He looked into her eyes and smiled. “It was but natural that you should have been deceived. You think you saw me in Miss Rochester’s parlor that day, but you did not; for, during all the time that we were at the chateau, I never once entered those rooms except to prescribe for Miss Rochester when she was ill. The man you saw with her must have been my brother, Norman—my twin brother—who resembles me, whose voice and face and figure are so like mine that our most intimate friends can scarcely tell us apart.” “Oh, if I had but known!” exclaimed Salome with a look of astonishment, but with a sigh of infinite relief, while her white fingers closed over her husband’s hand in a clinging grasp. “But, my darling, it seems strange that you should have forgotten how ill I had been—that it would have been impossible for me to have held Miss Rochester in my arms, or to have supported her upon my breast at that time!” said Dr. Winthrop smiling again. “I never thought of that,” Salome answered, wondering how she could have been so thoughtless and stupid. “If it had been you, you would have looked thin and white; but I was so wild with grief that it did not once occur to me to question your identity,” and the sweet face looking up into his began to clear, while she rested more contentedly in his embrace. She was beginning to realize that no rival could ever usurp her place in her husband’s heart—that his love for her was as strong and deathless as hers for him. “More than that, love,” he said. “Norman came to me only a short time ago, and confessed his love for Miss Rochester. I will tell you frankly that I expected to be obliged to marry her, although it almost seemed to me that it would be a crime to do so, when my heart was so filled with your image.” And then he explained to Salome how he had been drawn into making a proposal to the scheming girl and been accepted, and she listened with a strange look on her face, although she made no comment on the tale. “But you have spoken of your illness at the chateau—how long were you ill there?” Dr. Winthrop inquired, when his story was told. “Three weeks.” “It does not seem possible!” he cried astonished. “How could they manage to keep your presence in the house concealed so long? They told me that you had a fainting turn, and, fearing you were going to be ill, you had insisted upon going back to Paris. I supposed you were with the sisters and being most tenderly cared for, never suspecting the contrary until Harriet came to the chateau to inquire for you, and told me that no one knew anything about you; but—tell me just how it all happened, and how you were lured into that wretched place where I found you to-day.” Salome began with the day when she fainted in the hall before Mrs. Rochester’s door, and told him everything that had occurred up to the time when she had discovered his presence in the ward, where she was a prisoner in Dr. Arnot’s asylum for lunatics.