“Darling, you never had but one rival. She was the little working girl of whom I spoke. I first saw her on the eve of my departure for Europe, more than two years ago, and as time wore on the strange interest she had awakened in me by her beauty and sweetness kept growing so that in a few months I returned to New York to search for her, with some half-defined intentions of putting aside my pride of class, and educating and marrying her if she proved worthy. But the affair went no further; I did not find her. She had married a man by the name of Loring--by the way, I never knew her name--and gone away.” CHAPTER XXI. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. Fair hid her sweet face against her lover’s shoulder, that he might not see and wonder at the mingled joy and sorrow in her expressive eyes--joy that he had loved her, sorrow that through her haste in wedding a miserable impostor she had missed the opportunity of her life. “Oh, if only I had been true to myself, if I had sent that wretch away and waited, I might have been the happiest of the happy now,” she thought, forgetting, in her keen self-reproach, that her mother had been even more to blame than herself, and that the misguided woman would not have permitted her to throw away what she deemed a golden opportunity. For a moment, in the sudden courage imparted to her by Bayard Lorraine’s frank confession of the interest he had taken in the poor little working girl, she was half tempted to throw off her mask and confess all. It were better for her had she done so, but she hesitated, faltered, and lost that golden opportunity for winning his pity and forgiveness. “I will tell him to-morrow. In this happy hour I cannot do it,” she decided, for she could not bear to throw a shadow on his happy, loving mood. For as yet Bayard Lorraine did not even know that she was the adopted child of Mrs. Howard. Although the Howards and Lorraines were distantly related, there had been no intimacy between them. Bayard had been abroad when Azalia Howard died, and no murmur of her death had reached him. He did not remember ever having seen his young relative, or hearing her name, until he met her with her mother abroad. But Fair knew quite well that when Bayard Lorraine came to ask her hand from her adopted mother, Mrs. Howard would tell him the truth. She was a noble, conscientious woman. She would not deceive Fair’s suitor, but would say frankly: