"Why are you so determined that we should separate, darling?" he asked, in a low, pained voice, bending down towards her averted face. "Surely your Prince can never love you as devotedly as I have done!" "Ah! George," she cried, with a tender passion in her glance as she again turned to him, "do not tempt me. It is my duty, and I have given a pledge. I have never loved Prince Zertho, and I never shall. Mine will be a marriage of compulsion. In a few short weeks I shall bid farewell to hope and happiness, to life and love, for I shall become Princess d'Auzac and lose you for ever." "As Princess you may obtain many of the pleasures of life. Far more than if you were my wife," he observed, in a hollow tone, as if speaking to himself. "No, no," she protested. "The very name is to me synonymous of all that is hateful. Ah! you do not know, George, the terrible thoughts that seem to goad me to madness. Often I find myself reflecting whether death would not be preferable to the life to which I am now condemned. Yet I am held to it immutably, forced against my will to become this man's wife, in order that the terrible secret, which must never be disclosed, may still remain where it is, locked in the breast of the one man who, by its knowledge, holds me irrevocably in his power." "Then you fear this Prince Zertho?" he said slowly, with deep emphasis. She seemed quite unlike the laughing, happy girl he had known at home in their quiet rural village. Her strange attitude of abject dejection and despair held him stupefied. "Yes," she answered hoarsely, after a long pause, "I dare not disobey him." "From your words it would seem that your crime is of such a terrible nature that you dare not risk exposure. Is that so?" he hazarded in a hard voice, scarcely raised above a whisper. "My crime!" she cried, all colour instantly dying out of her handsome face, while in her clear, grey eyes was a strange expression as if she were haunted by some fearsome spectre of the past. Her white lips quivered, her hands trembled, "What do you mean?" she gasped. "What do you know of my crime?" Next instant she started, her lips held tight together as she drew herself up unsteadily with a sudden movement. She knew that she had involuntarily betrayed herself to the man she loved. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. LIP-SALVE. In a room on the second floor of an old, high, dingy-looking house in one of the dingiest back streets near the flower-market in Nice sat a man and a woman. The room was lofty, with a ceiling which had once been painted but had now faded and fallen away in great flakes, while the furniture was frayed and shabby. The shutters of the two long windows were closed, and the place was lit by a cheap shaded lamp suspended in the centre, its light being too dim to sufficiently illuminate the whole apartment. Beneath the circle of light stood a table marked in squares, and in its centre a roulette-wheel.