Wilford had never mentioned Genevra to her since the day of his return, and Katy sometimes felt it would be well to talk that matter over. It might lead to a better understanding than existed between them now, and dissipate the cloud which hung so darkly on their domestic horizon. But Wilford repulsed all her advances on that subject, and Genevra was a dead name in their household. Times there were when for an entire day he would appear like his former self, caressing her with unwonted tenderness, but never asked her forgiveness for all he had made her suffer. He was too proud to do that, and his tenderness always passed away when he remembered Morris Grant and Katy’s remark to Helen which he accidentally overheard. “I am afraid it can never be with us as it was once. I have not the same trust in him.” “She had no right to complain of me,” he thought, forgetting the time when he had been guilty of a similar offence in a more aggravated form. He could not reason upon anything naturally, and matters grew daily worse, while Katy’s face grew whiter and her voice sadder in its tone. When the Lenten days came on, oh how Katy longed to be in Silverton—to kneel again in its quiet church, and offer up her penitential prayers with the loved ones at home. At last she ventured to ask Wilford if she might go, her spirits rising when he did not refuse her request at once, but asked, “Whom do you wish to see the most?” His black eyes seemed reading her through, and something in their expression brought to her face the blush he construed according to his jealousy, and when she answered, “I wish to see them all,” he retorted, “Say, rather, you wish to see _that doctor_, who has loved you so long, and who but for me would have asked you to be his wife!” “What doctor, Wilford? whom do you mean?” she asked, and Wilford replied, “Dr. Grant, of course. Did you never suspect it?” “Never,” and Katy’s face grew very white, while Wilford continued, “I had it from his own lips; he sitting on one side of you and I upon the other. I so forgot myself as to charge him with loving you, and he did not deny it, but confessed as pretty a piece of romance as I ever read, except that, according to his story, it was a one-sided affair, confined wholly to himself. _You_ never dreamed of it, he said.” “Never, no never,” Katy said, panting for her breath, and remembering suddenly many things which confirmed what she had heard. “Poor Morris, how my thoughtlessness must have wounded him,” she murmured, and then all the pent-up passion in Wilford’s heart burst out in an impetuous storm. He did not charge his wife directly with returning Morris’s love; but he said she was sorry she had not known it earlier, asking her pointedly if it were not so, and pressing her for an answer, until the bewildered creature cried out, “Oh, I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”