He advanced toward her so fiercely that she shrank back, crying out in terror: "John! John! don't hurt me!" "Why not?" he asked, savagely. "Why not? Do you know what you have done for me? You have dragged down the woman I have loved and honored as my wife--down, down to within one step of being a procu----!" Her sharp scream of shame and terror cut across the hideous word. "No, I won't hurt you; but oh, God! oh, God! to wake and find the wife you have pillowed on your breast for twenty years is, after all, a stranger to you! That hurts!--yes, that hurts!" He passed his hand across his eyes, then he said, sternly: "Never bring that man into Dorothy's presence again--I forbid it! Yes, I told you you would make yourself ill!" But as she lapsed into a faint she was dimly conscious that John was leaving the room. She had gone too far--her slave had rebelled for once. He who always had waited upon her himself in her previous attacks, now called on Lena to attend her and get her to bed, while he went to Dorothy's room and kissed and blessed her and made her very soul sing for joy, because he praised her beloved. And in the silence, when his cheek rested on her piled-up sunny hair, she did not know of the bitter tears creeping down his face--tears of disapppointment and sorrow, because he had that day learned that the wife he believed to be but frivolous was in truth a personified selfishness. CHAPTER XX A PROFESSIONAL LESSON Sybil, hurried by a message from Leslie Galt, had come flying back from the city to the aid of her injured sister; and, as she dropped upon her knees beside the bed, she cried, breathlessly: "Oh, Dorrie! what an unfortunate, lucky, lucky girl you are!"--a bull that scattered threatening tears and set them both laughing.