With that, and his saying he should love her madly, a little creeping hope steals warmly about her heart. "Why should you disbelieve in me?" she asks, putting out a timid peace-making hand. "Because a faith once broken can never be mended," he answers, sternly--"it may be patched up, but a patched faith will not do to go through life with; because a woman who has deceived a man once for one object may deceive him a second time for another. I should never," he says (words coming quicker and emotion deepening as he proceeds), "look in your sweet eyes without thinking I read some treachery in them; I should never press your heart against mine without fearing that it was beating for some one else." She withdraws her rejected hand, and falls to weeping sorelier than ever, but very mutely. "What madness induced you to tell me so many lies?" he cries, passionately, with mournful severity. "Were you bent on putting a gulf, that could never be bridged through all eternity, between us? Did not you know that that is the one sin I could never forget or forgive?" She looks down humbled and crestfallen, and says, sobbingly, "I was afraid of you. I thought that, if I told you, I should lose you as I have done now, without telling you. I was on the point of speaking two or three times, but you looked so angry that my courage failed, and I _dared_ not." "Afraid of me!" he says, reproachfully. "By your own showing, then, you could not have loved me perfectly, for 'perfect love casteth out fear,' If you are afraid of me, it is indeed time for us to part." "I see you are bent on misconstruing every word I say," she says, hopelessly, and yet with a little petulant movement of shoulder and head, "and so I'll hold my tongue." He looks at her, not relentingly, but with infinite sadness. "I almost wish that Constance had left me in my Fool's Paradise!" he says. "Constance!" exclaims Esther, quickly. "Was it she that told you?" "It was," he answers, quietly: "she heard it this morning; she was annoyed with me for not going to the ball, and chose this ingenious and, I must say, complete mode of revenge." "What _had_ I done to her?" says Essie, bringing her two hands together sharply, and looking upwards to Heaven's great black, blue floor above her, "Thick inlaid with patines of bright gold." "What _had_ I done to her," she says, in a sort of wonder, "that she should do me such a mischief?"