'_Unhappy!_' she repeats, in a voice that, if he did not with his own eyes see the words issuing from her lips, he could never have believed to be hers--'_unhappy!_ Are you telling me that you were unhappy all my five years? Has she made you believe even this?' She stops, and fixes her glittering look upon him with an expression so withering that he involuntarily turns his away with a sensation as of one scorched. 'No!' she continues, her voice rising, and growing in clearness as she goes on; 'she may persuade _herself_ of that--what do I care what she persuades _herself_ of?--but she will never really persuade you. No! no! no!' a ring of triumph mixing with the exceeding bitterness of her tones. 'There is one superiority that I shall always, to all eternity, have over her; one that neither she nor you, do what you will, can ever rob me of: I shall always--always have been _first_! There is nothing you can give her that will not be second-hand!' He has clenched his hands in his misery till the finger-nails bite the palms. Is not this the very reflection that has been mingling its drop of earth's gall with the honeyed sweetness of his heaven? 'Yes!' he says, panting; 'do I deny it? I can never give any one better love than I gave you.' '_Gave!_' she repeats, her voice dropping again to a husky whisper, and casting her parched eyes up to heaven, as if calling on the stilly constellations to be witness to her great woe--'_gave_! He himself said _gave_! And I am alive after hearing it. Oh, poor I!' Her voice shudders away in a sigh of intense self-pity; and she hurriedly covers her face with her hands as if to shut out the view of her own fate, as too hideous to be looked upon with sanity; while long, dry sobs shake her from head to foot. The sight of her anguish is more than Talbot can bear. Two steps bring him to her side; and before he can realise what he is doing, he has taken her two hands and drawn them forcibly away from her face. 'Betty!' 'Well!' she says dully, leaving them in his, as if it no longer mattered where, or in whose keeping, they lay; 'what about Betty?' 'Betty!' convulsively pressing her small, burning fingers, 'you break my heart!' 'I wish I could!' rejoins she fiercely. 'I wish to heavens I could! But I must leave that to _her_. Tell me about her!' changing her tone to one of factitious temperate interest. 'She is a good soul, I am told; _bonne comme du pain_. There is nothing so pleasant as complete change, is there? How does she show her goodness, by the bye? Does she say her prayers every night, and make a flannel petticoat for the poor every day, eh?' He attempts no answer to her gibes; only, in his intense and mistakenly shown compassion, he still holds her hands, and looks down, with a pity beyond speech's plummet-line to sound, into the eyes whose beauty he has long ceased to see, but whose agony has still power to stab him.