Laurie begged Mrs. Ritchie to forbid her daughter writing him ever again. His love could never be resurrected from the gulf where it lay buried. Silence was all he claimed from her who had made such cruel shipwreck of his life. Her pride was outraged, she sank deep in the valley of humiliation again. “I will punish him! I will get a divorce!” she cried hotly to her mother. “Then he will marry Rosalind Whitney, and you will go mad with jealousy.” “Rosalind is to marry young Lord Warrington, with whose mother she is spending the season in London. I have seen it announced in all the papers. Her head is quite turned by the admiration she has received over there, and she will never stoop to Laurie now.” “They will be sure to marry if he ever gets free of you,” her mother insisted. It was just then that the manager came to see her about advertising her sensational play. He must have her portrait for the newspapers and a spicy biographical sketch of the subject. “You may write it yourself, if you choose, and color it as highly as you wish. Your beauty will almost carry the day, but if you can work in some sensation, all the better.” He paused, and added, with transient embarrassment: “The world has some tales of a runaway husband. Would you like to work that sensation for all it is worth?” “I have just decided to divorce my husband,” Lelia replied coolly. “Excellent! The success of your play is assured. Your beauty and the romance of your life will interest the public immediately, and curiosity will do the rest. ‘Magdala’ will draw full houses,” cried the manager, little dreaming that the beautiful author had dipped her pen in her own heart’s blood to write the play. For it was not wholly a work of imagination; rather a combination of fact and fancy, and “Magdala, the gipsy queen,” played a prominent part in it. It brought great success to the author, but the old general, her close relative, was horrified when he saw her portrait in the papers, and learned that the courts had granted her a divorce from his son. “What a horrible disgrace to the proud name of Willoughby! Really, I can never countenance Lelia again!” he cried angrily. CHAPTER XLIII. THE AMERICAN BEAUTY. When Laurie read his father’s letter in Paris the blood forsook his cheek for a moment, and his heart throbbed with hot anger. “She has dragged my proud name through the mire of a divorce-court and the columns of yellow journals to advertise her clap-trap play! It is like her--vain, selfish, sensational to the core!” he thought, with irritation. But the next moment his blood leaped through his veins wildly, with a thrilling thought. “I am free!” Of her own will, Lelia had unlocked the fetters in which she had bound him, and they fell, clanking, to his feet. Free! Free!