th and thrown into a convent, where
the only news that she heard of him was, that he had been killed in a
duel with her ruthless father. She had mourned for him in secret, without
hope and without sympathy, and before the first year of her widowhood had
passed--a widowhood she had been sternly forbidden by her father either
to bewail or even to acknowledge--she had been driven by a series of
unprecedented persecutions to give her hand where she could not give her
broken heart, and to go to the altar with a deadly secret on her
conscience, if not with a lie on her lips!

Now her persecutions had ceased, indeed; but not her sorrows. Her home
was quiet and honored, her middle-aged husband was kind and considerate,
and she loved him with filial affection and reverence; but she could not
forget the husband of her youth, slain by her father; his memory was a
tender sorrow cherished in the depths of her heart, the only living
sentiment there, for it seemed dead to all else.

"If he were a living lover," she whispered to herself, "I should be bound
by every consideration of honor and duty to cast him out of my heart--if
I could! But for my dead boy, my husband, slain in the flower of his
youth for my sake, I may cherish remembrance and sorrow."

Thus, it is no wonder that she moved through the splendor of her first
London season, a beautiful, pale, grave Melpomene.

But the splendor of that season was soon to be dimmed.

News came by telegraph to the Duke of Hereward, announcing the sudden
death of the Baron de la Motte, of apoplexy, in Paris.

Now much has been said and written about the ingratitude of children; but
quite as much might be said of their indestructible affection. The Baron
de la Motte had shown himself a very cruel father to his only child; he
had shot down her young husband in a duel; yet, notwithstanding all that,
Valerie was wild with grief at the news of his sudden death. She
wondered, poor child, if she herself had not had some hand in bringing
it on by all the trouble she had given him, although that trouble had
passed away now more than twelve months since; and the late baron was
known to have been a man of full habit and excitable temperament, and,
withal, a heavy feeder and hard drinker--a very fit subject for apoplexy
to strike down at any moment.

The Duke and Duchess of Hereward hastened to Paris, where they found the
remains of the baron laid in state in the great saloon of the Hotel de la
Mo