“You might wait until you see her before you make up your mind at least,” his aunt said, with a curling lip. The handsome young fellow looked at her, gloomily. “Aunt Drusilla, you despise me,” he said, abruptly. “I despise men in general, and I see no reason to make an exception in your favor,” snapped the maiden lady, scornfully. “And yet I am not a bad fellow as men go,” said Talbot Strangemore, self-excusingly. “Aunt Drusilla, I am going to tell you the truth now before I meet Nina, and then we will never speak of it again. Somehow I think I shall feel better if I confess to someone.” “I can guess your secret. It is an entanglement with some woman or other,” she said. “Not an entanglement,” he said, with dignity. “I am not that kind of a man, Aunt Drusilla, but it is that my whole heart is so irrevocably given to another woman that the bare thought of taking Nina to my arms thrills me with dread and repulsion. I have fought many a battle with my heart, tried bravely to cast out the passion within me that is an insult to the girl who is my wife, but I have ignobly failed in every effort, and now having torn myself away from my idol, I have brought only a broken heart to lay in Nina’s shrine.” He went on then to tell her his whole sad story, and neither of them dreamed of the white-faced girl in the next room, who had stolen in quietly just to catch the sound of her idol’s voice, and who had thus heard in horror and amazement the tale of his love for another and his repugnance to herself. She went away presently very quietly to her own room with a face from which all the beauty and brightness had suddenly been stricken as a flower is blighted by the frost of a night, leaving her pale and wild-eyed and forlorn. She locked herself into the room and stood up white and agonized, looking her fate in the face. “How dared she take him from me, that beautiful woman?” she muttered, bitterly, twisting her white hands in and out in anguish. “He belongs to me always, and I to him! Mamma told me so on her dying bed, and she would not have told me a falsehood. I shall go and see that woman and I shall tell her that she is a criminal before high heaven, for she has robbed me of my husband, and ruined all my life. What do they do with such women I wonder? Is there any punishment for a woman that steals the heart of another woman’s husband? If there is, I will find it out and punish her for her sin!” CHAPTER VI. “CAN THIS REALLY BE NINA?” Nina was half mad for the time over the terrible experience that had come to her. She had sorrowed long over her husband’s absence and silence, but the worst fear that had come to her was that he was dead. That he was cold, indifferent, false, had never once occurred to her. The magnitude of her discovery stunned her. She could not think clearly. She was only conscious of one feeling, and that was a bitter, burning jealousy and hatred of the woman that held Talbot Strangemore’s heart.