more, follow the step you would inconsiderately take, an imprudent
marriage."

"Audley Egerton," said Beatrice, lifting her dark, moistened eyes, "you
grant that real love does compensate for an imprudent marriage. You
speak as if you had known such love--you! Can it be possible?"

"Real love--I thought that I knew it once. Looking back with remorse, I
should doubt it now but for one curse that only real love, when lost, has
the power to leave evermore behind it."

"What is that?"

"A void here," answered Egerton, striking his heart. "Desolation!--
Adieu!"

He rose and left the room.

"Is it," murmured Egerton, as he pursued his way through the streets--"is
it that, as we approach death, all the first fair feelings of young life
come back to us mysteriously? Thus I have heard, or read, that in some
country of old, children scattering flowers preceded a funeral bier."




CHAPTER XV.

And so Leonard stood beside his friend's mortal clay, and watched, in the
ineffable smile of death, the last gleam which the soul had left there;