May 30, 1863.]
ONCE A WEEK.
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ELEANOR’S VICTORY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “AURORA FLOYD,” “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” &c.
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CHAPTER XXIII. RESOLVED.
Launcelot Darrell had not sailed for Calcutta in the Princess Alice. This point once established, it was utterly vain for Richard Thornton to argue against that sudden conviction, that indomitable belief which had taken possession of Eleanor Vane’s mind, respecting the identity between the man who had won her father’s money at écarté, and Mrs. Darrell’s only son.
“I tell you, Richard,” she said, when the scene-painter argued with her, “that nothing but proof positive of Launcelot Darrell’s absence in India at the date of my father’s death would have dispossessed me of the idea that flashed upon me on the day I left Berkshire. He was not in India at that time. He deceived his mother and his friends. He remained in Europe; and led, no doubt, an idle, dissipated life. He must have lived by his wits, for he had no money from his mother; no one to help him—no profession to support him. What is more likely than that he went to Paris,—the paradise of scoundrels, I have heard you say, Richard,—under an assumed name? What more likely? Why, he was there! The man I saw on the Boulevard, and the man I saw in the Windsor Street, are one and the same. You cannot argue me out of that settled idea, Richard Thornton, for it is the truth. It is the truth,