“I will not address another word to you if my presence is distasteful to you,” he said; “but you are my sister’s guest, and in the absence of her husband I stand in the place of your host. I will not leave you to ride home at this late hour alone. At the risk of incurring your displeasure I attend you to your own door.” Monica did not protest after that, but she hardly addressed a single word to her silent companion. As she rode up to her own house she saw that the door stood open. The groom was there, with his horse. He was in earnest converse with a tall, broad-shouldered man, who held a hunting-whip in his hand, and appeared about to spring into the saddle. Monica’s heart gave a sudden leap. Who was that other man standing with his back to her on the pavement? He turned quickly at the sound of her approach—it was her husband. He looked at her and her companion in perfect silence. Conrad took off his hat, murmured a few incoherent words, and rode quickly away. Randolph’s hand closed like a vice upon his whip, but he only gave one glance at the retreating figure, and then turned quietly to his wife and helped her to dismount. The groom took the horse, and without a word from anyone, husband and wife passed together into the house. And this was the meeting to which Monica had looked forward with so much trembling joy. [Illustration] CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH. RANDOLPH’S STORY. Randolph led his wife upstairs to the drawing-room, and closed the door behind them. It was nine o’clock, and the room was brightly illuminated. Randolph was in dinner dress, as though he had been some time at home. His face was pale, and wore an expression of stern repression more intense than anything Monica had ever seen there before. She was profoundly agitated—agitated most of all by the feeling that he was near her again; the husband that she had pined for without knowing that she pined. Her agitation was due to a kind of tumultuous joy more than to any other feeling, but she hardly knew this herself, and no one else would have credited it, from the whiteness of her face, and the strained look it wore. As a matter of fact, she was physically and mentally exhausted. She had gone through a great deal that day; she had eaten little, and that many hours ago; she was a good deal prostrated, though hardly aware of it—a state in which nervous tension made her unusually susceptible of impression; and she trembled and shrank before the displeasure in her husband’s proud face. Would he look like that if he really loved her? Ah, no! no! She shrank a little more into herself. Randolph did not hurry her. He took off his overcoat leisurely, and laid his whip down upon the table. He looked once or twice at her as she sat pale and wan in the arm-chair whither he had led her. Then he came and stood before her. “Monica, what have you to say to me?”