"Truth is strong," rather sadly said Kate; "the bracelet which you put on this morning, Miss Russell, was picked op by me last night at the door of the studio." Miriam gave a sudden spring on her chair; if a look could have struck Kate to the heart, her look would have done it then. But Kate only shook her handsome head, and smiled, fearless and disdainful. "Yes," she said again, "I picked it up there last night, thought it was Daisy's, and, to give her a lesson of carefulness, I said nothing about it. This morning I suppressed it from another motive. Do you claim it still, Miss Russell?" Everything like emotion had already passed from the face of Miriam. She had sunk hack on her seat; her look had again become indifferent and abstracted; her countenance again wore the expression of fatigue and _ennui_ it had worn the whole evening. As Kate addressed her, she looked up, and very calmly said-- "Why not?" I looked at Cornelius; his brow, his cheek, his lip, had the pallor of marble or of death: he did not speak, he did not move; he looked like one whose very last stronghold the enemy has reached, and who beholds his own ruin with more of silent stupor than of grief. At length he put me away; he rose; he went up to the table which divided him from Miriam; he laid both his hands upon it, and looking at her across, he bent slightly forward, and said, in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of his heart-- "Miriam, tell me you did not do it; Miriam!" She did not reply. "Tell me you did not do it--I will believe you." Miriam looked at him; as she saw the doubt and misery painted on his face, something like pity passed on hers. "Would you?" she said, with some surprise. "No, Cornelius, you could not, and even if you could, I would not prolong this. I might deny or give some explanation at which you would grasp eagerly; but where is the use?--I am weary." She passed her hand across her brow, as if to put by someheavy sense of fatigue, and looked round at us with an expression of dreary languor in her gaze which I have never forgotten. "I am weary," she said again; "for days and weeks this sense of fatigue has been creeping over me. The struggle to win that I never should have prized when won, is ended. I regret it not--still less should you." "Miriam," passionately said Cornelius, "it is false, and you must, you shall deny it." "I will not," Miriam replied firmly, and not without a certain cool dignity which she preserved to the last. "I tell you I am weary, and that if this did not part us, something else should." A chair stood near Cornelius; he sat down, and gave Miriam a long, searching glance, that seemed to ask, in its dismay and indignant grief-- "Are you the woman whom I have loved?"