Pretty Geraldine, the New York Salesgirl; or, Wedded to Her Choice

"And you will be my wife, dear,
So may you ever bless
Through all your sunny life, dear,
The day you answered yes."

Cissy paused for breath, and her lover looked at her adoringly.

Never had she looked so beautiful, never had she seemed so truly noble as at this moment when so generously pleading the cause of the woman who had brought such bitter sorrow into her life.

He forgot for a moment the tall, fair, beautiful woman who hung breathlessly on his fiat of fate, and exclaimed, rapturously:

"Cissy, you are an angel!"

"Yes, she is an angel!" cried the governess, eagerly. "She is an angel, and she will forgive you all your faults and make you happy yet—so happy that you might afford to spare the poor wretch whose sins have all recoiled upon her own head with crushing weight!"

"Spare her!" pleaded Cissy, with humid eyes.

He looked back at her tenderly, and answered:

"For your sake!"

With a sob of joy, the governess fled from the room.

And with her going the last shadow that her wicked influence had cast upon their lives faded into the past.

He moved closer to Cissy, catching both her trembling hands in his, and looking deep into her tearful eyes, saying, tremulously:

"My darling, the events of to-day have thrown down the last barriers of restraint between us, and we are back again where we left off that bitter day when you cast me off for the sake of the woman who declared she had a better claim to me. Cannot we go back to that past?"

Her face was downcast, her eyes drooped from his, she trembled, and did not speak.

But he was not repulsed, for she let him keep the little trembling hands in his, and he was thus encouraged to go on in a low voice, hoarse from passionate love:

"Cissy, I love you more devotedly than ever, and I should have sought you long ago but that I feared a repulse. I knew so well your willful pride, you see. But now fate has thrown us together again, and it will break my heart to lose this new sweet hope. Darling, will you forgive the past, and let the future make amends?"

Cissy had not thought last night that she would be won so quickly as this. She had resolved in her heart to be quite cold at first, and make her lover's second wooing very difficult.

But as Cameron said, the events of the day had made reserve impossible. They had come face to face with the past in all its love and pain.

So she could not steel her responsive heart to her lover's impetuous wooing. With a great burst of tears that revealed all her heart, she threw herself into his eager arms that clasped and held her with boundless delight.

And the woman whom Cissy had saved from exposure by her generous prayer for mercy, crept away to her room, muttering, in a fearful way:

"How strangely fate pursues me in this house! I thought I was done with my bitter past, but three of its ghosts have risen here to confront me with my sins! What a terrible blunder I made going into that room! But I did not dream of meeting my divorced husband there! Still, I might have guessed he would follow that girl, the one love of his life. She is indeed an angel, but alas! she would not intercede for me if she knew the thing I had done last night!"

CHAPTER LIII.

"I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HER!"

"Oh, loved one! where art thou?

Doubt whispers in my ear
Many and many a fear,
And tells me thou art gay while I despair,
Yet be the bright hours thine,
If only thou art mine,
I all the dark ones am content to bear."

The strange disappearance of her daughter had come to Mrs. Fitzgerald with the suddenness of a thunderbolt.

To lose her like this—the child she had loved so dearly and mourned so unceasingly—over whom she had rejoiced with such yearning love when found; oh! it was inexpressibly bitter!

In the six weeks that Geraldine had been with her the glad mother had lavished on her daughter everything that could make a young girl happy, withholding nothing except her approval of her love for Harry Hawthorne. Wealth had been poured out with an unstinting hand, to surround her and clothe her with beautiful things; she had been praised, petted, and loved by the whole household, and the two children, her half-brother and sister, had vied with each other in lovely attentions to their new-found sister.

Nothing had been lacking to make Geraldine happy—nothing except the love she had been forbidden to cherish.

Alas! this love had ranked above everything else in her tender heart.

"The world is naught when one is gone
Who was the world? then the heart breaks
That this is lost which was once won."

The mother's heart was cruelly wounded by the desertion of her daughter.

"I will never forgive her!" she cried in the first agony of the shock. "She has proved herself the child of her wicked father by this heartless desertion of home and friends, and I can realize how little of my blood runs in the veins of the daughter I bore him."

In vain did Cissy intercede for her friend.

"Remember how young and loving she was, dear Mrs. Fitzgerald. Then, too, her lover was very charming—just the sort of a man to fascinate a young girl."

"He may have been as handsome as Apollo, and as fascinating, but he was not a good man, or he would never have persuaded a young girl to elope with him. Why did he not come frankly to me like a gentleman, and ask for my daughter's hand?"

"Dear Mrs. Fitzgerald, because he knew it would be hopeless. Of course our dear Geraldine must have acquainted him with your opposition to the marriage," said Cissy, gently, though in her heart she thought very strangely of Geraldine, asking herself over and over why the girl had chosen to deceive her so in asserting that she knew nothing of Hawthorne's whereabouts.

"She must have been in secret correspondence with him all the while, but I could not have believed it of Geraldine but for that note in her own writing," she said, sadly enough to the angry mother.

At first, Mrs. Fitzgerald had feared that Cissy was in the plot of Geraldine's elopement, but the young girl's surprise and grief were so genuine that she dismissed the doubt. "She has treated you shamefully, too, my dear," said the lady. "After inviting you here as a guest, and promising you such a charming time, it was abominable to go off that way and leave you in the lurch."

"Do not worry about me. My only concern is for you in your trouble. Geraldine acted willfully, I know, but there is one comfort. The man she has married is good and true, and cannot fail to make her happy."

"Ah, but, my dear girl, only think of what she has thrown away. Why, Geraldine was betrothed to a nobleman from her childhood, the owner of a vast estate in England."

"Perhaps that was why she ran away for fear of being forced into an unloving marriage, madame."

"Oh, no, that would never have happened, of course. I would not have wished her to marry unwillingly, nor would noble Lord Putnam have accepted an unloving bride. Perhaps, after all, he will wait for my Claire. She will be grown up in a few years, and bids fair to be as lovely as Geraldine," returned the lady, comforting herself with hopes of the future.

At that moment a servant entered the boudoir to announce the arrival of Cameron Clemens.

Cissy looked up with heightened color, saying: