‘Oh, Horace, how different everything is!’ she said. Her heart was full and spoke out of its abundance. ‘If I could have thought this would ever come in those weary days when I looked for you, and you stayed away from me----’ ‘But you forgot me, Isabel.’ ‘Did I forget you? Oh, how I wearied for you, Horace!’ There was something like guilt in the confession; but the meaning in her mind was different from his conception of it. The time in which she ‘wearied’ for him had not been that pure, calm, cloistered year of her marriage, when all vain thoughts and wishes had been hushed in the unspeakable quiet. She had not thought of him then. She had been faithful and true as an angel to her father-husband, whose love surrounded her like a dwelling-place, and kept her pure from all the soils of earth. So detached was that period from her life that she did not even remember it while she spoke. It was a vision, a trance, a world apart. But in the other agitated world of her young lonely life it seemed now as if there had been but one thought, and that was him. ‘You left me all that year--all that weary, weary year, after our Margaret was taken from me,’ she said, looking up at him with her tender, shining eyes; ‘and I thought I would break my heart.’ ‘And at the end of it--’ he said, ‘shall I remind you, Isabel, how you showed your love to me? or shall we let by-gones be by-gones, and speak of it no more?’ ‘How I showed my love for you?’ said innocent Isabel--innocent, heartless, ungrateful--and yet, in her heart, loyal, after their degrees, to all affections. She looked in his face with genuine surprise. And then, all at once, with a scorching blush remembered what he meant. ‘He was so good to me,’ she murmured, with downcast looks; ‘oh, so kind, like my father! What could I do? It was different. Never, never, could he have been--like you.’ Stapylton drew her to his side with a shudder. ‘We’ll speak of it no more,’ he said; ‘I could not trust myself, Isabel; one moment of my life I was in Hell--and it was by seeing you----’ ‘Seeing me?’ she said, aghast. ‘With him--more lovely than I ever dreamt of--in London--at the opera. My God! when I think of it,’ said the young man, with a blackness impenetrable to her anxious gaze coming over his face. ‘Oh, Horace! was it you? Oh, was it you? There was something there that made me miserable. Oh, my Horace!’ she said, with pity, and remorse, and terror, clinging to his arm. ‘It was Hell!’ he said, wiping his forehead, upon which great drops of moisture were standing. ‘I had been forgetting as best I could--till then. It was Hell; but this is Heaven,’ he added, after a pause, holding her closer. Isabel, terrified and appalled, clung to him, gazing, with her wistful eyes, into his face. ‘It is all past now,’ she said, clinging close to him, with her hands clasped on his arm. ‘My darling! and this is Heaven!’