"Of a good family, I hope?" asked Johanna. "There are some persons it would be a disgrace to you to love. What is her other name?" "I don't know," I answered, reluctantly but distinctly. Johanna turned her face full upon me now--a face more agitated than I had ever seen it. There was no use in trying to keep back any part of my serious delinquency, so I resolved to make a clean breast of it. "I know very little about her," I said--"that is, about her history; as for herself, she is the sweetest, dearest, loveliest girl in the whole world to me. If I were free, and she loved me, I should not know what else to wish for. All I know is, that she has run away from her people; why, I have no more idea than you have, or who they are, or where they live; and she has been living in Tardif's cottage since last October. It is an infatuation, do you say? So it is, I dare say. It is an infatuation; and I don't know that I shall ever shake it off." "What is she like?" asked Johanna. "Is she very merry and bright?" "I never saw her laugh," I said. "Very melancholy and sad, then?" "I never saw her weep," I said. "What is it then, Martin?" she asked, earnestly. "I cannot tell what it is," I answered. "Everything she does and says has a charm for me that I could never describe. With her for my wife I should be more happy than I ever was; with any one else I shall be wretched. That is all I know." I had left my seat by Johanna, and was pacing to and fro in the room, too restless and miserable to keep still. The low moan of the sea sighed all about the house. I could have cast myself on the floor had I been alone, and wept and sobbed like a woman. I could see no loop-hole of escape from the mesh of circumstances which caught me in their net. A long, dreary, colorless, wretched life stretched before me, with Julia my inseparable companion, and Olivia altogether lost to me. Captain Carey and Johanna, neither of whom had tasted the sweets and bitters of marriage, looked sorrowfully at me and shook their heads. "You must tell Julia," said Johanna, after a long pause. "Tell Julia!" I echoed. "I would not tell her for worlds!" "You must tell her," she repeated; "it is your clear duty. I know it will be most painful to you both, but you have no right to marry her with this secret on your mind." "I should be true to her," I interrupted, somewhat angrily. "What do you call being true, Martin Dobrée?" she asked, more calmly than she had spoken before. "Is it being true to a woman to let her believe you choose and love her above all other women when that is absolutely false? No; you are too honorable for that. I tell you it is your plain duty to let Julia know this, and know it at once." "It will break her heart," I said, with a sharp twinge of conscience and a cowardly shrinking from the unpleasant duty urged upon me. "It will not break Julia's heart," said Johanna, very sadly; "it may break your mother's."