All the pent-up grief of the past seemed bound to expend itself, and unmindful of everything, she wept and sobbed until the fountain of her tears was dry and she lay exhausted in her husband’s arms, with deep, quivering sighs breaking at intervals from her lips. Nearly half an hour elapsed, and no word had been spoken; the tender, noble-hearted man was content to sit there, holding the beloved form in his embrace, and patiently bide his time. At last, however, he thought to renew the subject so near his heart. “Now, Salome, my wife,” he began in a quiet, kindly tone, “begin at the beginning, and tell me all about yourself; the sooner you and I get out of this unnatural state of constraint, and understand each other, the better it will be for us both.” Those two words, “my wife,” suddenly brought her to herself, renewing all her doubts and fears, and she shrank away from him again with a gesture of despair. “Oh!—I am not your wife,” she moaned, covering her burning face with her hands. Ah! that began to throw a little light upon her strange behavior, and Dr. Winthrop’s mind reverted to what his mother had said about the illegality of their marriage, because Salome’s true surname had been withheld, and was not written upon their certificate. He had wrung enough from madam and Evelyn, on his return to New York, after Salome’s supposed death, to make him suspect something of the cruel things they had said to her. He did not attempt to take her in his arms again, for her gestures had told him that she felt she had no right to his embraces. “Why do you say that, Salome?” he gravely questioned, “what makes you think you are not my wife?” “They told me so,” she answered wildly. “They said our marriage was illegal.” “My mother and sister, I suppose you mean,” he quietly returned. “I know that they argued something of the kind—perhaps they even really believed it; but you should never have trusted to a simple assertion like that. You should have written to ask me the truth; or if you could not trust me, you should have gone to some trustworthy lawyer in New York and obtained a decision.” “I did not think of that,” she murmured. A look of keen pain swept over Dr. Winthrop’s face. “O Salome! how could you believe that I would be guilty of doing you such wrong as to disown you, even though there had been a flaw in our marriage?” he cried sharply. She lifted her eyes and searched his face wonderingly. “I never should have believed it, if—if you had not sent me away from your home,” she said, with quivering lips. “I sent you away from my home—your home!” he repeated in astonishment. “Yes; you sent me that cruel dispatch, telling me to shut up the house on Madison Avenue, and go to the —— Hotel, and remain there until your return.” “‘Cruel dispatch!’ Why, my darling, I was wild lest you should be poisoned by sewer-gas, and I simply sent you the message to save time. I wrote explaining all by the next steamer.”