“Yes, I am very grateful for it. Now I can seek constant diversion to drown memory,” she answered, with a long-drawn sigh that showed him she would not forget so easily as he had hoped. It did not occur to her to ask the name of the relative who had left her so handsome a legacy, or to notice that her father had not spoken of any one’s death. In her eagerness she accepted her good fortune without curiosity, and clasping her little hands in growing excitement, cried: “Papa, I have always wished to cross the sea. Will you take me?” “Yes, Cinthia; but should you not see something of your own land first?” “That can wait, papa. My first wish is to put the whole breadth of the world between me and Arthur Varian.” “Perhaps that will be best,” he assented; for her words touched an aching chord in his own heart. Who could know better the aching pangs of love and loss than Everard Dawn, who had tasted both to the bitter dregs? And how could he blame any one for the mad instinct of flight from memory when he had been a restless exile weary years for no better reason? “And I have wandered far away to quell my spirit’s wild unrest, From place to place a lonely one, And rocked on ocean’s heaving breast. “But in the sound of winds and waves For evermore I heard thy tone, Gazed down the mountain’s verdant slope, And thought of thee, and thee alone. “The eyes whose sparkling light I loved Shone on me from the midnight stars, The crimson of the lips once kissed Glowed in the sunset’s rosy bars.” The curtain fell to the crash of orchestra music and the crowded building began to be emptied and the lights turned low. Both rose, and Cinthia’s father said, abruptly: “Shall we return to the hotel? Or would you like to go on to New York to-night to get ready for sailing on the first steamer?” “We will go to New York to-night, but first let me go and say farewell to my dear friend Madame Ray,” she said, hurrying to the greenroom. Everard Dawn went out and sent a note to Mrs. Varian, while he waited for his daughter. It ran simply: “I found Cinthia at the theater, and we go on at once to New York, to sail this week for Europe, by her earnestly expressed wish. In change of scene and the rush of excitement she will seek oblivion of this painful episode in her life. “E. D.” Presently Cinthia came to him from Madame Ray’s dressing-room, where she had spent a long half hour, and her father saw that the dew of tears hung heavily on the thick fringe of her dark lashes. Wondering greatly at this mysterious friendship, he drew her hand through his arm and led her away to the new life that lay before her in the untried future. CHAPTER XXI. A QUARREL WITH FATE. Mrs. Flint would have been very lonely after her brother’s departure, but for the fact that she had her hands and her mind both full with helping the nurse to care for the poor wayfarer so strangely thrown on her hands.