“Shamed!” cried Lenorme. “--Well, if you can’t help being ashamed of me--and perhaps, as you have been brought up, you can’t-- do you not then love me enough to encounter a little shame for my sake? I should welcome worlds of such for yours!” Florimel was silent. She kept her face hidden on his shoulder, but was already halfway to a quarrel. “You don’t love me, Florimel!” he said, after a pause, little thinking how nearly true were the words. “Well, suppose I don’t!” she cried, half defiantly, half merrily; and drawing herself from him, she stepped back two paces, and looked at him with saucy eyes, in which burned two little flames of displeasure, that seemed to shoot up from the red spots glowing upon her cheeks. Lenorme looked at her. He had often seen her like this before, and knew that the shell was charged and the fuse lighted. But within lay a mixture even more explosive than he suspected; for not merely was there more of shame and fear and perplexity mingled with her love than he understood, but she was conscious of having now been false to him, and that rendered her temper dangerous. Lenorme had already suffered severely from the fluctuations of her moods. They had been almost too much for him. He could endure them, he thought, to all eternity, if he had her to himself, safe and sure; but the confidence to which he rose every now and then that she would one day be his, just as often failed him, rudely shaken by some new symptom of what almost seemed like cherished inconstancy. If after all she should forsake him! It was impossible, but she might. If even that should come, he was too much of a man to imagine anything but a stern encounter of the inevitable, and he knew he would survive it; but he knew also that life could never be the same again; that for a season work would be impossible-- the kind of work he had hitherto believed his own rendered for ever impossible perhaps, and his art degraded to the mere earning of a living. At best he would have to die and be buried and rise again before existence could become endurable under the new squalid condition of life without her. It was no wonder then if her behaviour sometimes angered him; for even against a Will o’ the Wisp that has enticed us into a swamp, a glow of foolish indignation will spring up. And now a black fire in his eyes answered the blue flash in hers; and the difference suggests the diversity of their loves: hers might vanish in fierce explosion, his would go on burning like a coal mine. A word of indignant expostulation rose to his lips, but a thought came that repressed it. He took her hand, and led her--the wonder was that she yielded, for she had seen the glow in his eyes, and the fuse of her own anger burned faster; but she did yield, partly from curiosity, and followed where he pleased --her hand lying dead in his. It was but to the other end of the room he led her, to the picture of her father, now all but finished. Why he did so, he would have found