“Oh, Mr. Everard, I am glad you have come; we have wanted you so much.” He had thought she would meet him with coldness and scorn for his weakness and duplicity, and he was prepared for that, but not for this; and forgetting himself utterly for the moment, he took the offered hands and held them tightly in his own, until she released them from him and motioned him to a seat opposite her, where he could look into her face, which, now that he saw it more closely, had on it such a grieved, disappointed expression that he cried out: “Kill me, Rossie, if you will! but don’t look at me that way, for I cannot bear it. I know what I’ve done and what I am, better than you do.” Here he paused, and Rossie said: “I am sorry, Everard, that you did not tell me long ago, when it first happened. Four years and more, she says. I’ve been thinking it over, and it must have been that time you came home when your mother died and you were so sick afterward. You were married then.” How quietly and naturally she spoke the words “married then,” as if it was nothing to her that he was married _then_ or _now_, but the hot blood flamed up for a moment in her face and then left it whiter than before, as Everard replied: “Yes, if that can be called a marriage which was a mere farce, and has brought nothing but bitter humiliation to me, and been the cause of my ruin. I wish that day had been blotted from my existence.” “Hush, Everard,” Rossie said. “You must not talk that way, and your wife here in the house waiting for you. I have not seen her yet, but they tell me she is very beautiful.” “Yes, with that cursed beauty which lures men, or rather fools, to their destruction; and I was a fool!” Everard answered, bitterly,—“an idiot, who thought myself in love. Don’t call her my wife, Rossie. She has never been that; never will be. But I did not come here to abuse her. I came to tell you the whole truth at last, as I ought to have told it years ago, when my mother was on her death-bed. I tried to tell her, but I could not. I made a beginning by showing her Josephine’s picture, which she did not like. The face was pretty, she said, but not the face of a true, refined woman, but rather of one who wore dollar jewelry,” and here Everard laughed sarcastically as he went on; “then I showed the picture to Bee, who said she looked as if she might wear cotton lace. But you, Rossie, said the hardest thing of all, and decided me finally not to tell, for I had almost made up my mind to make you my confidante.” “I, Everard? I decided you? You must be mistaken. When was it, Everard?” Rossie exclaimed, her eyes growing very large and bright in her excitement.