Never had she suffered as during the last few days, for she was being taught by the inexorable logic of facts and events. In Ella's crystal nature she saw what her own love should be, and might have been. She had witnessed the girl's wild impulse to follow her lover to the depths of the harbor, and her own heart gave swift interpretation. She was alive because a Northern boy, deemed incapable of anything better than selfish, reckless love-making, had unhesitatingly risked his life to save one who had spurned him. Even Mrs. Hunter's prejudice had been compelled to yield, and she to admit the young fellow's nobility, of which she was a living proof. The wretched thought haunted Mara that Owen Clancy, unblinded, had discovered for himself, what had been forced upon her, that there were Northern people with whom he could gladly affiliate. The shadow of death had not been so dark and baleful as the shadow of the past in which she so long had dwelt, for in the former there had been light enough to reveal the folly and injustice of indiscriminating prejudice and enmity. Worse than all these thoughts, piercing like shafts of light the darkness which had obscured her judgment, was the truth, upon which she could not reason, that she shrunk with an ever-increasing dread from words and acts of love unprompted by her heart. Like a rock, however, amid all this chaos--this breaking up of the old which left nothing stable in its place--remained her purpose to go forward. On this evening which was to witness a wilder chaos than that of her long-repressed yet passionate heart, she had said sternly, "My word has been passed, my honor is involved, and he shall never learn that I have trembled and faltered." Mrs. Hunter had retired, overcome by the heat, and, believing that she could endure the sultriness better in the little parlor, Mara had turned down the gas, and was sitting by an open window. The city seemed singularly quiet. The street on which she dwelt contained a large population, yet the steps on the pavement were comparatively few. Her own languor was general, and people sought refuge in the seclusion and the undress permitted in their own homes. In a vague, half-conscious way she wondered that a large city could be so still at that hour. "Like myself," she murmured, "it is half shrouded in gloom and gives but slight hint of much that is hidden, that ever must be hidden.--I wonder where he is to-night. Oh, I've no right to think of him at all. Why can't I say, 'Stop,' and end it?--this miserable stealing away of my thoughts until will, like a jailer, pursues and drags them back. Why should a presentiment of danger to him weigh down my spirit to-night? What other peril can he be exposed to except that of marrying a beauty and an heiress? Ah! peril enough, if his heart shrinks like mine. Here, now, _quit_," and the word came sharply and angrily in her self-condemnation.