“Dead! dead!  Oh, Philip!  Oh, my father! my father!” And the poor girl threw herself, with passionate sobbings, among the cushions of the sofa.

This was a revelation.  Here, in Pauline Alexes, the girl he had fondly loved for nearly three years, Philip found the long-sought heiress of Kurston Chace!

Bitter, indeed, was her grief when she learned how sorrowfully her father had sought her; but she was scarcely to be blamed for not knowing of, and responding to, his late repentance of the life-long wrong he had done her.  For Philip’s sister moved far outside the narrow and supreme circle of the Kurstons.

She had hidden her identity in her mother’s maiden name—­the only thing she knew of her mother.  She had never seen her father since her flight from her home but in public, accompanied by his wife; she had no reason to suppose the influence of that wife any weaker; she had been made, by cruel innuendoes, to doubt both the right and the inclination of her father to protect her.

It now became Philip’s duty to acquaint the second Mrs. Kurston with her true position, and to take the necessary steps to reinstate Athel Kurston in her rights.

Of course, he had to bear many unkind suspicions—­even his friends believed him to have been cognizant all the time of the identity of Pauline Alexes with Athel Kurston—­and he was complimented on his cleverness in securing the property, with the daughter, instead of the widow, for an incumbrance.  But those may laugh who win, and these things scarcely touched the happiness of Philip and Athel.

As for Mrs. Kurston she made a still more brilliant marriage, and gave up the Kurston estate with an ostentatious indifference.  “She was glad to get rid of it; it had brought her nothing but sorrow and disappointment,” etc.

But from the heights of her social autocracy, clothed in Worth’s greatest inspirations, wearing priceless lace and jewels, dwelling in unrivalled splendor, she looked with regret on the man whom she had rejected for his poverty.

She saw him grow to be the pride of his State and the honor of his country.  Loveless and childless, she saw his boys and girls cling to the woman she hated as their “mother,” and knew that they filled with light and love the grand old home for which she had first of all sacrificed her affection and her womanhood.

“ONLY THIS ONCE.”

Over the solemn mountains and the misty moorlands the chill spring night was falling.  David Scott, master shepherd for MacAllister, of Allister, thought of his ewes and lambs, pulled his Scotch bonnet over his brows, and taking his staff in his hand, turned his face to the hills.

David Scott was a mystic in his own way; the mountains were to him “temples not made with hands,” and in them he had seen and heard wonderful things.  Years of silent communion with nature had made him love her in all her moods, and he passionately believed in God.