her, deeming Camille little less than a martyr. They went home the next day, and Thea was so weary from her long journey that she was ill for several days. The old doctor shook his wise head, and declared that she must be kept very quiet this fall--she would not be able to bear any great bustle or excitement. So several months passed away quietly but happily at Verelands. Norman was utterly devoted to his young wife--utterly happy in her love, that was so true and steadfast, not stormy and capricious as Camille’s had been. He felt that he had never known happiness before in its truest sense. One of the things that consoled Thea most when she returned home was to hear that Cameron Bentley had engaged himself to Miss Faris, the New York beauty. She did not know that it had been done through pique, not love, to make the world think he had got over the past. When Nellie, who had been faithful to Thea through everything, came to see her, she told her that Cameron was spending the winter in New York to be near his lady-love. “He is quite ashamed now of his attempt at suicide, and will stay away from Jacksonville until people begin to forget it,” his sister said, frankly. But when Diana came she was more reserved, and did not mention her brother. She held a secret resentment against Thea, not only because, as she phrased it, she had “made a fool of Cam,” but because she had married Norman de Vere, the man on whom she had set her heart.