“Hard and cruel!” repeated her husband, looking down upon her with bitter contempt; “it is you who have proven yourself to be that by doing such a cruel, unwomanly act. I could never have thought you capable of inflicting such a cruel wrong upon one who loved and trusted you--to his bitter cost!” “Have I acted so very wrong?” cried Jess, clutching her two little hands together tightly and looking up into his eyes with a face as white as his own. “Wrong!” he exclaimed, contemptuously, “we will waive that, Jess. You have done that which I will never pardon. Now tell me why you did it--what actuated your course?” Still the girl was silent, fairly bewildered by his words. “I think I can see through it all,” he went on, bitterly; “but let me hear the truth from your own lips, dispelling my mad delusion that you were young and guileless as an angel, and not a fortune hunter, like others of your sex. You say you were about to wed another. When did you meet him, and where, and who is he? I repeat,” he questioned, sternly. “He is a handsome young man whom I met at Blackheath Hall,” murmured the girl, as though the words were fairly wrung from her lips, and she would tell no more than was actually forced from her. “He saved my life, and--and when he asked me to marry him, and told me to think it over while he was away at New Orleans, I wrote him that I--I consented, and that the marriage should take place, as he so desired, as soon as I could get ready. While they were making my trousseau I was to spend a few weeks with a New York family, ‘to get my manners polished up,’ to use Mrs. Bryson’s words, and--you know the rest--Fate led me here.” While she had been speaking her companion’s face had grown whiter still, if that could be. He realized that he had made a fatal mistake in supposing this girl had been waiting for him--John Dinsmore, the joint heir with her to Blackheath Hall--to come down there to ask her to marry him. In that moment of excitement it did not occur to him to press the question as to his name, since she did not seem inclined to inform him concerning it. Indeed, what did his name matter to him, he ruminated, moodily. She loved that other fellow or she would never have consented to marry him, was the thought that passed with lightning-like rapidity through his brain. She had also believed Lucy Caldwell’s report that he himself was fabulously rich, and, as that other love of his had done, thrown over the poorer suitor for the richer one. He had been intending to tell Jess on their way back to the farmhouse that he was John Dinsmore, who had also been expected to come to her and lay his heart and fortune at her feet; now his lips were dumb. He decided to keep that fact a secret from her for the present, until he could see a path out of the dilemma in which he found himself; determining that for the present she should know him only as Mr. Moore, the man whom she had married on the impulse of the moment.