"Now, honey dear, you jes' keep cool. Don't go an' fly right off de handle agin, or Mas'r Graham'll blow his brains out. Good Lor', how dat man do look sometimes! An' yet often, when he was pintin' out yer letters ter yer, or showin' yer pearty tings, like as you was a chile, he look so happy and gentle like, dat I say he jes' like a moder." Grace was touched, and yet deep, deep in her soul she felt that a wrong had been done her, no matter what had been the motives. Jinny had no such fine perceptions, but with a feminine tact which runs down through the lowliest natures, she chose one of Grace's quietest, yet most becoming costumes, and would not let her go to the glass till arrayed to the dusky woman's intense satisfaction. Then she led her mistress to the mirror and said: "Look dar, honey! All de picters you'se eber seen can't beat dat!" and Grace gazed long and fixedly at the lovely creature that gazed back with troubled and bewildered eyes. "Was--was I like that when--when he married me?" "Yes, an' no, honey. You only look like a picter of a woman den--a berry pearty picter, but nothin' but a picter arter all. Mas'r Graham hab brought yer ter life." With another lingering, wondering glance at herself, she turned away and said: "Leave me, now, Jinny; I wish to be alone." The woman hesitated, and was about to speak, but Grace waved her away imperiously, and sat down to the letters Graham had given her. She read and re-read them. They confirmed his words. She was a wife: her husband awaited her but a few feet away--her _husband_, and she had never dreamed of marrying again. The past now stood out luminous to her, and Warren Hilland was its centre. But another husband awaited her--one whom she had never consciously promised "to love, honor, and obey." As a friend she could worship him, obey him, die for him; but as her _husband_--how could she sustain that mysterious bond which merges one life in another? She was drawn toward him by every impulse of gratitude. She saw that, whether misled or not, he had been governed by the best of motives--nay, more, by the spirit of self-sacrifice in its extreme manifestation--that he had been made to believe that it was her only chance for health and life. Still, in her deepest consciousness he was but Alford Graham, the friend most loved and trusted, whom she had known in her far distant home, yet not her husband. How could she go to him, what could she say to him, in their new relations that seemed so unreal? She trembled to leave him longer in the agony of suspense; but her limbs refused to support her, and her woman's heart shrank with a strange and hitherto unknown fear. There was a timid knock at the door. "Come in, Alford," she said, tremblingly. He stood before her haggard, pale, and expectant. "Alford," she said, sadly, "why did you not let me die?"