“I hope this sedative will quiet my nerves, for my dear friend Ada will arrive this evening, and I want to feel well enough to enjoy her company! Only think, what a lovely winter we shall have with dear Ada for a guest! She is very beautiful, you know, auntie, and--perhaps--she may console Reggie for losing me.” But Mrs. Hamilton frowned slightly, and answered: “I should not fancy such a match. I wanted him to marry you, my dear little niece, and no other.” “I told you, auntie, I had refused his offer,” protested Eva. “You were hasty, my dear. Perhaps you may come to reconsider the case.” “But I told you, also, that I loved another.” Mrs. Hamilton wondered suddenly if that “other” could be the handsome Doctor Ludington, and she quickly decided that this was the case. It explained things that were otherwise inexplicable. But aloud she said, in her calm, gentle way: “But you told me your love was hopeless, Eva!” “Yes, quite hopeless!” sighed the girl, stifling a sob that seemed to rend her very heart in twain. “Then you will have to put that love away from you, and try to forget. The easiest way to do it would be to become interested in another and marry him. A happy marriage is, to my mind, the only remedy for your pain.” Her father had used the same words to her, and they recurred to her again. Was it true? Would a marriage with Reggie, who adored her, teach her to forget? CHAPTER XXX. LOVE AND PRIDE. It was useless trying to disguise the truth from her own heart. Miss Winton’s eagerly anticipated visit, instead of adding to Eva’s happiness, only made her more miserable. It brought back too clearly the dead past--the long weeks and months of wretchedness side by side with the days and hours of ecstatic joy when she had been Rupert’s plighted bride! They could but talk of old days to each other. Eva was fain to ask questions--Ada glad to answer. She must know how all her old friends were faring, she had such a kindly interest in them all. She learned that the clever, genial young Doctor Merry had formed a very romantic attachment for a beautiful schoolgirl whom he was to marry when she completed her education. Ada told her that the kindly, earnest Doctor Bertrand still pursued the even tenor of her way, and that the superintendent had resigned his position and sought a more congenial field of usefulness. As the doctor’s agency in ferreting out Doctor Rupert’s secret, and preventing his marriage, had long since leaked out, he was despised and execrated by many who had formerly respected him, and few missed him from the position he had disgraced. He was supplanted by a less impressionable superintendent, in whose eyes womanhood stood on a higher plane of purity and goodness. Ada had one little item of personal news. Aunt Susan had left her a small estate that would keep her in comfort, and she need not work at the insane asylum any more.