“Yet answer me this,” she cried: “Have you actually believed me united to Lieutenant Mason--believed that I came to your house a deserted wife, hiding her shame beneath a name she had no longer a right to bear?” Mr. Aylwinne did not reply. All his deeply rooted convictions shaken by her indignant earnestness, he stood gazing at her in troubled silence. With rising anger, Florence passionately exclaimed: “If I have ever felt disgraced in my own sight it is now that I find you have thought me capable of such infamous concealments! What! you have been regarding me all these months as the discarded victim of a villain, and imagined that under such circumstances I could permit you to woo me?” He drew his hand across his brow. “Mason is dead, and you are free. Did I not carefully guard against a look or word that should fright you hence, while another had the shadow of a claim upon you? I can scarcely command my thoughts at this moment; yet surely I have not been mistaken in supposing that you acknowledged a barrier between us, and acceded to my wish that the wrongs you received at Mason’s hands should be never adverted to by either of us?” “No, no!” cried Florence vehemently. “I never comprehended your half-sorrowful, half-angry allusions to the past. I thought it was of papa and his unfortunate speculations you spoke so angrily. Truth to tell, I have always supposed that some entanglement you did not care to confess to me occasioned your varying manner and your declaration that it was too late for us to love each other.” “And you have never been another’s, my Florence--my darling!” Mr. Aylwinne murmured, as he joyfully caught her to his breast. “How cruelly I have been deceived! How cold--how unkind I must have appeared to you! And yet,” he added, releasing her and again looking doubtful and unsatisfied, “and yet there is something here I do not understand: I saw you at the Albany--I heard you crave an interview with the profligate lieutenant, and--oh, Florence!--I was the maddened witness of your tears and disappointment when you learned that he had quitted England.” “And listened,” Florence added, with bitterness, “to the whispers of a man who is, by your own showing, as vile as his master. I insist that you tell me all he said!” “For what purpose?” he asked. “Surely you must be well aware that your own candid statement will outweigh anything he may have told me.” But Florence, whose pride had been aroused by his suspicions, persisted, and by degrees drew from him the whole story. He had partially recognized in the veiled lady waiting to see Lieutenant Mason the form and features of the fair girl he loved devotedly, despite the rejection his suit had received. Shocked to behold her at such a place, he had questioned the servant, obtained equivocal answers, and bribed him to confess more.