“I see that you don't wish to tell me!” cried the girl. “But you might have trusted me. I would have defended you, no matter what you had done--the worse the better.” Lemuel hung his head without answering. After a while she continued: “If I had been that girl who had you arrested, and I had been the cause of so much suffering to an innocent person, I should never have forgiven myself. I should have devoted my life to expiation. I should have spent my life in going about the prisons, and finding out persons who were unjustly accused. I should have done it as a penance. Yes! even if he had been guilty!” Lemuel remained insensible to this extreme of self-sacrifice, and she went on: “This book--it is a story--is all one picture of such a nature. There is a girl who's been brought up as the ward of a young man. He educates her, and she expects to be his wife, and he turns out to be perfectly false and unworthy in every way; but she marries him all the same, although she likes some one else, because she feels that she ought to punish herself for thinking of another, and because she hopes that she will die soon, and when her guardian finds out what she's done for him, it will reform him. It's perfectly sublime. It's--ennobling! If every one could read this book, they would be very different.” “I don't see much sense in it,” said Lemuel, goaded to this comment. “You would if you read it. When she dies--she is killed by a fall from her horse in hunting, and has just time to join the hands of her husband and the man she liked first, and tell them everything--it is wrought up so that you hold your breath. I suppose it was reading that that made me think there were burglars getting in. But perhaps you're right not to read it now, if you're excited already. I'll get you something cheerful.” She whirled out of the room and back in a series of those swift, nervous movements peculiar to her. “There! that will amuse you, I know.” She put the book down on the table before Lemuel, who silently submitted to have it left there. “It will distract your thoughts, if anything will. And I shall ask you to let me sit just here in the reception-room, so that I can call you if I feel alarmed.” “All right,” said Lemuel, lapsing absently to his own troubled thoughts. “Thank you very much,” said Sibyl. She went away, and came back directly. “Don't you think,” she asked, “that it's very strange you should never have seen or heard anything of her?” “Heard of who?” he asked, dragging himself painfully up from the depths of his thoughts. “That heartless girl who had you arrested.” “She _wasn't_ heartless!” retorted Lemuel indignantly. “You think so because you are generous, and can't imagine such heartlessness. Perhaps,” added Sibyl, with the air of being illumined by a happy thought, “she is dead. That would account for everything. She may have died of remorse. It probably preyed upon her till she couldn't bear it any longer, and then she killed herself.”