His glance shifted from her face and he turned with a bow towards the door. “May I ask,” she slowly inquired as he moved across the floor, “what is the reason of this sudden interest in poor papa?” “Certainly,” said he, pausing and looking back, not without some emotion of pity in his glance. “I am sometimes struck with a sense of the duty I owe you, in helping you to bear the burden of certain secret responsibilities which I fear may sometimes prove too heavy for you.” She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the glass. “You choose strange times in which to be struck,” said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming. “Conscience is the chooser, not I,” declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded. His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room. “I should like Edward very much,” murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection in the glass, “if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience.” * * * * * “You look unhappy,” said Mr. Sylvester to Paula as they came from the dining-room. “Have the adventures of the day made such an impression upon you that you will not be able to enjoy the evening’s festivities?” She lifted her face and the quick smile came. “I do not like to see your brow so clouded,” continued he, smoothing his own to meet her searching eye. “Smiles should sit on the lips of youth, or else why are they so rosy.” “Would you have me smile in face of my first glimpse of wickedness,” asked she, but in a gentle tone that robbed her words of half their reproach. “You must remember that I have had but little experience with the world. I have lived all my life in a town of wholesome virtues, and while here I have been kept from contact with anything low or base. I have never known vice, and now all in a moment I feel as if I have been bathed in it.” He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him—as you must?” “I don’t know; it’s a problem I have never been brought to consider. I feel as if launched on a dismal sea for which I have neither chart nor compass. Life was so joyous to me this morning—” a flush swept over her cheek but he did not notice it—“I held, or seemed to hold, a cup of white wine in my hand, but suddenly as I looked at it, it turned black and—” Ah, the outreach, the dismal breaking away of thought into the unfathomable, that lies in the pause of an _and_!