"You offer me a brilliant lot," she said--"to live in a garret, I suppose, and darn your stockings, while you earn a paltry pittance as a literary man, eked out by aunt Leo's charity! You know very well that sooner than do that I put up for two years with Marion Vane's patronage and the drudgery of the schoolroom! And now, when the woman who alternately scolded and cajoled me, the woman who once took it upon her to lecture me for my behavior to her husband, the woman whom I hated as I should hate a poisonous snake--when that woman is slowly dying and leaving the field to me, am I to throw up the game, give up my chances, and go to vegetate with you in London? You know me very little if you think I would do that." "I seem to have known you very little all my life," said Hubert bitterly. "I certainly do not understand you now. What can you get by staying here?" "Oh, nothing, of course!" she answered tranquilly. "What is your scheme, Florence?" "It is of no use telling you--you might interfere again." The anguish of doubt and anxiety in his dark eyes, if she had looked at him, would surely have moved her. But she did not look. "I mean to stay here," she said quietly, "teaching Enid Vane, putting up with aunt Leonora's impertinences as well as I can, until I get another chance in the world. What that chance may be of course I cannot tell, but I am certain that it will come." "You can bear to stay in this house which I--I--infinitely less blameworthy than yourself--can hardly endure to enter?" "The world would not call you less blameworthy. I am glad that you are so far on good terms with your conscience." "Florence," he said, almost threateningly, "take care! I will not spare you another time. If I find you involved in any other transaction of which you ought to be ashamed, I will expose you. I will tell the world the truth--that you were on the point of leaving England with Sydney Vane when I--when I----" "When you shot him," she said, without a trace of emotion manifest in either face or voice, "and let Andrew Westwood bear the blame." The young man winced as if he had received a blow. "It was to shield you that I kept silence," he said, passionate agitation showing itself in his manner. "It was to save your good name. But even for your sake I would not have let the man suffer death. If we had obtained no reprieve for him, I swear that I would have given myself up and borne the punishment!" "You were at work then? You tried to get the reprieve for him?" said his sister, with the faintest possible touch of eagerness.