"Last winter when I came to you," he blundered, and then the anger in her face gave him sudden cool courage, "I was not free to do so--so you thought, I thought otherwise; you will do me the honor to believe it," coldly; "for fear of some misadventure I told you--" "I have not forgotten," said Frances gently, as if to save him the pain of putting the thought into speech. "Now, now--I have not said it yet, scarcely told it myself!--do not let me frighten you--_I am free!_" The delicate flowers slipped from Frances' nerveless hands down to the ground and lay there in the path between them. "Frances, I am free. Do you know what it means? That woman who bore my name is dead;" if he never spoke her name in reverence before he did so now, "she is dead. Did you think I went away for pleasure, Christmas?" he hurried on, almost breathlessly. "She wrote to me. I had not heard from her for five years. My lawyer was told never to mention her name to me. But she wrote that very day, no, the next,"--he put his hand to his head confusedly, he could not tell her all the pain, the bitterness, he had felt,--"she wrote begging me to come. She was dying, she said. I went; I telegraphed my father to meet me there. She saw us both; she had not been so bad, perhaps, as we thought; it was the devil of show and selfishness and restlessness which possessed her, and I must have seemed to her at the first, long ago, to be a very fool, to be wheedled, to be--I don't think she ever dreamed it was in me to leave her. She had taken her divorce in half-angry, half-amused carelessness; so long as she got what she wanted, what did it matter, and that was wealth! I must tell you this, Frances, once for all, then it shall be dead between us, as she is. The doctor said she would live a week. I came back, knowing this. I saw you! You will never know how I was tempted, but there was a vileness I could not sink to! I could not build dreams of happiness upon the shortness of her life! "If I had not studied until there was no thought day by day, week by week--work! They think I love it. God! I have been buried, dead, have been buried, and now am alive!" He put his hand on hers, clenched before her. "You are thinking how unlike I am to anything you ever dreamed of me. I am! I do not know myself! Think if you can--five years of shame, and now freedom and the world--and _you_! You are not shocked, Frances, that I am glad?" There was no answer, except the breath of the wind over the fields, and the rustling in the wayside bushes about them. "Is it a dreadful thing to you that I should be glad?" he pleaded. "No! Oh no!" Her trembling lips scarcely framed the words. "Frances! Look at me!" he put his hand on her shoulder and felt the convulsive sob that shook her. "Sweetheart, my darling," he began, with broken words of love. "No, no," cried the girl wildly, "you must not speak such words to me! Wait! wait a moment."