"I thought you parted by mutual consent?" "How horrid you are, Mr. Webster! At all events I mean to get quit of him. I am weary of a tie which is no tie; of a bond which galls me, and I would do anything, even something desperate, to break it." She started to her feet, and began walking up and down the room as she spoke, swaying her tall, fine figure with a restless movement as she did so. She was looking very handsome, her excitement had flushed her face and brightened her bright eyes, and involuntarily Webster admired her. "There!" she said, presently, "now I have told you my news, so please rouse your sharp legal brains to help me. I don't mind about the three hundred a year now, or the ultimate reversion of some bigger sum. I want to be free. I don't want John Temple to cut his own throat or mine--and upon my word he looked as if he could do it--but I want to scrape out of my marriage some other way." "Well, let me have time to think it over." "Thanks, and now let us drop a disagreeable subject, and tell me what you have been doing with yourself all this long time? You look thinner, and you say you have been worried?" "Yes; we all have worries and troubles, you know, Miss Weir." "That is true; but still I think life might be bright, might be sweet and worth living for." "I am sure yours is." "Oh! don't pay me those commonplace compliments; I don't want to hear them from you." "You despise my best efforts to be agreeable." "What a disagreeable humor you are in! I declare I think I shall send you away." "Well, must I go?" said Webster, rising with a smile. "Not yet; unless you will promise to come again very soon. Come to supper to meet Linda Falconer and Dereham the day after to-morrow." "I will see if I can, if you will allow the invitation to remain open. By the by, how is that affair progressing?" "Oh, swimmingly, I believe, but Linda is fearfully bored with him. 'My dear,' she said to me the other day, 'he is too silly.'" "Poor boy!" "Poor boy, indeed! However, that is settled, and you will come the day after to-morrow to supper? In the meantime, you know, don't forget my ghost and his probable misdoings." "Very well," said Webster with a laugh. Then he took leave of the actress, and Kathleen Weir was alone. As she had done once before after he had left her, she immediately went up to one of the mirrors in the room and gazed at her own reflection in the glass. "Am I so weak?" she thought. "Do I actually like this man, perhaps better than he likes me? But if I were free I think he would like me--I must be free!" CHAPTER XXXVI. BY THE SEA. The next day Ralph Webster went to see a very different woman to the sprightly actress. He went to see pale, sad-faced May Churchill, propped up in an easy chair, with the unmistakable attitudes of weakness and languor in every movement.