“Do you remember I once showed you a picture of a young girl?” Everard said. “You were watering flowers in the garden; and you said she was very beautiful, but suggested that the jewelry, of which there was a superfluity on her neck and arms, might be a sham, and said she looked like a _sham_, too. How could I tell you after that, that she was my wife? I couldn’t, and I kept it to myself; and mother died, and I went crazy, and you cut off your hair and sold it to pay what you believed to be a gambling debt, and you wrote to Joe Fleming, and I did not open my lips to undeceive you. “I will have my say out,” he continued, fiercely, as Rossie put up her hands to stop him; “I deserve a good cudgeling, and I’ll give it to myself, for no one knows as well as I do just what a sneaking coward I have been all these years, when you have been believing in me and keeping me from going to the——. No, I won’t swear; at least before you, who have been my good angel ever since you knew enough to chide me for my faults. Oh, Rossie! what would I give to be put back to those old days when I was comparatively innocent, and you, in your cape sun-bonnet and long-sleeved aprons, were the dearest, sweetest little girl in all the world, just as you are now. I will say it, though I am killing you, I know, and I am almost wicked enough not to care, for I would rather there were no Rossie in this world than to know she lived to hate and despise me.” “No, Everard, never that, never!” and Rossie again stretched toward him her pale little hands, which he seized and held while he told her rapidly the whole story of his marriage, beginning at the time he first saw Josey Fleming and went to board with her mother. One item, however, he withheld. He did not tell her that it was her half-brother who had married him, nor did he give the name of the clergyman. He would spare her all pain in that direction, if possible, and let her think as well as she could of the brother she could scarcely remember, and who, she believed, must be dead, or he would ere this have manifested some interest in her. Of Josephine he spoke very plainly, and though he did not exaggerate her faults, he showed conclusively, in what he said, that his love for her had long since died out, and he went on from one fact to another so rapidly that Rossie felt stunned and bewildered and begged him to stop. But he would not. She must hear him through, he said, and at the close of his story she looked so white and tired that he bent over her in alarm, chafing her cold hands and asking what he could do for her.