They walked the length of the long piazza, and then Black drew Helen into the deserted library. She took her hand from his arm, her usually pale face burning with color, her calm eyes agitated. It was enough to set his faithless heart aflame—to call forth treasonable words of love. Curiously enough it was on the very spot where a few hours before he had given Valentine such assurance of his love. The remembrance stung him to shame, but it could not silence his tongue. His love for Valentine had been an infatuation, but Helen held his heart. So he told himself, so he had been telling himself for a month, though he had never before confessed as much to Helen. Valentine was not the woman to make him happy, with her jealous, tempestuous moods and passionate temper. "But you, you are an angel of sweetness and goodness," he said, kissing her hands, even the folds of her pale-blue silken sleeves. Helen shivered a little as she listened to him, and cast uneasy glances about the room, for there was a good deal of cowardice in her nature, and she feared Valentine. "What if she should hear you?" she said, trembling, yet leading him on with her soft eyes, her half-yielding manner. "Why speak of her, think of her, now?" he exclaimed, "My bondage is not yet hopeless, and I—I cannot help not loving her." "But you are engaged to her, and it is all wrong to talk so to me," she said, tears starting suddenly to her eyes. What she had deliberately begun as a flirtation had become as serious to her as to him. Her emotion nearly distracted him. Still rasher words trembled on his lips, when— "Is this tableau for the benefit of the public, or only for your own amusement?" a voice inquired near them, causing them to start guiltily apart, for it was Valentine herself standing there, white as her dress, and with eyes that were terrible in their rage and anguish. "Mr. Black will be perfect in the art of love-making if he continues his present role. You need not tremble and look as if you’d like to run away, Miss Lawrence. There is no Hebe here to crunch your delicate bones, richly as you deserve such a fate, and willingly as I would give you to it." "Blame me for it all, Valentine, not her," exclaimed Black, feeling like a craven between them. "So you would protect and defend her! What a chivalrous gentleman! what a man of honor! Do you think I have been blind and deaf to the sighs and glances, to the thousand little arts she has used upon you—she, the example that has been held up to me by my aunt as worthy of imitation? Well, I congratulate her on the conquest she has made. Two months ago you were ready to grovel at my feet, and to-day—yes, only a few hours ago—you assured me that you were true, that you loved me; and I believed you." Her passion rose again to violence. "I would like to kill you both; yes, with my own hands!" "Hush, for Heaven’s sake!" exclaimed Black. "Do you want all those people in here?"