Guy Earlscourt's Wife — page 42: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

46 The Dawn of the Fourteenth of April. ing Duke to follow, and he found himself in a spacious and elegant ante-chamber, dimly hghted by two wax candles——an apartment more luxuricus and beautiful than any the scene- painter had ever beheld. “The Coral Caves of the Dismal Deep are very dazzling abodes, no doubt,” he thought, “but for permanence give me a big, black house in Park lane.” “Wait here,” the girl said, laeconically. A second after, lifting a heavy crimson curtain that draped an arch, she let it’ fall, and disappeared. Again the curtain was lifted by the servant, and this time Miss Olivia Lyndith herself appeared; Duke rose. She wore a flowing, white dressing-gown, her abundant hair hung loose over her shoulders, her large eyes looked bigger and blacker than ever in her small, pale face. - Again she took his hand in both her own, as on that memorable night, when they had parted, and looked at him with her dark, solemn eyes. “J knew you would come,” she said. “I knew I might trust you. I have sent for you on a matter of life and death to me. ‘T’o-morrow—nay, to-day—is my wedding day.”. “Oh, indeed!” Mr. Mason responded, feeling that politencss required him to say something, and wondering if young ladies generally regarded their wedding days as matters of life and death, and what she could possibly want of him in this state of affairs. “T am surrounded by enemies, who call themselves’ my friends, and in whose power I am. I am going to marry a man whom I neither love nor respect—a man whom I fear. For myself, it does not so much matter. I don’t care what becomes of me”’—there was a desperate recklessness in her tone and look that suited her words—“but there is one in this house whom I do love, whom I wish to save from the men who have made my life miserable. It 1s a child. To obtain possession of her, I have promised to marry the man of my guardian’s choice. This very day, immediately after the ceremony, I start for Italy, and she remains behind in the power of Geoffrey LUyndith. I cannot trust him—I will not trust him. Her life would be blighted, as her mother’s has been. She must be removed out of their knowledge and out of their power. That is why I have sent for you; I have not a friend T dare trust—they are all my unele’s friends, and her bith is a dead secret. Will you take her away with you to-night? Wit) vou keep her, and bring her up as your own #!—vou and your sister. You shail be well paid. and, if it is ever in my power, I will claim her. Don’t refuse; have pity on me, her most wretched mother: have pity on hers a — 500KS-COIn "A “a