'"What end--oh, what can all this mean?" I cried, repressing with difficulty a desire to shriek aloud, while holding him in my embrace, for he seemed almost to faint; his lips were a violet tint, and his face was deathly pale. '"I cannot tell you all that is before me, or what I have to do and to suffer, beyond even what I suffer now, lest you should loathe me, scorn me; but oh, pity me, Lisette, pity me when all is over." '"Oh, God, he is mad!" I whispered in my heart. '"I dare not tell you," he resumed; "I have an enemy who is merciless, and I have blighted your life and my own by an act of folly, almost baseness, over which I had no control." 'Unutterable, indescribable was my longing, my anxious and affectionate curiosity to know what this secret was, but next day--on the anniversary of our marriage--I knew all. 'By an arrangement of which all the officers of their corps were cognizant, Lucien and my brother, Victor Gabion, who had challenged him, fought what was called an American duel two days before our marriage. Two little balls, a black and a white one, had been placed in a hat, and each of the two principals drew out one, with the understanding "that he who drew the black one must be numbered with the dead within twelve months." 'The year--my year of joy--had expired, and in the evening Lucien shot himself! Two days before, he had written a touching letter to Victor, praying him for my sake to release him from the penalty he had incurred, but the letter miscarried, it was never delivered, and no answer came. 'Lucien had died on the instant, and he was found with my bracelet clasped upon his arm. It is buried with him, and my heart is buried too,' added the Beguine, sweetly and simply. Hence it was, doubtless, that Captain Victor Gabion had such a horror of duels, as he told Bevil Goring, and that the memory of one haunted him; and hence it was also that Sister Lisette, after being a Red Cross nurse in the war, finally entered the Beguinage, that she might the better dedicate herself to the service of God and to prayer for the dead. Alison Cheyne had endured many bitternesses, humiliations, and mortifications during her short experience of life; but, save the loss of her mother and brothers, no such keen and unmerited misery as her poor Belgian namesake, whose strange story gave her some food for reflection, when the world of waters rolled between them. The sojourn of Alison in the Beguinage of the Rue Rouge was an epoch in the history of that ancient institution, an era in the peacefully monotonous and uneventful lives of the Sisterhood.