"Mell, listen: Love is more than raiment, more than food, more than the world's censure or the world's praise. It is sweeter in life than life itself! But time presses; the other wedding comes on apace; we have no time to spare. An hour's hard driving will bring us to Parson Fordham's, well known to me. There we will be married at once, and catch the early train at Pudney. Our names will be an execration and a by-word for a little time, but what of that? What though all friends turn their backs upon us! Together we will enter hopefully upon a new life, loving God and each other--a life of truer things, Mell; a life consecrated to each other and glorified by perfect love and perfect trust. Will you lead that life with me?" "No, I will not!" "What, Mellville!" he cried. "You will not! I thought you loved me, loved me as I loved you?" "Once I loved you," she said. She spoke now as much to her own soul as to his perceptions. "Once--or was it only that I thought I did? For long weeks I struggled against deceiving Rube, and out of that I must have drifted by slow degrees into deceiving myself. For, to-night, even to-night, when I parted from Rube I thought it was you I loved, not he! But the mists have lifted from my vision, and now, at this moment--never fully until this moment--I see you both in your true light; I weigh you understandingly, one against the other; I set your self-seeking against his unselfishness, your improbity against his high sense of honor. And how plainly I see it all! Just as if a moral kaleidoscope were exhibiting by spiritual reflections, to the eyes of my mind, the difference between one man and another, at an angle of virtue which is the aliquot part of three hundred and sixty degrees of real merit! Upon this disk of the imagination appears your own image; and what are you doing? Passing me by as an unknown thing, a thing too small to know in the presence of mighty magnates at a county picnic! There is another manly form; what is he doing? Lifting me up from the bare earth where the other's cruel slights have crushed me; feeding me with his own hands; even then loving me. How different the pictures! Shift the scene. Some one is crowning me: I am a queen before the world. Whose hand has held a crown for me? Not yours--Rube's! You had not the courage. He had. I love courage in a man. I love it better than a handsome face or an oily tongue. A man without courage--what is he? He isn't a man at all--not really. Jerome Devonhough," here she turned her lovely face, grown so cold, and her exquisite eyes, grown so scornful, full upon him, "were you the right sort of a man, would you be here to-night? Will a man, false to his friend, be true to his wife? I can trust Rube Rutland; can I trust you? No! For, even while loving, I could not keep down a feeling of contempt. Beginning with respect for Rube, that sentiment of respect has ripened into love--real love--not the wild, senseless, mad, unreasoning passion of