tormenting attraction for her, a sudden impulse of utter incredulity seized her. Nothing was changed in the facts, nothing in the circumstances; but Clare laid aside reason under the suddenly exerted power of feeling, and refused to believe that Paul Ward had murdered the unknown man in whose company he had been, and who undoubtedly had been murdered. "I _won't_ believe it! I don't believe it!" These words have often been uttered by the human will, when tortured by the terrible impotence of human despair, as unreasonably, as obstinately, as Clare Carruthers spoke them, and with infinitely more suffering implied in the inevitable reaction. But they can seldom have brought greater relief. A generous, reckless impulse of youth, partly against the terrible knowledge of evil, partly against her own suffering, which wearied and oppressed her spirit, distant, vague, even chimerical as she told herself it was, animated her resolution. She rose, and stretched her arms out, and shook her golden head, as though she discarded a baleful vision by a strong act of her will. "I shall never see him again," she thought. "I shall never know his fate, unless, indeed, he becomes famous, and the voice of his renown reaches me. I shall never know the truth of this dreadful story; but, strong as the evidence is, I never will believe it more. Never, never!" Clare Carruthers was too young, too little accustomed to the sad science of self-examination, too candidly persuadable by the natural abhorrence of youth for grief, to ask herself how much of this resolution came from the gradual influence of time--how much from the longing she felt to escape from the constant pressure of the first misery she had ever known. The impulse, the resolution, had come to her, with her first waking thoughts, one glorious morning in the early autumn--the morning which saw George Dallas and his uncle arrive at Homburg, and witnessed Mr. Carruthers's reception of his stepson. This resolution she never abandoned. That day she had taken the books out of their hiding-place, and had set herself to read the serial story which she knew was written by him. Something of his mind, something of his disposition, would thus reveal itself to her. It was strange that he remembered to send her the books so punctually, but that might mean nothing; they might be sent by the publisher, by his order. He might have forgotten her existence by this time. Clare was sensible, and not vain, and she saw nothing more than a simple politeness in the circumstance. So she read the serial novel, and thought over it; but it revealed nothing to her. There was one description, indeed, which reminded her, vaguely, of Mrs. Carruthers, as she had been before her illness, as Clare remembered her, when she had first seen her, years ago. Clare liked the story. She was not enthusiastically delighted with it. A change which her newly-formed resolution to believe him