She hissed the words between her shut teeth, and Alice involuntarily shuddered at the hard, relentless look, which only a deceived, deserted woman can wear. She did not dream that Adah, who had seemed so gentle, so good, could put on such a look, and she gazed at her in astonishment, as in clear, determined tones she repeated the words, “Yes, _I should hate him!_ “I know it’s wrong,” she continued, “and I’ve asked God many a time to take the feeling away, but it’s in me yet, and sometimes, when I get to thinking of the time before he came, when I was a happy, innocent school girl, without a care for anything, my heart turns into stone, and the prayer I would say will not come. Miss Johnson, you don’t know what it is to love with your whole soul one who, to all appearance, was worthy of your love, and who, the world would say, was above you in position—to trust him implicitly, to worship the very earth he trod, to feel ’twas Heaven where he was, to have no shadow of suspicion, to believe yourself his lawful wife, and then some dreadful morning wake up and find him gone, you know not where—to wait and watch through weary weeks and months of agonizing pain, and then to hear at last, in his own handwriting, that you were not a wife that the whole was a mockery, a marriage of convenience, which circumstances rendered it necessary for him to break, that his proud family would not receive you, that though he loved you still, his bride must be rich to please his aristocratic mother, and then to end with the hope thrown out that sometime he might come back and make you truly his. But for that I should have died, and, as it was, I felt my heart-strings snapping, one by one, felt the blood freezing in my veins, felt that I was going mad. I frighten you, Miss Johnson,” she said, as she saw how Alice shrunk away from the dark eyes in which there was a fierce, resentful gleam, unlike sweet Adah Hastings. “I used to frighten myself when I saw in my eyes the demon which whispered suicide.” “Oh, Adah, Mrs. Hastings,” and Alice involuntarily wound her arm around the young girl-woman as if to shield her from sin. “You could not have dreamed of that!”