This punishment he put on himself. He must not be met coming out of his wife's room alone. "Of course!" she cried eagerly. "You know I would have done much more for you--I mean since you became ill--if you had only allowed it! But Dick was always jealous--Dick has always hated me!" "Surely not always?" he said mildly. "Yes, always!" He would not take her arm, or lean on her. She simply walked by his side, her mind in a whirl of amazement, of gratitude, of almost hysterical excitement, till he dismissed her, curtly, at his door. * * * * * The hour that followed was perhaps the happiest hour of Athena Maule's not unhappy life. It bore a curious resemblance to that which had immediately followed Richard Maule's proposal of marriage, the proposal for which her father and mother, as well as herself, had watched and waited so anxiously. But now there was added what had been quite lacking before--a sufficiently strong feeling of attraction to the man who would place her in the position she longed feverishly to enjoy and adorn. That Lingard, in the throes of his passion for her, should go through moments of acute self-depreciation and remorse, only made her feel her power, her triumph, the more. She now came down to him gentle, subdued, as he had never yet seen her,--Nature provides such women with a wonderfully complex and full armoury--and Lingard, alas! once more under the spell, sprang towards her. The unexpected departure of Jane to the Small Farm had angered him. "I have seen Richard." The pregnant words were uttered solemnly. "I found him, for the first time in my life, in--in my room. Jane spoke to him to-day, and he is going to release me, to let me out of prison--at last!" and then, not till then, Athena allowed herself to fall on Lingard's breast, and feel the clasp of his strong arms about her. It mattered naught to her that the man who was now murmuring wild, broken words of love and passionate joy at her release from intolerable bonds, felt what the traitor feels--that his intoxication was even now seared with livid streaks of self-loathing and self-contempt. She knew well that he would not trouble her overmuch with his remorse. She could almost hear him, in his heart, say the words he had said the night before Jane Oglander had come to disturb and trouble the sunlit waters into which they two had already glided. "It is not your fault,--any fault there may be is mine." But just before they said good-night Lingard frightened Athena Maule, and sent her away from him cold, almost angry. "If I were the brave man men take me to be," he said suddenly, unclasping the hands which lay in his, "I should go out into the night and shoot myself." She had made him beg, entreat, her forgiveness for his wild, wicked words. But they frightened her--dashed her deep content.