"I hope," he began, "that you will not object to my recalling certain events of your past life, mademoiselle. I have been commissioned to bear you a message, relative to a detail of your unusually sad experience, but I would first like to know that it does not pain you too much to hear your past repeated." "Oh, sir!" she said, clasping her hands and looking devoutly up, "don't spare me on that account. When we have been able to do wrong, we should be able to bear the consequences, whatever they be. Besides, my past has never been a past to me--all is as vivid to-day as it was in the first hours of my experience. I have only memory left me from that frightful past." "Then we may as well proceed to the point immediately," added Guy, who was feeling slightly uncomfortable over the task. "I am a doctor by profession, mademoiselle, and have, for the last few years, been practising in the city of New York. Some months ago I was summoned to the bed-side of a man in typhoid fever, in whom I recognized an old school friend. He was evidently delighted at the freak of good fortune that brought us together, for, as he told me, there was a secret gnawing at his heart, that he longed to disclose. I sat down beside him and heard, mademoiselle, from his fevered lips, the shameful account of a wedding ceremony, of which you were such an unfortunate victim." Fifine was clutching her fingers convulsively, and there was a look of suppression in her sad face that touched Guy, he was, however, anxious to get through with his disagreeable tale, and hurried on. "He bade me seek you out, mademoiselle, only to tell you that since that eventful night, he has wandered through life, dogged and shadowed by a cruel remorse, which ultimately laid him on the bed where I found him. One thing he craved with his dying lips, mademoiselle, that the message be borne you from him, of your freedom; that you be told how that ceremony was a mockery, null and void, and after this disclosure, if pardon were possible, that you might try to forgive him his blind share in the disgraceful deed. The person I allude to, mademoiselle, was the pretended clergyman who married you that night." He looked now into the struggling face beside him, he knew the conflict that was raging in that soul. The trembling lips parted while he watched, and he heard the low murmur of a sanctified soul, as it breathed. "As we forgive them that trespass against us," she answered back the look of anxious enquiry he cast upon her face for a moment, and then cried: