"Daisy!" he cried, holding out his arms to her with a yearning, passionate cry. "My God! tell me it is false--you are _not_ here with Stanwick--or I shall go mad! Daisy, my dear little sweetheart, my little love, why don't you speak?" he cried, clasping her close to his heart and covering her face and hair and hands with passionate, rapturous kisses. Daisy struggled out of his embrace, with a low, broken sob, flinging herself on her knees at his feet with a sharp cry. "Daisy," said the old lady, bending over her and smoothing back the golden hair from the lovely anguished face, "tell him the truth, dear. You are here with Mr. Stanwick; is it not so?" The sudden weight of sorrow that had fallen upon poor, hapless Daisy seemed to paralyze her very senses. The sunshine seemed blotted out, and the light of heaven to grow dark around her. "Yes," she cried, despairingly; and it almost seemed to Daisy another voice had spoken with her lips. "This Mr. Stanwick claims to be your husband?" asked the old lady, solemnly. "Yes," she cried out again, in agony, "but, Rex, I--I--" The words died away on her white lips, and the sound died away in her throat. She saw him recoil from her with a look of white, frozen horror on his face which gave place to stern, bitter wrath. Slowly and sadly he put her clinging arms away from him, folding his arms across his breast with that terrible look upon his face such as a hero's face wears when he has heard, unflinchingly, his death sentence--the calm of terrible despair. "Daisy," he said, proudly, "I have trusted you blindly, for I loved you madly, passionately. I would as soon believe the fair smiling heavens that bend above us false as you whom I loved so madly and so well. I was mad to bind you with such cruel, irksome bonds when your heart was not mine but another's. My dream of love is shattered now. You have broken my heart and ruined and blighted my life. God forgive you, Daisy, for I never can! I give you back your freedom; I release you from your vows; I can not curse you--I have loved you too well for that; I cast you from my heart as I cast you from my life; farewell, Daisy--farewell forever!" She tried to speak, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Oh, pitying Heaven, if she could only have cried out to you and the angels to bear witness and proclaim her innocence! The strength to move hand or foot seemed suddenly to have left her. She tried hard, oh! so hard, to speak, but no sound issued from her white lips. She felt as one in a horrible trance, fearfully, terribly conscious of all that transpired around her, yet denied the power to move even a muscle to defend herself. "Have you anything to say to me, Daisy?" he asked, mournfully, turning from her to depart.