"Don't be so angry with me," prayed Mell, "please don't! You don't know how much I have suffered over it. I say, at that time I thought I cared for some one else, and so I ought not, in all fairness, to have encouraged you; but, it is only since father died, that I have been able to see things in their true light. I have had a false standard of character, a false measure of worth, a false conception of human aims and human achievement. Out of the wretchedness of sleepless hours I have heard the under-tones of truth: Knowledge is great, but how much greater is goodness without knowledge than knowledge without goodness!" Rube made no reply. He left her side, and, crossing the room, folded his arms and looked moodily out of the window. He was very simple in nature, somewhat slow, sometimes stupid; but loyal and true--true in great things, and no less true in small ones, and as open as the day. Mell dried her eyes, and glanced at him anxiously. The worst part of her duty was now over. She began already to feel relieved; she began already to know just how she was going to feel in a few minutes more, the possessor of a conscience, void of offence before God and man. There's nothing like it--a good conscience. "This beats all!" soliloquized Rube, at the window; "I'll be hanged if there's enough solid space in a woman's mind to peg a man's hat on! Now, just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough, here's a tombstone in my own graveyard!" "Ha!" thought Mell, hearing, considering. "_Just as things have panned out all right for Devonhough._" What did that mean? Her throbbing, panting, bursting heart knew only too well. Clara had come to a decision--she would marry Jerome, and not the Honorable Archibald. Rube had scarcely ceased to speak when Mell raised her head. "Rube!" Very soft that call! Unheeding, Rube still looked out of the window and into the past. That day at the picnic--that beautiful day, that day of days; a pure, white, luminous spot in memory's galaxy of fair and heavenly things--that day she had not felt as she had made him think she felt; hence, he had been a cat's-paw, a puppet; and she--oh, it could not be that Mell was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a serpent! "Rube!" A little louder was this call. He turned, he obeyed--no more able to resist the beckoning hand, the dulcet voice, the luring glance, than you or I the spells of our own individual Sirens and Circes. He came back to her, but stood in gloomy waiting, his brow so dark, his expression so hard and cold and stern, that the girl on the sofa felt herself wilting and withering before him, as a frail flower in a deadly blast. She did not say a word. She only used two eyes of blue, and two big tears which rolled out of them, and down upon her velvet cheek, and splash upon her little white hand, with crushing effect--not upon the hand, but the beholder.