Slipping his arms around her, he forcibly drew her up until her head was pillowed upon his breast. Then he kissed her again and again, kissed her brow, her hair, her cheeks, her mouth. "Darling, are you happy?" he breathed at length into her ear. Upon this the girl released herself from his hold, and kneeling erect by his side, looked with wide-open, excited, somewhat horrified eyes straight into his. It was no highly-wrought sentiment either of love or indignation that fell from her lips. Simply, yet emphatically, she cried-- "Oh, we mustn't! we mustn't! We were both forgetting your wife!" Morris was rather proud of his versatility, and cultivated the art of being all things to all women. The last lady on whom he had temporarily bestowed his affections had, like Evarne, been tactless and inconsiderate enough to invoke the memory of the happily absent one at a critical moment. To Evarne's predecessor he had lightly remarked, "Oh! hang my wife, Birdie. She doesn't count." Birdie had giggled, called him a "naughty man," and there had been an end to that topic. To have addressed any such flippant answer to Evarne and her clamouring conscience would have meant the end of all things. Morris unhesitatingly took the one and only course that would serve his turn now. He adopted the plan of apparent perfect frankness, not only regarding the legal partner of his joys and woes, but concerning much else that he had hitherto kept hidden. With many a sign of great mental struggle, now flashing forth eloquent glances, now veiling his eyes from her clear, searching gaze, he made confession of his deception concerning Mrs. Kenyon's promised presence at "Mon Bijou." He waxed alternately ardent and pathetic as he discoursed upon the love he bore Evarne and all that it meant to him, vowing that it was the intensity of his affection alone that had prompted him to his falsehood. He abused himself so unsparingly, that half-unconsciously she was moved to utter a pleading little cry of pity and expostulation. Thereupon he went on to explain in touching terms that he was but a lonely, desolate man, rapidly becoming weary of life, embittered and miserable, until her charm, her sweet goodness, aroused him, awoke affection and brought fresh zest into his existence--and so on, and so on. "My wife, well, she was a nicely-brought-up, rather silly girl, pretty enough once and good-natured too, but now soured and aged by permanent, incurable illness. There is no bond of any kind between us. We have not a thought in common. There are no children; she can never be either companion or wife to me. Frail though she is, she has a marvellous vitality, a wondrous clinging to life. Such unhappy existences--a curse to themselves and others,--are always prolonged. Think of it, dearest, think what it means to a man to be practically tied to a corpse, cut off from all the joy of living."