Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/139

 sister there was always a gift or a word for her playmate, Therese. She had met him at last, for convent grates and watchful nuns cannot baffle lovers' wits, and he had told her that he loved her, and that when she left the convent she should be his wife. Then there came a happy time of blissful, golden cloud-building, in which all the glorious world seemed to the lovers to be made but for their pleasure and their love. All too short this happy time,—soon to give place to dread reality. A letter from her lover told her that she must think of him no more, that he could never see her again. Soon after this came the news of her father's death and instructions calling her to the home which she had never known as hers. The mystery which had hung about her all her life, and which Fernand Thoron had unravelled, was then explained. She was no child of princely blood, no heir to a disputed title; nothing but the bastard daughter of an American planter and of a human chattel whom he had called his slave. Chance or a remorseless fate threw her again in the way of Fernand Thoron; and in that second meeting the love which had been strong and pure enough to nerve the man into fleeing from the maiden who could never be his wife had grown weak and earthly, and they had yielded to its bliss and to its sin. While