“Aye!” savagely. “And love was not strong enough to cast out fear! She was justifiable if she hesitated to entrust herself and her happiness to the keeping of one she had known but two months. It was prudent--not false--in her to weigh, to the finest grain, the evidence furnished by her brother to prove my unfitness to be her husband. But having done all this, she should have remembered that I had rights also. It was infamous, cowardly, cruel beyond degree, to cast her vote against me without giving me a chance of self-exculpation. Her hand--not his--struck the dagger into my back!” Again Rosa's fingers involuntarily (?) stole into his, to recall him to a knowledge of where he was, and there were fresh tears, ready to fall from her gazelle eyes, when his agitation began to subside. “My poor child!” he said, penitently. “I am behaving like a madman, you like a pitying angel! We will have no more scenes, and you must oblige me by forgetting this one, as fast as may be. From to-night Mabel Aylett is to me as if she had never been. To nobody except yourself have I betrayed the secret of my hurt. After this, when you think of it, believe that it is a hurt no longer.” Rosa “had out” her fit of crying when he went away, betaking herself to her chamber and locking the door that her aunt might not surprise her while the traces of tears disfigured her cheeks. But she was anything but broken-hearted, and only slightly sore in spirit in the retrospect of what had ensued upon her communication to the discarded lover. He had, indeed, given more evidence of his unconquered passion for Mabel than she had expected. His undisguised pleasure in renewed companionship with herself; his excellent spirits during the greater part of the evening; his unembarrassed reply to her aunt's malapropos observation, and fluent chat upon other themes, had misled her into the hope that the ungenerous and uncivil conduct of the Ayletts had disgusted and alienated him from sister, no less than from brother. It was a disappointment to discover that it cost him a terrible effort to pronounce Mabel's name, while the abrupt intelligence of her marriage had distracted him to incoherent ravings, which had nearly amounted to curses upon the authors of his pain.