When Mr. and Mrs. King were in the carriage, he took her hand tenderly, and said, “My dear, that young man recalled to mind your infant son, who died with poor Tulee.”

With a heavy sigh she answered, “Yes, I am thinking of that poor little baby.”

He held her hand clasped in his; but deeming it most kind not to intrude into the sanctum of that sad and tender memory, he remained silent.  She spoke no other word as they rode toward their hotel.  She was seeing a vision of those two babes, lying side by side, on that dreadful night when her tortured soul was for a while filled with bitter hatred for the man she had loved so truly.

Mrs. Fitzgerald and her son were the earliest among the callers the next day.  Mrs. King happened to rest her hand lightly on the back of a chair, while she exchanged salutations with them, and her husband noticed that the lace of her hanging sleeve trembled violently.

“You took everybody by storm last evening, Mrs. King, just as you did when you first appeared as Norma,” said the loquacious Mrs. Fitzgerald.  “As for you, Mr. King, I don’t know but you would have received a hundred challenges, if gentlemen had known you were going to carry off the prize.  So sly of you, too!  For I always heard you were entirely indifferent to ladies.”

“Ah, well, the world don’t always know what it’s talking about,” rejoined Mr. King, smiling.  Further remarks were interrupted by the entrance of a young girl, whom he took by the hand, and introduced as “My daughter Eulalia.”

Nature is very capricious in the varieties she produces by mixing flowers with each other.  Sometimes the different tints of each are blended in a new color, compounded of both; sometimes the color of one is delicately shaded into the other; sometimes one color is marked in distinct stripes or rings upon the other; and sometimes the separate hues are mottled and clouded.  Nature had indulged in one of her freaks in the production of Eulalia, a maiden of fifteen summers, the only surviving child of Mr. and Mrs. King.  She inherited her mother’s tall, flexile form, and her long dark eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair; but she had her father’s large blue eyes, and his rose-and-white complexion.  The combination was peculiar, and very handsome; especially the serene eyes, which, looked out from their dark surroundings like clear blue water deeply shaded by shrubbery around its edges.  Her manners were a little shy, for her parents had wisely forborne an early introduction to society.  But she entered pleasantly enough into some small talk with Fitzgerald about the skating parties of the winter, and a new polka that he thought she would like to practise.