“I did not tell her of the marriage, although I tried to, and made a beginning by showing her your picture, and telling her your name and that of your mother, whom she at once identified as the Roxie who had lived in her father’s family so long.” “And of course my fine lady objected to such stock,” Josephine said, with a sneer in her voice. “Josephine,” and Everard spoke more sternly than he had ever spoken to her in his life, “say what you like to me, but don’t mention my mother in that tone or spirit again. She did not despise you for your birth. No true woman would do that. She said that innate refinement or delicacy of feeling would always assert itself, and raise one above the lowest and humblest of positions. Almost her last words to me were of you, in whom she knew I was interested, for I had confessed as much. “‘If she is so good, and womanly, and true, her birth is of no consequence—none whatever,’ she said. So you see she laid less stress upon it than do you, who know better than she did whether you are good, and womanly and true.” Here Josephine began to cry, but Everard did not heed her tears, and went on: “There is in this country no degradation in honest labor; it is the character, the actions, which tell; and were you what I believed you to be when in my madness I consented to that foolish farce, I would not care though your origin were the lowest which can be conceived.” Here Josephine stopped crying, and demanded, sharply: “What am I, pray? What do you know of me?—you, who have scarcely seen me half a dozen times since I became your wife.” “I know more than you suppose,—have seen more than you guess,” he replied; “but let me begin with the morning I left you in Holburton, four years ago last June, and come down to the present time.” When he hinted that he knew more of her life than she supposed, there instantly flashed into Josephine’s mind the memory of all the love affairs she had been concerned in, and the improprieties of which she had been guilty, and she wondered if it were possible that Everard could know of them, too. But it was not, and, assuming a calmness she was far from feeling, she said: “Go on, I am all attention.” Very rapidly, Everard went over with the events of his life as connected with her up to the time of his father’s death and his own disinheritance, and here he paused a moment, while Josephine said: “And so it was through me you lost your money. I am very sorry, and I must say I think it mean in that girl to keep it, knowing as she does how it came to her.” “You misjudge her,” Everard said, quickly. “You know nothing of her, or how she rebelled against it and tried to give it back to me. But she cannot do it while she is under age, and I would not take it if she could. I made her believe it at last, and then counseled with Miss Belknap as to my future course——”