CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.

The day came when Rosalind Whitney realized that she must come to the parting of the ways.

Laurie Willoughby, the husband of another, grew every day more fatally dear to her heart.

She could not blot from her mind the memory of the hour when he had placed on her finger the beautiful ring that had so nearly cost her her life.

If she had not known that Laurie could never love any one but Lelia all his life, she would have believed that his looks and words and touch meant the sweet, new dawn of love.

What brief, happy moments she had spent under the spell of the ring before Lelia’s murderous onslaught had laid her low!

And when she recovered in the gipsies’ tent from her long unconsciousness, a sudden hope was born in her mind.

As remembrance slowly came back she recalled with joy that Lelia had told her that her engagement was broken.

“What if--what if? Oh, that warm, close pressure of his hand, that glance of penetrating sweetness, those murmured tones, the gift of the ring--might they not mean more than Lelia guessed, the rebound of a heart?”

That night when Laurie was married and Miss Willoughby died, she had stolen from the gipsy tent and dragged herself painfully up to The Crags, with a fell purpose in her mind.

She would denounce Lelia for her crime, she would turn her lover’s heart away, she would win him for herself, her life would be hereafter a dream of love and happiness.

But we have seen that as she gazed with eager eyes into the window, she became a witness of the wedding, and realized that the man she loved was lost to her forever.

With a moan of despair she sank back from their startled sight, and managed to hide until the hue and cry was over.

Then she hastened back to the gipsies, half-determined to cast her lot with them forever.

Again on her way she encountered Laurie Willoughby, and shrank from his sight, wondering why he was going away from his bride in the first hours of their happiness.

She knew not that death had cast its shadow over their bridal, or that the dear old lady she loved so well was no more.

Oh, the wretched night hours, how slowly they crept, filled with jealous, maddening pain. He whom she loved and had dreamed of winning was plighted to another!

And when morning dawned another thorn was pressed into her heart.

She heard the gipsies telling that Miss Willoughby was dead, and that the grand estate would pass to one they hated for her father’s sake--Lelia, the beautiful, blue-eyed bride.

“We had as well get ready to move on, she will give us orders as soon as the will is read,” they said bitterly.

But the gipsy queen shook the gray head that had been black as the raven’s wing in Colonel Ritchie’s time.

“I am not going to move on!” she averred stoutly, and added:

“Magdala’s curse did not allow Colonel Ritchie’s daughter to inherit The Crags. Woe be unto her for her father’s sin!”

And she turned aside with a mocking laugh of sure triumph, for Magdala’s husband had lain ill of a fever when they were driven from the land, and by reason of the removal he had died.

Magdala could neither forget nor forgive. She rejoiced when she heard that the harsh soldier had fallen at the hands of hostile Indians, and she bided her time for the hour of Lelia’s calamity.

When she heard who had been named as the heiress, she laughed in incredulous joy.

“The curse worked, it worked--only in one instance did it fail! And time may remedy that!”

No one knew what she meant, but the truth was that Magdala had been bitterly chagrined over Laurie’s marriage to Lelia.

The infant had been left in the woods to further Magdala’s scheme of revenge.

She knew from the gossip of the servants at The Crags that the family had planned a match between Laurie and Lelia, expecting them to be endowed with the Willoughby fortune.

In a spirit of bitter spite, to punish Colonel Ritchie’s brutality, she had left the infant Rosalind, hoping that Miss Willoughby might adopt it and give it her fortune. If it grew up as beautiful and charming as the mother and grandmother, she did not doubt but that it would supplant Lelia in Laurie’s heart.

Magdala thought that the curse had worked out almost all she had wished; she did not realize that Lelia’s inherited ill temper had wrought out all her personal ill.