candid with me, how much I might have been spared; but such deliberate treachery." And again and again did her troubled thoughts work round the painful circle of unanticipated mortification which had so suddenly risen up around her; each time returning with redoubled rage and bitterness to Kate's supposed duplicity, for it never occurred to her to doubt that Lord Effingham's love was reciprocated. How long she had lain, her head buried in the cushions of the sofa, striving to find some loop-hole through which her wounded self-love might creep from the storm that beat it to the ground she could not tell. Ages seemed to have passed since she left the carriage, which had conveyed her to so much misery; but at last the door was opened, and Kate entered, she looked pale and agitated, and exclaimed-- "I had no idea you had returned, dear Georgy." Lady Desmond raised her eyes with such a look of dark resentment, of concentrated indignation, that, innocent as she was, Kate recoiled before it with the confusion of guilt. "Ay, shrink back from my presence," said her cousin, in low, deep tones, as if she dared not lose control of her voice. "Traitress! long practice might have taught you more art than to quail at my first glance. Lord Effingham can place full faith in a wife, who, for months, deliberately deceived and duped her friend, leading her to pour forth the last secrets she would have confided to a rival. False, false heart, I loved you, I trusted you; I heaped benefits upon you; I cared for my wealth only because it might be of use to you; and, in return, you have crept into the very sanctuary of my soul to rob and desecrate it; is this the truth, the honor of D'Arcy Vernon's grand-child?" She had risen in her wrath, and stood--her long black hair thrown wildly back--nervously grasping the back of the sofa, on which she had lain, and gazing with pitiless eyes on the slight shrinking figure before her. "Georgy, hear me, I implore you," cried Kate, trembling in every limb, and feeling, in spite of her conscious rectitude, as though she was guilty, before her cousin's impassioned reproaches. "Hush," returned Lady Desmond, with a wild gesture of command and horror, "let me hear no well-arranged tissue of falsehoods. Your very voice is pregnant with dissimulation; go--relieve me of the sight of so much treachery." "Not till you have heard me," said Kate, with firmness, recalled, by Lady Desmond's unjust reproaches, from the excessive commiseration which at first had unnerved her. "Why do you suppose I am a participator in Lord Effingham's deception? Why do you imagine that an acquaintance of but three months' standing could so influence me, as to change my entire previous principles? You are excited. You are wretched. And God knows how deeply I feel for you; but, Georgy, do not be unjust."