Her last words had been followed by a thrilling silence which the other felt herself powerless to break. It was Christine who spoke. "I promised your son that I would tell you the history of my life," she said. "I can give it to you very briefly. I was as innocent and unknowing as a little child when I was taken from the convent where I was educated, and married by my father to a man I scarcely knew. I suppose I was a burden to my father and he wanted to get rid of me. He told me that the whole of my mother's little fortune had been spent on my education, and that he had no home to take me to, and that I must marry. The young man he chose for me was good-looking and kind, though he did not speak my language, and I knew almost nothing of his. My father did everything. He assured me this man adored me and would do everything to make me happy--would always take care of me and give me a beautiful home in his land beyond the sea. I was ignorant of marriage as a baby. It was easy to get up a girlish fancy for the young man thus presented to my childish imagination, and I consented willingly. I had a lot of charming clothes ordered for my trousseau, and I was as delighted as a child. In this way I was married--" "Ah, you were really married!" interrupted her companion, the cloud on her face beginning to clear away. Christine saw it with a tinge of bitterness in her gentle heart. "No," she said, almost coldly, "I was not really married. I thought so, and for three years I struggled through pain and woe and horror to do my duty to the man to whom I believed myself bound by the holy and indissoluble tie of marriage. I was ignorant, but somehow I had imbibed from every source ever opened to me a deep sense of the sacredness and eternity of that bond. So I fought and struggled on, feeling that truth to that obligation was my one anchor in a sea of trouble. I thought when I came here I could tell you some of the things I felt and endured, but I cannot. There would be no use. The bare fact is enough for a woman's heart. When my child came I fixed my whole soul's devotion on him. He was always delicate and feeble, but I loved him as, perhaps, a strong and healthy child could not have been loved. His father never noticed him at all, except to show that he thought him a burden. That was the final touch of complete alienation. Love--or what I had once called by that name--was gone long ago. We had become extremely poor--every cent of the principal had been spent in the most reckless way--oh, I can't tell you all that. Your son will tell you if you ask him. I think a sort of mental lack was at the back of it. I must hurry; I can't bear to go over it all now. I met your son on the steamer coming over, and he was kind to me then, suspecting, perhaps, how things were tending. Long after I met him again, accidentally, and he found out how wretched and poor I was, with my baby ill, and in need almost of the necessaries of life.